Being
able to read well is like a gold pass to the world.
Author
of the National Book for the National Year of Reading, Alison Lester sent a
special message to all the children at Gilgandra Reads Everything Around Town
Day, last Friday 31st August.
“Hello to everybody at Gilgandra. I hope you are having a wonderful
GREAT Day. It’s good to celebrate books
because they make our lives so fabulous.
If you can read you are never lonely and never bored. You can travel anywhere, meet anybody, be
whoever you’d like to be and feel terrified, happy, brave and sad. If I am very worried about something, so worried that I can’t sit still, I read. I have a couple of books I use in this way and they always do the trick. They take me to another place, away from the worry that’s driving me crazy. If you are a terrific reader you will know all this already but if you are still struggling to read, persevere, keep at it! Being able to read well is like a gold pass to the world.”
Reading turns you into a writer
The
activities on GREAT Day were based on Alison Lester’s beautiful picture book
“Are we there yet?”, but we also celebrated the books of other Australian
children’s authors. Pat Clarke, author
of “The Magic Forest of Goonoo” and Serena Geddes, illustrator of many
children’s books, came to GREAT Day to tell us about their work, but many other
authors sent messages to the children. Rosanne
Hawke from South Australia wrote “I think Reading is so important. It turns you into a writer….. I think
reading a lot enriches your life. It helps you to see how others think and feel
and how they live their lives. You can walk in their shoes for a little while.
It also makes you a good writer. Whatever you read will make its way down your
arm and out of your fingers sooner or later.
I always wanted to write stories, but I started writing Jihad in the Borderland trilogy while I was living in Pakistan as an aid worker.
My thirteen-year-old daughter wanted me to tell her a story. One of our friends
had been kidnapped by the freedom fighters and she thought that would be so
exciting. After I told the story she made me write it down. Then she asked me
to send it to a publisher. She had the vision of walking into a bookshop and
buying a book that her mother had written just for her. It took four or five
years but her dream came true. And I never stopped writing.”
Thank you to everyone who came to GREAT Day
and to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen, and to make it fun. Thank you especially to Lyn Greenhalgh and
the Principal and Staff of Gilgandra Public School, who organised this event,
and have done so since 2005. It brings
our community together in an amazing way. .On Gilgandra Shire Library’s
facebook page, much loved children’s author Jacquie Harvey recently commented “I have loved the times I've been involved in the GREAT
Day in the past. It's a fabulous initiative and one that should happen all over
Australia!”
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