ONE FOR THE BOOKS

JACKIE FRENCH DOESN’T LET DYSLEXIA STOP HER FROM PENNING SOME OF THE BEST STORIES ON THE SHELF, WRITES KIRI TEN DOLLE

It’s not how Jackie French imagined the ride into 2020. “Surgery, paralysis, infection, bushfire, then pandemic. The pandemic has been the easiest part of the year,” the 66-year-old bestselling author, historian and ecologist says.

Jackie is busier than ever. The author of more than 200 children’s and adult books, best known for her picture book Diary of a

Wombat, is fielding daily requests to read books to classrooms online and calls to bolster a chaotic COVID-19 curriculum from home.

“Everyone from UNESCO to Mrs Smith’s third grade class has wanted some video or audio content,” she says.

Just months ago, the stone house she painstakingly built by hand during her 20s, in New South Wales’ Araluen Valley, near Braidwood, was narrowly spared during the worst bushfires in Australia’s history.

Three fire fronts burnt around the property. She evacuated three times. The wind was the only thing keeping the fires away.

Jackie went into the bushfires recovering from a knee replacement that got infected. Not only was her knee replaced but part of her leg too. “I had a kidney infection after the surgery and somehow I woke up after the operation, which went well, with a fractured back that paralysed me from the waist down for a short time,” she says.

Jackie and her husband Bryan

Sullivan took turns on ember watch, changing hands at 2am.

Hundreds of animals took refuge at their home, where they established feeding stations.

It was in the early hours of one morning as Jackie sat weary eyed outside her home that a blackened wombat collapsed in front of her.

This wombat would inspire Jackie to pen The Fire Wombat, a picture book due out in September.

“When she arrived her coat was completely black with soot,” Jackie says. “Her paws were burnt, she was exhausted.

“She made it 10m from water and couldn’t go any further.”

“The amazing thing was the other animals. They stood back for her, even Wild Whiskers who is one of the nastiest wombats I’ve ever come across. They all realised that this was an animal at the absolute end of her strength.”

Wild Whiskers is the granddaughter of Mothball, the very wombat who inspired Jackie to write the 2003 children’s classic,

Diary of a Wombat, which printed millions of copies and found the dyslexic author international success. Jackie and Bryan share their backyard with a dozen wombats they know on a firstname basis.

She finds solace in the 6000sq km of surrounding bushland.

Jackie was born in Sydney but spent most of her childhood living in the outskirts of Brisbane in Carina. “My childhood was 45 per cent boredom, 45 per cent terror and the other 10 per cent was books … and my grandma. The times with grandma were sheer, utter, glorious magic.”

By age three Jackie could read. “Books for me were a magic carpet. I also grew up in the 1950s when lots of bad things happened, but people very carefully didn’t talk

about them. It was a time when a lot of men came back from World War II, particularly the prisoner’s camps, and everyone said, ‘Don’t talk about it’.”

Jackie wrote her first book at age six when she “ran out of books to read”. “My teachers didn’t discover I could read until they found me illegally in the library one lunch time, nearly finished

Black Beauty.”

Jackie could speed read blocks of text but struggled to read single words on the blackboard. It was decades later that she was officially diagnosed with severe dyslexia.

She always wanted to be a writer but was told with the best of intentions by her parents, teachers, guidance councillors, that she couldn’t make a living as a writer in Australia. The best she could do, they said, was write as hobby.

“In my first marriage, I was told my writing was a waste of time and to do something productive. So, I wrote books in secret.”

Then, aged 30 and divorced from her first husband, Jackie found herself in desperation.

“I had only about $7.20 and the car rego was about $144,” she says.

“I had a baby. I was living in a shed in the bush with no electric light. It was very primitive. If I didn’t grow it or harvest it in the bush, we went without.

“A friend was a freelance journalist and knew I enjoyed writing. He said, why don’t you try sending some of your writing off?” Jackie’s first novel was Rain

Stones. “I wrote compulsively. I sent a story to Canberra Times, I sent an article about organic control of scale to Hobby Farmer and another article to Earth Garden magazine and within three weeks

Rain Stones had been accepted and I had been offered regular columns in all three publications.”

Now, 29 years later, Angus and Robertson, an imprint of HarperCollins, has published her latest book, The Schoolmaster’s

Daughter, based on the lives of Jackie’s great-grandparents and grandmothers who taught and fought for equal education rights of all Australians.

Jackie is a patron of literacy programs across Australia and a passionate advocate for equal educational opportunity.

She has had her work translated into 36 languages and has won more than 60 awards. Yet, she admits she still can’t spell.