Love Your Library

Almost 2500 books . . .  and counting

The Library has been a hub of activity with many new books coming in just in time to go on our shelves for students to read over the holidays. These are all new publications, most of them for our lower school readers. Also on display in the Library are the covers for the current contenders for the CBCA Bbook of the Yyear award. These books have been ordered and we hope they will be available for borrowing very soon.

Currently we have 2487 books available in the Library.  This year 273 books have been borrowed by our students. There are also 11410 resources on ClickView that are available through the Library. Teachers may request programs from free-to-air television programs to be added to our ClickView collection. Many of these resources link to national curriculum and they can be uploaded to SEQTA for students to access through their lessons. 

Our Teacher Librarian, Tamsin Sykiotis, has been busy supporting our wider reading program. She prepared resources for Year 7s' study of persuasive techniques, for Year 8s she collated Ocean stories to support their study of the novel Blue Back, and interactive resources to complement the Year 9 study of graphic novels. The students are also being surveyed in relation to their wider reading. This should help us to finesse our collection and activities to further meet our students’ reading and literacy needs. We are very lucky to have Mrs Sykiotis as a member of our Library team as well as an outstanding Mandarin and Study Skills Teacher.

My reading over the past weeks has been diverse. A few of these books were the following: The Flywheel, by Erin Gough for older teen readers, was short listed for the CBCA Award in 2016. This is a novel exploring how to navigate relationships, friendships and the chaotic world of the restaurant industry. Local writer Ian Saunders published his first novel, The Islands, in 2023. This is an intriguing novel shifting narrative points of view to explore the impact of climate and global politics on ordinary lives. The novel is in our senior fiction collection. The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, is a nonfiction text mapping the origins and impact of deadly filoviruses such as Ebola virus, Sudan virus, Marburg virus and Ravn virus. Having no prior knowledge of the history of viruses, I found this a chilling, but fascinating account of the viruses’ leap from species to species. What is made clear from Preston’s work is that the clearing of native forests has flow on effects that may have devastating implications for humanity.  

Finally, from the old Murdoch College collection, Friday Brown, by Vikki Wakefield. This novel for older teenagers was shortlisted for the 2013 CBCA older reader award. Against the diverse backgrounds of the Australian bush and living on the streets, this is a confronting coming-of-age novel.

 Together, let us read.

Dr Annette Pedersen

Library Coordinator