Love Your Library

The Final Chapter

This is the final Laurence Library article for Term Three and from me as I leave St George’s Anglican Grammar School. When I commenced my contract there was no Laurence Library, no books, no content on the Vivi screens in classrooms and no Lego Club. Thanks to the vision and very hard work of many people, we now have a beautiful library, a brilliant fiction collection, many avid readers and a magnificent space in the new building just waiting to be filled with even more books, passionate readers and scholars. I will miss the easy access to books and plotting lessons or library activities with dedicated colleagues. But most of all I will miss the extremely loveable St George’s students.

The year is moving quickly. It is light in the mornings when I arrive at the school and still light when I leave. 

The end of Term 3 is marked by Health Week, World Of Work Week, the run into examinations for Year 12 students and the passing on of the leadership baton to the Year 11 cohort. 

Legendary Learners had its final evenings for the term before Mock ATAR exams began. Study groups in the Library have been noticeably silent as students focus on revision and finishing tasks. While co-curricular activities do not run in the final week of term, Philosophy Club still felt the need to meet. In Week 9 an intense hour spent struggling with ideas of reality, language and what we can “know” left so much unresolved that another week was needed. I will really miss these nimble thinkers. Meanwhile, crafty workers have completed our model library.

Year 8 Lego Club members, Declan Arambasic, Tomas Wilson, Isaiah Cox and Brianna King completed the mammoth Millennium Falson project. This took two years to build. Congratulations to all involved in this mammoth undertaking. 

Book List Information

As planning for 2025 arcs up, please note the following information for book lists:

Online return date for parents to order – Friday, 27 December 2024

Some delivery of orders placed by the return date – will be delivered by the 28January 2025.

Wider Reading

Mrs Sykiotis’ Wider Reading resources will look a bit different for the final weeks of the term. She prepared a ‘Spring Holidays Reading Challenge’ for teachers to share with their class(es). Students are encouraged to choose two or more of the challenges. The range will suit reluctant and avid readers alike. Students may also write their own challenge. Another suggestion for this fortnight’s Wider Reading is for the teacher to choose an extract from a book and read it aloud to the class. Mrs Sykiotis explains that literacy expert, Dr Margaret Merga, found that; 

“While reading aloud is often seen as a practice most appropriate to young children who are still developing the most basic reading skills, research suggests that opportunities to listen to reading aloud may be appreciated by young people beyond the early years, affording pleasure as well as strengthening social bonds, building literacy skills and facilitating access to more complex texts”. 

Attempting to keep up with the flow of young adult fiction coming into the Library, I read The Boy Next Door by Jenny Ireland. A sweet little romance, the novel included the now obligatory themes of single parent families and teenage body dysmorphia. Throw into that mix a young heroine who suffers a brain injury and “the boy next door” and the novel is a romp through all the predictable conflicts one can expect from young adult fiction. On a more serious note, I read Pat Barker’s recent novel The Silence of the Girls. This is the first in her Women of Troy trilogy. It is somehow fitting that as The Iliad and the Odyssey settle into the Library, so does this novel about Briseis, Achille’s prize, who was coveted by Agamemnon, triggering a catastrophic series of final conflicts in the battle for Troy. There is no time in this novel for body dysmorphia, or indeed young love. Rather it is an uncomfortable and graphic women’s view of war. It is generally accepted that history is written by the victor. The victor and defeated in war elide the invisible victims, women and children. They are footnotes at the most, ironic in this case as disputes over women ignited the beginning and end of the Trojan War. The novel provides the reader with sparse detail of either the context or the characters, but it does a little unpacking of Briseis from a twenty first century perspective. As a counterpoint to this arid interpretation of an ancient story, I reread Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven. 

This first novel in her Alexander trilogy carries the reader into the fourth century BC. One can relate to the characters and, thanks to Renault’s classical education at Oxford, feel as if one is in that world. The characters are beautifully written and while the context is romanticised at times, the reader is positioned to empathise with both the men and the women caught up in the blazing meteor that was Alexander. As another writer commented, “what darkness after the fireworks”.

From the Bronze Age to Classical Greece and then a shift in genre to The Things we Leave Behind by Clare Furniss. This is another new young adult novel from our collection. Dystopian fiction has never been my “jam”. SBS news contains enough dystopia for me. However, as this novel is on offer for our students, I thought I should make the effort to read it. One of the disturbing things about good dystopian fiction is that is often underpinned by a context, or ideology, that is only too familiar. This novel, set in Great Britian, pivots on the growing xenophobia of the Western world.  But it could just as easily be Gaza, the Ukraine or even USA. Conflict and climate change triggers successive waves of refugees. The political response to this, in the novel, is an authoritarian regime. The young protagonist struggles to navigate to safety as her world disintegrates. This is a beautifully written novel that is deeply moving. It was an awkward read in the Library, I was thankful for handy boxes of tissues.

My final Laurence Library read is another new novel for younger readers. Something Somewhere by Richard Yaxley is a very gentle ghost story. Set in a small country town on the east coast of Australia the young protagonist’s life is lived on the road with a very young single mother, Malt’s only emotional security is his dog, Banjo. Finally, his mother brings him to live with a grandmother who is a stranger to him. Here, after some adventures and a mystery solved, Malt finds a place that he is able to call home. The bush setting and gentle observations of people and native animals lifts the novel from the usual formulaic single parent drama into an engrossing plot. As always, these novels are nestled on our shelves, waiting for you to read.

I hope the September holiday gifts everyone good books and soft sunshine. 

Together, let us read.

Dr Annette Pedersen