onetwothreefour
Bluelight Crew
this is one of my final essays for class this semester. despite the fact that i just wrote it in about (*looks at clock*) ooh, a couple of hours, i actually don't mind it (for once!). and since it's obviously related to words and books and all that kind of stuff, i figured i'd post it here. feel free to criticise it if you'd like - i'm not going to cry 
Like all good stories, this one begins in a library. The Gladesville Primary School Library, Kilsyth, Victoria, Australia, Earth, The Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe, to be particularly precise – and as my primary school teacher would have put it. It begins in that library – small, yet full enough of fairy tales and encyclopaedias and Usborne how-to-build-anything-that-your-parents-might-hate books for inquiring minds, as it were. Miss Green was a tall, gangly woman of about 35; to a ten year-old child she was a near-giant – fitting for a librarian, we thought. She wore large, fashionable glasses, and her short curls bounced around gently as if teased by a constant breeze. Miss Green was not the reason I loved reading as a child – that honour goes to my mother – but she holds credit for introducing me to the two most important books of my childhood.
Reading was the perfect activity for me as a child. I was boisterous – some might say disruptive – but to balance my energetic daytime activities I was encouraged by my mother to take a healthy interest in the more academic pursuits of life. A trip to the supermarket with my five year-old self would never result in chocolate bars or lollies – if I behaved I would receive a Golden Book. Of course, I progressed from this, but I never outgrew the idea of reading being a reward. I divided my time up diplomatically – afternoons were spent in the backyard with my best friend Hamish. We did everything young kids are expected to, and perhaps even a little more: crawling around the jungle-like garden looking for new and exciting bugs to pull apart, or setting army men alight as they burned slowly and defiantly to the ground – all of these activities, of course, to the chagrin of my mother. But as nights dawned and the dying embers of the sun disappeared, my mother called me inside for dinner and there was just one thing on my mind – whichever book I happened to be reading at the time.
My love affair with my primary school’s library began almost immediately: despite regular visits to the public library nearby my house, at the onset of primary school I was still very much surprised and enthralled at the idea of my very own library at my very own school – I could borrow these books (any of these books!) – and I didn’t even have to have mum around for me to take them home. Heaven, I figured. And so, on one late afternoon when I was probably supposed to be in class, or detention, or on bin duty (I was not a well-behaved child) I discovered Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. From the beginning I was hooked: Bastian Balthazar Bux’s dramatic entrance from the rain-soaked streets outside into Carl Conrad Coreander’s musty bookshop – a safe-haven.
And for the next seven years, I barely left the book behind. Every year – and then some - I read The Neverending Story. Every year I journeyed back to the enormous tome. Enormous, of course, being a matter of perspective – but for a wet-around-the-ears five year-old prep kid, 377 pages seemed like the longest novel ever written. But as the years went on, the length seemed to decrease – I read through the approaching chapters in my head before I’d even reached their pages. I yearned to be Bastian – who spent the story’s journey (he himself was reading Carl Conrad Coreandar’s Neverending Story – a book within the book) crammed hermit-like in his school’s attic, avoiding the bullies who’d first chased him, fatefully, into the bookstore. I grimaced in anticipation of the story’s hero, Atreyu, and the grim fate of his gallant horse Artax – who drowned in the not-at-all melodramatically named Swamps of Sadness.
Just like Coreander’s bookshop to Bastian, my school’s library had opened up an entirely new world to me. It was something that it would do time and time again over the years. I would read as often as I could, covering every angle that our humble library made possible – from the fantastic adventures of The Neverending Story to the Usborne Train Set guide (of course, I never owned a train set – but it made little difference, such was the intrigue held in the detailed little book), from Enid Blyton’s odd and enchanting adventures with fairies and pixies and elves (not to mention the, quite frankly rather disturbing, Saucepan Man) to Roald Dahl’s excursions into chocolate factories, with friendly giants and menacing witches, and even – my favourite – James’s peculiar adventure rolling around the world in the middle of a giant peach.
As you’ve probably gathered, despite my bookish ways, I wasn’t a particularly high-brow literary child. You’d have heard of the child prodigies who’ve read and annotated Shakespeare’s best by the age of thirteen, or those wunderkind children writing books of poetry through the troubled years eight to twelve, but it never really bothered me. Eventually I got to the classics, but my childhood years were well-spent in the milieu of children’s fantasy. But, eventually, it was something a little more real which marked my development from ‘just a kid’ into a full-blown (and, as I journeyed to the section with smaller print and books-a-plenty) ‘young adult’. The moment – a moment which all adolescent book-readers will experience, gleefully, at some stage in their young lives – holds a similar spot in my heart as the time that I, proudly first in the class, discovered just how to deduce the decimal value of the fraction 1/7. Proud events, to be sure.
At the time I’d been venturing ahead by myself rather hesitantly, sampling the large collection of books from the inimitable Judy Blume or the fantastic pseudo sci-fi of Gillian Rubinstein, but it wasn’t until the library’s key holder, Miss Green, approached me cautiously, book in hand, that the true leap occurred. ‘It’s called Tomorrow, When the War Began,’ she said in a whisper. ‘It’s a new book, by John Marsden… It’s a little intense’. She said the last word carefully, her teeth gritted, as if delivering a final imperative message to the last man in the trenches of an already-lost war. I understood the gravity of this message. ‘I’d like you to read it, Bradley. I want to know if you think we should bring it into the library.’ I was ready for the task, I was up to it, I – beaming – was a young adult, and I could handle anything this new book threw at me. But then the crushing blow came: ‘I’ve asked Joanna too, but I wanted a second opinion’. Joanna Sansworth. Joanna of the perfect grades. Joanna of the swimming credentials and the mother who did more than her expected lunchtime duties in the canteen. Joanna, adored by teachers all and sundry. Joanna, who – unlike me – had an opinion that would surely be the be-all and end-all of any necessary decision.
But I overcame the rage, instead focussing on the potential honour of having such a prestigious place; perhaps, I mused, Miss Green might appreciate my opinion a little more – sure, I was younger and less well-behaved, but certainly more worldly than the goody-two-shoes Sansworth: that must count for something, mustn’t it?
So, in eager anticipation, and with my new scholarly responsibilities weighing heavily upon my mind, I began to read. And I read. And I read, and I read and I read and I read: I couldn’t put this book down. For a novel written for a teenage audience, it was remarkably powerful. The book, centered around the hypothetical invasion of Australia and New Zealand by some unnamed (but apparently rather angry) terrorist neighbours and their enormous army, made for often-disturbing reading. I came to love characters – Fi, Kevin, Robin, the entire gang – and sometimes they died; real deaths. They got injured, they fell in love, they escaped the enemy’s hands, they were caught. They hid out in the truly Australian bush, anxiously awaiting word of their families. Good things happened, and as teenagers do, they mucked around – hooning around the bush in borrowed cars and seeing the adventure behind it all; yet this was real, this was, as Miss Green had aptly put it, intense. Even through the book’s more light-hearted moments, there was always an undercurrent of danger. Yet, though some of the book’s images and concepts were alarming, they were never too much to handle. I was in grade five at the time, and at the very least – as I told Miss Green – the book wasn’t just okay for the grade sixes, but a book which would be remiss of them not to read. Joanna, of course, thought otherwise. ‘Too adult,’ she said. ‘Too much violence,’ she complained. And who was the librarian to believe? Me, the articulate but prone to mischief younger child, or Joanna, Miss straight-A, model student? I didn’t even need to ask.
Having read it (and its subsequent series – Marsden’s Tomorrow books went on to become some of the best-selling young adult novels in Australia’s history) back recently, the book still stands up. Of course, it’s no Dostoevsky, but Marsden’s novel has lost little of its power, and I stand true by my convictions: the book should be required reading for the grade six curriculum. But, alas, the rest of my school – for their primary years at least – was deprived of this wonderful story – that first step between childhood and the real world.
I thought, at the time, that I would forever hold that grudge against my librarian, but just a year-and-a-half later something happened which made me reassess all that had come before. It was grade six graduation day – which for primary schoolers in Kilsyth means free lunch (fairy bread!), far too many photos, and some badly photocopied certificates – and again Miss Green approached me warily. I, too, was guarded. But this time our encounter would end not in resentment, but in appreciation: somehow, somewhere between the many after-school detentions, wagged classes, and heavy-handed mediation sessions with exasperated teachers, I’d managed to earn this teacher’s respect. ‘Bradley,’ she queried, ‘would you like this?’ She held her hand outstretched, clutching the library’s solitary copy of The Neverending Story like my own personal Holy Grail.
To say I was thrilled is to understate the event dramatically; this, it seemed, was recognition – perhaps not of a mistake on her behalf – but at least of the fact that my opinion had mattered too. I smiled at Miss Green, thanked her, and went on my way, graduated from primary school finally, but with far greater things on my mind.
The book remains upon my shelf, and I still read it once a year. I haven’t been back to Gladesville Primary School to see if Miss Green is still teaching, but even if she’s been replaced by now, I can only hope that whoever now stalks quietly across the room’s soft carpet whispers the same messages of foreign worlds and strange adventures into the ears of eager children.
NAMES CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY
Like all good stories, this one begins in a library. The Gladesville Primary School Library, Kilsyth, Victoria, Australia, Earth, The Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe, to be particularly precise – and as my primary school teacher would have put it. It begins in that library – small, yet full enough of fairy tales and encyclopaedias and Usborne how-to-build-anything-that-your-parents-might-hate books for inquiring minds, as it were. Miss Green was a tall, gangly woman of about 35; to a ten year-old child she was a near-giant – fitting for a librarian, we thought. She wore large, fashionable glasses, and her short curls bounced around gently as if teased by a constant breeze. Miss Green was not the reason I loved reading as a child – that honour goes to my mother – but she holds credit for introducing me to the two most important books of my childhood.
Reading was the perfect activity for me as a child. I was boisterous – some might say disruptive – but to balance my energetic daytime activities I was encouraged by my mother to take a healthy interest in the more academic pursuits of life. A trip to the supermarket with my five year-old self would never result in chocolate bars or lollies – if I behaved I would receive a Golden Book. Of course, I progressed from this, but I never outgrew the idea of reading being a reward. I divided my time up diplomatically – afternoons were spent in the backyard with my best friend Hamish. We did everything young kids are expected to, and perhaps even a little more: crawling around the jungle-like garden looking for new and exciting bugs to pull apart, or setting army men alight as they burned slowly and defiantly to the ground – all of these activities, of course, to the chagrin of my mother. But as nights dawned and the dying embers of the sun disappeared, my mother called me inside for dinner and there was just one thing on my mind – whichever book I happened to be reading at the time.
My love affair with my primary school’s library began almost immediately: despite regular visits to the public library nearby my house, at the onset of primary school I was still very much surprised and enthralled at the idea of my very own library at my very own school – I could borrow these books (any of these books!) – and I didn’t even have to have mum around for me to take them home. Heaven, I figured. And so, on one late afternoon when I was probably supposed to be in class, or detention, or on bin duty (I was not a well-behaved child) I discovered Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. From the beginning I was hooked: Bastian Balthazar Bux’s dramatic entrance from the rain-soaked streets outside into Carl Conrad Coreander’s musty bookshop – a safe-haven.
And for the next seven years, I barely left the book behind. Every year – and then some - I read The Neverending Story. Every year I journeyed back to the enormous tome. Enormous, of course, being a matter of perspective – but for a wet-around-the-ears five year-old prep kid, 377 pages seemed like the longest novel ever written. But as the years went on, the length seemed to decrease – I read through the approaching chapters in my head before I’d even reached their pages. I yearned to be Bastian – who spent the story’s journey (he himself was reading Carl Conrad Coreandar’s Neverending Story – a book within the book) crammed hermit-like in his school’s attic, avoiding the bullies who’d first chased him, fatefully, into the bookstore. I grimaced in anticipation of the story’s hero, Atreyu, and the grim fate of his gallant horse Artax – who drowned in the not-at-all melodramatically named Swamps of Sadness.
Just like Coreander’s bookshop to Bastian, my school’s library had opened up an entirely new world to me. It was something that it would do time and time again over the years. I would read as often as I could, covering every angle that our humble library made possible – from the fantastic adventures of The Neverending Story to the Usborne Train Set guide (of course, I never owned a train set – but it made little difference, such was the intrigue held in the detailed little book), from Enid Blyton’s odd and enchanting adventures with fairies and pixies and elves (not to mention the, quite frankly rather disturbing, Saucepan Man) to Roald Dahl’s excursions into chocolate factories, with friendly giants and menacing witches, and even – my favourite – James’s peculiar adventure rolling around the world in the middle of a giant peach.
As you’ve probably gathered, despite my bookish ways, I wasn’t a particularly high-brow literary child. You’d have heard of the child prodigies who’ve read and annotated Shakespeare’s best by the age of thirteen, or those wunderkind children writing books of poetry through the troubled years eight to twelve, but it never really bothered me. Eventually I got to the classics, but my childhood years were well-spent in the milieu of children’s fantasy. But, eventually, it was something a little more real which marked my development from ‘just a kid’ into a full-blown (and, as I journeyed to the section with smaller print and books-a-plenty) ‘young adult’. The moment – a moment which all adolescent book-readers will experience, gleefully, at some stage in their young lives – holds a similar spot in my heart as the time that I, proudly first in the class, discovered just how to deduce the decimal value of the fraction 1/7. Proud events, to be sure.
At the time I’d been venturing ahead by myself rather hesitantly, sampling the large collection of books from the inimitable Judy Blume or the fantastic pseudo sci-fi of Gillian Rubinstein, but it wasn’t until the library’s key holder, Miss Green, approached me cautiously, book in hand, that the true leap occurred. ‘It’s called Tomorrow, When the War Began,’ she said in a whisper. ‘It’s a new book, by John Marsden… It’s a little intense’. She said the last word carefully, her teeth gritted, as if delivering a final imperative message to the last man in the trenches of an already-lost war. I understood the gravity of this message. ‘I’d like you to read it, Bradley. I want to know if you think we should bring it into the library.’ I was ready for the task, I was up to it, I – beaming – was a young adult, and I could handle anything this new book threw at me. But then the crushing blow came: ‘I’ve asked Joanna too, but I wanted a second opinion’. Joanna Sansworth. Joanna of the perfect grades. Joanna of the swimming credentials and the mother who did more than her expected lunchtime duties in the canteen. Joanna, adored by teachers all and sundry. Joanna, who – unlike me – had an opinion that would surely be the be-all and end-all of any necessary decision.
But I overcame the rage, instead focussing on the potential honour of having such a prestigious place; perhaps, I mused, Miss Green might appreciate my opinion a little more – sure, I was younger and less well-behaved, but certainly more worldly than the goody-two-shoes Sansworth: that must count for something, mustn’t it?
So, in eager anticipation, and with my new scholarly responsibilities weighing heavily upon my mind, I began to read. And I read. And I read, and I read and I read and I read: I couldn’t put this book down. For a novel written for a teenage audience, it was remarkably powerful. The book, centered around the hypothetical invasion of Australia and New Zealand by some unnamed (but apparently rather angry) terrorist neighbours and their enormous army, made for often-disturbing reading. I came to love characters – Fi, Kevin, Robin, the entire gang – and sometimes they died; real deaths. They got injured, they fell in love, they escaped the enemy’s hands, they were caught. They hid out in the truly Australian bush, anxiously awaiting word of their families. Good things happened, and as teenagers do, they mucked around – hooning around the bush in borrowed cars and seeing the adventure behind it all; yet this was real, this was, as Miss Green had aptly put it, intense. Even through the book’s more light-hearted moments, there was always an undercurrent of danger. Yet, though some of the book’s images and concepts were alarming, they were never too much to handle. I was in grade five at the time, and at the very least – as I told Miss Green – the book wasn’t just okay for the grade sixes, but a book which would be remiss of them not to read. Joanna, of course, thought otherwise. ‘Too adult,’ she said. ‘Too much violence,’ she complained. And who was the librarian to believe? Me, the articulate but prone to mischief younger child, or Joanna, Miss straight-A, model student? I didn’t even need to ask.
Having read it (and its subsequent series – Marsden’s Tomorrow books went on to become some of the best-selling young adult novels in Australia’s history) back recently, the book still stands up. Of course, it’s no Dostoevsky, but Marsden’s novel has lost little of its power, and I stand true by my convictions: the book should be required reading for the grade six curriculum. But, alas, the rest of my school – for their primary years at least – was deprived of this wonderful story – that first step between childhood and the real world.
I thought, at the time, that I would forever hold that grudge against my librarian, but just a year-and-a-half later something happened which made me reassess all that had come before. It was grade six graduation day – which for primary schoolers in Kilsyth means free lunch (fairy bread!), far too many photos, and some badly photocopied certificates – and again Miss Green approached me warily. I, too, was guarded. But this time our encounter would end not in resentment, but in appreciation: somehow, somewhere between the many after-school detentions, wagged classes, and heavy-handed mediation sessions with exasperated teachers, I’d managed to earn this teacher’s respect. ‘Bradley,’ she queried, ‘would you like this?’ She held her hand outstretched, clutching the library’s solitary copy of The Neverending Story like my own personal Holy Grail.
To say I was thrilled is to understate the event dramatically; this, it seemed, was recognition – perhaps not of a mistake on her behalf – but at least of the fact that my opinion had mattered too. I smiled at Miss Green, thanked her, and went on my way, graduated from primary school finally, but with far greater things on my mind.
The book remains upon my shelf, and I still read it once a year. I haven’t been back to Gladesville Primary School to see if Miss Green is still teaching, but even if she’s been replaced by now, I can only hope that whoever now stalks quietly across the room’s soft carpet whispers the same messages of foreign worlds and strange adventures into the ears of eager children.
NAMES CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")