JACKIE FRENCH
One of Australia’s most popular children’s authors returns with a new series
What ideas drove the writing of The Girls Who Changed the World: Ming and Flo Fight for the Future?
To show kids how young people have changed history, and they’ll keep doing it. Give kids the confidence to change the world, and they will soar. Young people – including girls – were at all the major events in history, but you need to hunt for them. The battles for the rights of everyone to have an education and a living wage are usually told as a male story. Ming and Flo Fight for the Future is about the indomitable girls who changed the world, just as our extraordinary young people continue to do today. How has the pandemic affected your writing?
I’ve fallen in love with Zoom and other video programs, speaking to hundreds of schools across Australia and the world, including places where the kids have never had the chance to question a writer before. I’m lucky – when times are hard, I can live my working hours eating scones in the 1890s or finding a bushranger’s treasure.
A book that had a pivotal impact on your life?
The Magic Pudding ends with animals living in a house in a tree in a market garden, with good conversation of an evening and all the pudding and fruit and vegetables they want to eat. At seven years old I thought, “That’s exactly how I want to live, too”. And now I do, as a writer, which is what I dreamed back then, too.
The book you couldn’t finish?
Any novel my husband reads, the kind with identical blokes saving the world, with accurate technical details and no conversation, no interesting clothes and no delicious meals.
Your earliest reading memory? Sneaking behind Grandma’s sofa to raid the “grown-up” bookshelf, and finding Brave New World.
What book do you re-read?
My “emergency” bookcase: it’s filled with books I can grab if we need to evacuate in a bushfire or someone goes to hospital. I can open any one of them and dive into the most perfect world where I can escape from anything unpleasant.
What books are on your bedside table?
Two Jodi Taylors, one Sunday Philosophy Club, one collection of Gallipoli oral history interviews, 264 silverfish, my diary, a pair of earrings, a small bud vase with a pink rose in it (my husband is romantic), a stock and station bill, a notebook that is so illegible even I can’t read it, and a copy of No Hearts of Gold to post to a friend … but they are all close to toppling, so may be a pile on the floor in five seconds.
What are you writing now?
Being Mrs Mulberry, the third of my adult novels after Angel of Waterloo and No Hearts of Gold, while working on the final version of Diary of a Rescue Wombat, the prequel to Diary of a Wombat, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and sketching out a novel set at Gallipoli, 1915.