![]() I confess I could hardly speak a sensible word. I did go to dinner with him, even though he lived in Sydney and I live in Adelaide. Unbelievably I was asked to dinner by this silver-haired god, who was 85 by then and still living alone. I told him I’d adored his books and that his work had greatly influenced my becoming a writer. I loved it so much that in the late 80’s, when I was reading Walter McVitty’s book: Authors and Illustrators of Australian Children’s Books and discovered to my amazement that Leslie Rees was still alive and living at Balmoral Beach in Sydney, I wrote to him. My favourite of his was Shy, The Platypus. Like many children living outside Australia, my sisters and I were riveted by Australian animals, a fascination enhanced by the long picture-story-books of Leslie Rees. She also read us Banjo Paterson ballads, and CJ Dennis’s Songs of a Sentimental Bloke.Īt this late stage in my life, a heartfelt tribute also to my mother, without whom Australian literature wouldn’t have entered my soul as deeply as it did. My mother had a broad Sydney accent so her renditions of Blinky Bill, and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie made Australia a very real place to us. ![]() My parents had generous friends back home who sent me and my sisters all the Australian books they could lay their hands on. ![]() So you can imagine my reaction when I was told that I’d been nominated for the Nan Chauncy Award! It was more than a feeling of being over the moon: it was a pent-up, lifelong, whoosh of gratitude to her, and all the other Australian authors I’d loved a child, who had nurtured me with so much care, and without whom I wouldn’t be standing here as the author of such one-eyed Australian books as Possum Magic, Wombat Divine, Hunwick’s Egg, Sail Away, Koala Lou, and I’m Australian Too. I felt selfishly sad, as if her work had belonged particularly to me. I had returned to the land she had made me love, and now she herself had left it. We were living here happily ever after-I was teaching drama in a Catholic girls’ school-when only four months after we arrived, in early May 1970, the news came though that Nan Chauncy had died. I came back to Australia in January 1970, with my very English husband. I was living on a mission, predominantly with Africans, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe, witnessing racism daily, and riding horses out in the bush, and being brave about snakes and speaking out about politics. When I was about (!) twelve, in about 1958 (!) and beginning the I-love-horses phase of my life, Nan Chauncy was writing about wild brumbies and brave girls, the Australian bush, and racism, and Tasmanian Aborigines. Without them I wouldn’t be standing before you this evening. I’d also like to bow to the many Australian authors of the past-none of whom is still alive, although their words live on in my heart-who endowed my childhood with exotic books about Australia, the country in which I was born: authors who explained the place, and explored it, and extolled it, and taught me to know and love it from afar, while I was growing up in Africa. You will understand that picture book writers create only 50% of any successful picture book and artists do the rest, but the proportions of that creative partnership are too often ignored, so tonight I’d like to raise an Allelujah to illustrators everywhere. Without their talent, I would not be standing before you this evening. Thank you for everything.īefore I go any further, I’d like to bow to the genius of my illustrators and kiss their feet. Thank you for your love and support over the years. It’s a bit like “you had to be there”, but hopefully in reading this speech, you will feel some of the magic of that chilly Hobart night… There was lots of laughter, maybe even a few tears, as Mem held the audience spellbound. Her speech included a reading of her latest title, I’m Australian Too. ![]() This is the amazing acceptance speech she gave at the CBCA Book Week dinner in Hobart on 18 August. Mem Fox was the 2017 recipient of the Nan Chauncy Award.
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