Papua New Guinea

Returning to the Motherland 2#

| June

So, continuing on from my last post on zooming to Higaturu Oil Palm International School, PNG for a most memorable book week, here is more about the classroom itself. This image is what it looked like from the point of view of the students in the main zoom room, before we were allocated to our learning zoom room with the students and their teacher.

Zooming Book Week Image Courtesy HOPIS school

So how did we end up with a confident performance of a group poem by the end of book week (despite the challenges of working via zoom and classroom learning space combined) and a wall full of beautiful art and sense poems?

This is where the immense dedication of the teacher, her assistant and children, going with the flow of a physically distant author communicating and coming to terms with being on a large screen, and stuck there, makes a massive difference.

As I communicated, using voice, slide shows, and virtual white boards, Ms Gwendalyn, and Ms Cynthia, her assistant, would further explain it to the students. Zoom can be tricky as I couldn’t walk around the classroom, nor easily read the body language of students, like I normally do. The students could only walk up to the front to ask me questions, and sometimes felt a bit shy of the screen.

Although by the end of the week they knew to keep an eye on the whiteboard for surprises, such as Riddles!

It helped that they had the focus texts, of Magic Fish Dreaming and Michelle Worthington’s Possum Games with them to work from as well. These had been posted to arrive before Book Week in PNG began.

They became mentor texts for the students, to also learn about publishing, illustrating and cover pages.

We had a prior meeting on zoom the week before, with all presenting authors, Tina, Phil, Caroline, Albert and myself, meeting the teachers, and working out how we would proceed. I asked Ms Gwendalyn, to please put stickers on the children with their names, and she sent me a class list as well.

I ran the program by her, to check if it would be helpful for the students, and had a mix of activities to go with the books, such as art, drama, writing, all complementary to the text, as well as readings.

Although I have done many workshops this was my first time doing a sequence for a whole week, and in Papua New Guinea too, as normally I just have had two hour workshops so that was a blessing and a new challenge.

As part of the process we decided that each day it would be helpful for me to email Ms Gwendalyn, and just check in on how she felt the children had responded, as well as observing that during class time myself.

These consultations sometimes led to modifications for the next day which were beneficial for all. Although sometimes the messages took longer to arrive then we anticipated. That’s the internet for you.

I gave the students a sneak peek reading of a new anthology I have some new poems in which is edited by Michelle Worthington. We also spoke about the power of anthologies.

The immense benefit of working over a whole week with the students and their teacher was we could use each earlier class as a foundation to the next class and creative task.

We could expand and apply new concepts into their work from previous sessions. The main challenge, was just making sure to go with the flow of what was engaging the students, and extending them to just the right balance.

This meant every now and then, me or Ms Gwendalyn, making on the spot easy to implement decisions to alter previous plans.

By the end of this post series, I’d like to feature some of the work of the students, the school is just doublechecking with their parents that this will be okay as it is my hope to introduce these budding authors to you through their work. Perhaps some of them will choose the pathway of authors, designers, artists or playwrights!

Another amazing thing, was the warmth of the author team and some of the zany things we decided to do, like change our head gear everyday…

to be continued…

Return to the Motherland 1#

| June

I never expected that my first trip back to Papua New Guinea, since I moved to Australia as a one year old, would be in my fifties and via zoom and would be working with writers based in three different countries.

Yet, none of us knows our future, and so it was that the last week my first ever Book Week experience, occurred this way.

I was invited by Tina Marie Clark, to join a CYA team, including her, Albert Nayathi, Phil Kettle, Caroline Evari, (and works from Michelle Worthington and Dannika Patterson) that has been mostly going to the Higaturu Oil Palm International School there in person for the last ten years.

The last two years they have had to conduct the visit via zoom, because of COVID19.

Screen shot of zoom of bookweek

Although I haven’t done Book Week before, I have done several workshops in libraries, environmental centres, and schools, to mentor creatives of all ages from kindergarten through to people all backgrounds in their seventies, in poetry. Something which became such a passion I ended up writing and publishing a poetry book,  Magic Fish Dreaming, for children.

I wrote Magic Fish Dreaming,  to express a sense of the place I was living in at the time, which was the Cassowary Coast, in Far North Queensland, as well as to demonstrate different poetry techniques which might appeal to children but also extend them. At the time of composing this work I was facilitating workshops in the community and needed to create original materials with a sense of the place I was living in, not just use what was already out there.

Magic Fish Dreaming, represents all the beauty, grandeur, magic, and heartache and I saw whilst living in that area, all captured for families to relive some of that and hopefully fall in love with poetry.

During this visit, I was able to bring all the experiences of the last few years, in designing workshops, as well as my recent enrolment training as a teacher (although for highschool) together into my contemporary practice.

I was delighted to see the effect of the workshops on the students and their teacher and teacher assistant. I can truly say I had as much of a feeling of joy out of this as out of being published.

My heart soared to see them engaged with the activities and WRITING! And finally confidently performing work they had collaborated on composing together.

What did we and the school do during the week to reach this point?

To be continued . . .

Magic Fish Dreaming with your help and love on its way to PNG

| June

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO MAGIC FISH DREAMING BOOKS TO PNG (You will be asked to verify you are not a robot first!)

Inspired by a meeting with Gregg Dreise, where we learnt about the Indigenous Literacy Foundation in Australia and their various projects I decided I needed to do something for literacy for my mother’s homeland Papua New Guinea.

I decided to run a non profit book drive to send some copies of Magic Fish Dreaming, via local charities that deliver them, to Papua New Guinea. In this way I hoped to cover my cost price only, and effectively donate the profit on these books to charity.

I wanted to do this so that rather than sending second hand books, that might not be culturally appropriate I could send a brand new book, from my heart to the heart of Papua New Guinea.

I wanted to do something to assist literacy to assist the children in my Mekeo mother’s homeland.

I had a feeling that if I asked my friends, they would want to support me in these efforts, and enable me to send more than a few.

To my amazement, so far enough for 76 books has been raised, and I am so excited to be delivering them to the charities who will then ensure these make it into schools that need them.

I will soon be sharing the names of all those assisted me to make this contribution on my social media and with the charities (as long as you give me your name) that find schools in need of these books in Papua New Guinea.

I will be making my first delivery to my first charity of choice, Books4PNGKIDS soon, but have found some other worthy people who take books into PNG schools and communities to support as well and I may look to send it to other places in the Pacific.

$8.00 AUD  per book allows me to send one Magic Fish Dreaming book to PNG by covering the costs of my printing.

People can sponsor as many books as they would like, whether it be one or ten or more,  it is the love with which this donation is made that matters the most.

I am now inviting overseas friends and fans to join this project to sponsor some Magic Fish Dreaming Books to go to PNG.

Please leave a note with a name and message and join us in this quest to send this beautiful book to PNG. You are welcome to email me at gumbootspearlz@gmail.com

I hope to share updates of where the books end up!

Donations to this project are closed for now.

Another charity sponsorship project coming soon.

When I was a Baby

| June

Growing up Queensland
In the land of the cane, cassowary and crocodile.

Script Extracts

“When I was a baby my Mekeo grandmother, or bubu, from Papua New Guinea, would rock me in her arms and tell me stories.  My Mekeo grandfather, bubu, was a crocodile hunter.

But I didn’t grow up with crocodiles because when I was only one, we went to live in Australia with my Aussie dad on a cold but beautiful island called Tasmania: home of wild rivers, Tasmanian devils and the now extinct thylacine.

In my twenties I left Tasmania with my husband and by the time we had small children we were living near the rain forest and the sugar cane fields.

We were well and truly in the lands of the crocodile and cassowary, similar to that of my ancestor’s Mekeo homeland.”

malolo (2)
My Mekeo Grandfather

Coming soon  the Kickstarter Trailer.