Photographs in the Mud

Anzac Day links for students

With Anzac Day approaching, here are links, trailers, worksheets and activities to help commemorate our veterans and war animals.

My YouTube channel has many clips, start here, book-trailers include Light Horse Boy and Lighthouse Girl, student’s trailers. Watch a Theatre 180 stage preview and song, and Destination WA Breaksea Island TV segment. You can see me reading The Last Light Horse high in the Snowy Mountains and hear reflective Covid Anzac Day thoughts at the Desert Mounted Corp Memorial. Or listen to a conversation about historical fiction with Elaine Forrestal.

Each book on my website has a dedicated page, with teaching activities, worksheets and story background information. Please also check out my blog. There are dozens of Anzac-linked posts. Try typing in book titles. For example, if you search In the Lamplight, you’ll find out about the wallaby and cockatoo living at Harefield Hospital during WWI. Or click the Anzac Category on blog sidebar to find Semaphore and Morse charts, interviews, Kokoda Track links to Photographs in the Mud, Purple Poppies, and the amazing 2015 The Giants street theatre event.

I hope these activities and links are helpful as we remember the courage and sacrifice of our veterans, their horses and animal mascots. Lest we forget.

It’s 80 years since the horrific WWII battles along Papua New Guinea’s Kokoda Track. In 2002 I hiked the track to research a YA novel (yet to be published). An unexpected outcome of the trip was the publication of my first picture book, Photographs in the Mud. It’s 17 years since Fremantle Press published this story, told from both Australian and Japanese perspectives. It has also been published in Japanese.

In the latest edition of ‘The Open Book,’ you can read more about this book’s journey. I’m grateful to Fremantle Press for keeping this title in print for 17 years!

More details here and via other blogposts on my website.

Kokoda Track: 75 years

2017 is the 75th anniversary of WW2 battles along Papua New Guinea’s Kokoda Track. As part of their Serial Reading programme, in Term Two the West Australian newspaper’s ED! supplement will be serialising my picture book Photographs in the Mud.

9781921361043photographsinthemud-copy

The story set in 1942, explores Kokoda from two perspectives; through the eyes of an Australian soldier and also from a Japanese soldier’s point of view. The book was inspired by a story I heard during my 2002 trek from Kokoda airstrip across the Owen Stanley range to Ower’s Corner (near Port Moresby). During one bloody battle, two soldiers locked in combat, rolled down the steep mountainside away from the main battle. They found themselves alone and injured in a jungle ditch. This moment and the imagined aftermath became the core of my story with a theme of common humanity.

Although mostly fictitious, Photographs in the Mud was inspired by an incident experienced by Kokichi Nishimura, a soldier of the 2/144th Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army. Mr Nishimura’s amazing life story, including his return to PNG to collect the bones of war dead, was later explored in Charles Happell’s The Bone Man of Kokoda.

My picture book, published in 2005 by Fremantle Press and illustrated by Brian Harrison-Lever, has been utilised as an international peace reference. It’s suitable for middle primary readers through to senior high school and is often used in visual literacy units. Teaching notes and more details, including photos of a much younger me, can be found on my website.