Book Week 

This year, the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual Book Week was from Saturday the 17th of August until Friday the 23rd with the theme ‘Reading is Magic’. Across Australia, schools and organisations have been hosting events in celebration of the wonderful stories we are immersed in. This is what we did here at Melbourne Girls College.

Monday

Now as any good member of our school book club knows, all subjects Percy Jackson are banned. They have to be, or else we’d talk of nothing but Rick Riordan’s novels every meeting. So, to honour both Percy Jackson’s birthday (which was on the previous Sunday) and Book Week it was decided to raise the ban for just one day. This meant that on Monday the library was full of blue food (Percy’s favourite) and many heated discussions, such as which characters deserved better, the answer—so many.

Tuesday

Tuesday, the day of book to screen. After a school-wide vote, it was decided that once again Julie Andrews should grace us with her presence after introducing us to Maria, and so The Princess Diaries was shown in the library at lunch. However, not just in the library—this time the film was shown on a projector screen that came down in front of the magazines. A new movie-viewing set up that was more popular than ever judging by the turnout of (primarily middle school) students.

Wednesday

On Wednesday came the most combative event—trivia. It’s well known that trivia nerds are passionate about what they love, and so are book nerds and on Wednesday we proved just that. Knocking Triumvirate out of first place after last year’s win, bookies, Ines, Isla and Sophie, topped the leaderboard with 34 out of 39 questions correct. Coming in second was Triumvirate, myself, Anja and Emily, with only 32 correct answers, and then The chickens, Frankie, Solee and Alice, with 29 questions correct. This year, the quiz mainly centred around popular YA fiction with only one booktok question (breaking Beth’s promise to book club of no booktok—but the question was a good one, so we all forgave her).

Before starting off the trivia, we had the announcement of the MGC Writing Competition winners! Congratulations to everyone who was successful!

Thursday

Thursday, the pinnacle event, the costume parade. This year saw the return of many familiar characters who’ve featured over the years, including many Loraxes, an abundance of Alices in Wonderland and her companions, and multiple Annes of Green Gables (I was one of them!). After a whole lunchtime of parading (yes—there were that many of us) and a special appearance from the school robot, R2D2, we were finally told our winners… Amelie from year seven was an amazing Lorax, representing year eight was Miri as Pinocchio (complete with a marionette!), from year nine, the winner was Galatea dressed up as Mikasa Ackerman. Zaynab and Elsie from year 10 were victorious with the first team costume win of the competition as Anne of Green Gables and Diana, then the year 11 winner was Anja as Hercule Poirot. Finally, taking out the year 12 category was STEAM club, represented by Al, Xanthe, Charli and their robot controlled by Rory (not all from year 12 but the judges thought it was close enough), as Han Solo, C3P0, Darth Vader, and R2D2—to be honest, I was surprised to see Darth Vader getting along so well with his sworn enemies! Was it the Anakin in him?

Friday

Bringing Book Week to a close, we had our singer/songwriter showcase on Friday. Starting off with double year 12 jazz performances, first from Alia, Elita & Olivia with voice, saxophone and guitar, and then Emily also on the guitar and singing. After that was Indi from year 10, following on from her performance at the NGV a few weeks ago played us a pop song.  Audrey in year 11 with her song ‘Mysterious You’ continued the theme of guitar and voice. Next came Indi’s encore in a similar style to first piece, while we waited for the keyboard to work. To conclude the showcase, music captain Leanne from year 12 performed a short song on the keyboard after running the whole afternoon. All these songs were written spectacularly and cohesively by the students themselves, showing off the writing talent at our school beyond traditional book and poetry structures.

As well as having a variety of lunchtime activities, we were also lucky enough to have two authors as guest speakers. On Monday, Steve Mushin (author of Ultrawild), was in the library period two to speak to the year eights. On Tuesday, Ellie Marne (author of None Shall Sleep and other young adult crime/thrillers) spoke to the year sevens and year nines in the theatre.

Steve Mushin

Steve Mushin is science communicator and author of Ultrawild, a book created over seven years that began as an exhibition of ideas and eventually a book. His inspiration for his work came while working on engineering projects, particularly improving and wilding urban environments. He regularly tours schools and runs workshops for adults to help people learn how to think creatively, including a drawing activity where you have to draw without stopping for five minutes to see what you can do. 

“I would say that re-wilding is one of the most powerful tools to fight climate change. It's one of the most exciting new movements on the horizon that I think everyone should get involved with. It's really cool because it costs almost nothing to get involved. You can just get out there in the forest and start learning about animals, and you can get a gumboot and fill it full of soil and grow a plant. And I think that imagination and creative thinking is so very vital in our fight against climate change. And I believe that drawing in particular, we should all be drawing more. And I would encourage everyone to pick up a pencil, not necessarily just to describe things, but just for the creative act of drawing, I think it's one of the most amazing ways to kickstart ideas” 

Ellie Marney

Ellie Marney is an Australian author of many young adult books, including her ‘Every’ series, which is set in Melbourne, None Shall Sleep and its sequel, and The Killing Code. She goes to visit schools to make sure every school student out there knows that writing is an achievable thing, even though she started out late as a writer she could still accomplish it. She was also part of the creation of the #LoveOzYA campaign supporting local literature and contributed to its anthology. 

Marney believes Book Week is an important thing for adult writers as well as the students celebrating.

“I think it's good, because writers like me spend a lot of time sitting alone in a room, completely isolated from everybody, tapping away on a keyboard. For me, I work as a high school teacher, so I do get to meet students when I'm when I'm teaching, but a lot of writers don't. And I think if you're writing for young people, it's really important that you have an opportunity to meet them. And also, it's just nice to kind of come out in the world. We spend a lot of time in our writing cave, so it's nice to be out in the world”

Eloise Brown, Year 11