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Storylines Betty Gilderdale Award 2018

For the love of libraries Jeannie Skinner, National Library Services to Schools, Northland 2 December 2018

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou, tēna koutou, tēna koutou, tēna koutou katoa.

Thank you all for coming today to be part of this celebration, I am so grateful to have you here with me, so many friendly faces and kind hearts, and it is lovely being here in this place, my mothership – National Library, Auckland.

The bouquet of roses that is the Betty Gilderdale Award comes with a little thorn – the requirement to present a “Spring Lecture” which rather sounds as if it should be edifying, and is more than a little daunting. I made the mistake of re-reading some of the other lectures from previous recipients which are variously erudite, poignant, historical, impressive in recounting achievements – and in the part of Maureen’s speech last year where she talked about block chain, mystifying.

Elizabeth [Jones, from National Library] sent a lovely encouraging email saying “Just say what you know and what you care about and who you are”, which in some ways was reassuring but also rather all-encompassing. Linda [McCullough] said to me earlier this week, “Oh, don’t worry, you could just read us a story and we’d all love it”, and I did consider that option – I enjoyed Rosemary [Tisdall’s] extract from The Young Visiters very much, but then, what on earth to choose? I wonder if you remember, Frances [Plumpton], when you asked me to be on a panel out West Auckland, sharing our top ten children’s books to have with us on a desert island? In agonies of indecision I expanded my allocation of ten with each title representing an author or illustrator, genre or publisher, and you said I was the reason that the boat had sunk and that we were on the desert island in the first place, but at least we’d all have plenty to read!

I was thinking that the focus of this talk would be summed up in a simple slogan or two – the first might be Kids who read succeed! and the second could be School libraries matter! but I suspect this third one is the most true: It’s all about me! I am certain that this audience already knows all about the why, what and how of the first two.

Whenever I read Newbery Medal acceptance speeches I am struck by how often the recipient begins with where, and when, they were when they got the phone call – sometimes it is in the middle of the night which makes me wonder if the Newbery committee have quite got a handle on US times zones, but maybe it is just such a big announcement that it has to be communicated immediately the decision is made. When Libby rang me though, it was a perfectly respectable time, late afternoon, at my desk, and I thought she was ringing about the upcoming Storylines Northland Story Tour Kerikeri event, but instead she gave me the news of the Betty Gilderdale Award. I was overwhelmed with feelings of utter astonishment, great delight, more than a touch of embarrassment, and real gratitude. Although maybe not in quite the same category as the Newbery, now I know why that the actual moment of being told about an award, those surprising words that come out of the blue, is so exciting and memorable.

I am so glad to have you here, Betty [Gilderdale]. Thank you for coming, and it means a lot to me to know you in person as well as through your work, and to be given this award named in your honour.

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I received a lovely congratulations message about the award from Catherine Pilkington, the librarian, formerly a teacher, at Otamatea High School, which included the following:

Betty Gilderdale was my children's literature lecturer at training college, she was wonderful and I credit her and Tom Fitzgibbon, another of my lecturers, with my love of children's literature.

What an amazing gift to have passed on to your students. Your influence is lasting and important, and along with a certain heroic little yellow digger that is an enduring delight, your name is an integral part of the New Zealand children’s literature story.

This award feels like a happy book-end to my career, as I remember when I first started at National Library 30 years ago, Betty, you were a stalwart of the then Children’s Literature Association along with others such as Joan Brockett, Jo Noble, Rosemary, Frances and more. Remembering those days I found myself needing to make a slight chronological readjustment – I think back then I thought of Betty (forgive me please), as, well, sort of old, until I worked out that actually she was then only a few years older than I am now, and that’s really not that old at all! I’m sure there is some scholarly research about the shift in perceptions of age as the years go by.

I also remember US educator Jamie McKenzie talking about change, and how his grandmother had, within her lifetime, gone from travelling in a covered wagon in the late 1880s, to seeing a man land on the moon in the 1960s. In a way, I feel a bit like that, having been an Adviser for so long, starting in the Department of Education just before Tomorrow’s Schools, at 83 Remuera Road before its refurbishment, with green canvas holdall bags, marked up copies of NASH, the challenge that was microfiche, and a particular masterpiece of technological engineering – Karen [Du Fresne’s] cardboard framed, multi-flip overhead transparency used in courses to demonstrate how to type a catalogue card, line by line.

When I started as an Adviser we’d visit a school and come back to the office and write a report – using pen and paper, and give it to the secretary Alison to type it up. When you finally got a version that not only you, but also she approved of, it would be posted out to the school. Oh, the excitement when the first computer arrived in the early 1990s! Catherine Lee was the avid early adopter of the single computer for the team, but we all soon followed suit.

There is a world of difference from those days to our reach and our approach now, and yet the essentials stay the same – the core that underpins our work is the belief in the importance of libraries, literature and learning to make a difference in children’s lives, give them scope and opportunity, and make the world a better place.

Here is a favourite quote of mine from American educator, Elliot Eisner1:

“Among the various aims we consider important in education, two are especially so. We would like our children to be well informed - that is, to understand ideas that are important, useful, beautiful, and powerful. We also want them to have the appetite and ability to think analytically and critically, to be able to speculate and imagine, to see connections among ideas, and to be able to use what they know to enhance their own lives and to contribute to their culture.”

1 Cognition and representation, Eisner, Elliot W., Phi Delta Kappan, 00317217, Jan 97, Vol. 78, Issue 5 http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~ext12366/readings/eisner.pdf

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Isn’t that well said? I believe libraries are also integral to these aims, for education in the broadest sense, for ideas, for imagination, for self-empowerment and scope, critical thought, citizenship and engagement, and all freely given and open to everyone.

In a recent New York Times piece Eric Kleinenberg2, author of the book Palaces of the People: How to build a more equal and united society, talks persuasively about how libraries strengthen communities and build social capital. He says, “Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that – even in an age of atomization, polarization and inequality – serve as the bedrock of civil society.” It is no coincidence that the word “liber,” the Latin root of the word “library,” means both “book” and “free.”

Like Rosemary Tisdall described in her 2016 Betty Gilderdale talk, I too was a fortunate child, growing up in a reading family and a home with books. I have many of my childhood books still and as I started to write their names and titles that came to mind it became an indigestible list, but for any of you in the audience as readers growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, you’ll know the books I’m thinking of…

Large format Orlando and Babar picture books, Little Golden Books, Madeleine, collections of stories and poems illustrated by Tasha Tudor, Walter Crane or Eric Kincaid, learning to read with Dr Seuss, PD Eastman and Bennet Cerf – What time is it when an elephant sits on a fence? Time to get a new fence! Louis Untermeyer’s Golden Treasury of Poetry with Joan Walsh Anglund illustrations, Robert Louis Stevenson verses illustrated by Hilda Boswell, Little Grey Men, Anne of Green Gables and all the classics – Little Women, Swiss Family Robinson and Tom Sawyer, Charlotte’s Web, Laura Ingalls Wilder books with Garth Williams illustrations, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes and Marianne Dreams, Swallows and Amazons – the whole series, Flambards, Stig of the Dump, Mary Poppins, war stories – Anne Frank, I am David, The Endless Steppe, biographies, non-fiction – I adored Gerald Durrell’s books, the Provensen’s illustrated Iliad and Odyssey, Andrew Lang’s Fairy books, (he was my great-aunt’s godfather and I have her now century old collection), along with Catweazle, Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Rosemary Sutcliffe, The Owl Service, The Amazing Mr Blunden, The Family from One End Street, and of course Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Malory Towers.

I was read to as well. I remember my father reading me the Just So stories, O Best Beloved, and my mother, on one surprising occasion, becoming someone quite different when she had a go at reading the Uncle Remus Brer Rabbit stories in their dialect with an American accent – it was my mother but not as I knew her! I was encouraged to read, given the essential ingredients of bountiful bookshelves and a bedside light, and of course, we made visits to the local public library each week, on Fridays after school. I remember gathering my choices and whittling them down to the borrowable number – definites and probables and maybes…. The library was quiet, and dark, with wooden shelves, wooden floors, wooden furniture, and rows of long, narrow segmented wooden troughs on the librarian’s desk with individual borrower pockets and their neat little book cards tucked inside.

I think I took the public and school libraries I visited for granted – it was simply part of the routine of life, having books on hand, though I know I did enjoy the trips to the library. I loved the total independence of selecting something to read, getting setup for bedtime or car trips or afternoons in the treehouse with books, or in my favourite reading tree in the garden – a beech tree with branches at just the right climbing, sitting, foot and back rest spacing – here I am, reading, I think Porterhouse Major by Margaret Baker.

2 To Restore Civil Society, Start With the Library, Eric Klinenberg, New York Times, Sept. 8, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/opinion/sunday/civil-society-library.html

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It was, however, when I came to New Zealand in 1974 that I really discovered how libraries could be more than part of the everyday and were in fact an essential life-saver. Caitlin Moran3 put it so eloquently, describing what libraries offered her as she grew up on a housing estate in Wolverhampton: “A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.”

We arrived in New Zealand on a Friday in November, drove up north from Auckland airport – my father growled at me as we drove into Kerikeri when he saw I had my nose in a book, desperate to finish the last few pages, instead of smelling the orange blossom scented air and looking around at our new home town. I was at school that Monday, end of the third form, the proverbial fish out of water, 13 years old, pale from an English winter, academic and un-sporty, terrible plummy accent I expect, and way out of my comfort zone.

Of course, it was the school library that became my haven and books my friends in that first challenging year or two. I picked my way through the collection and then decided to read more systematically through the fiction, alphabetically in its entirety, from Lloyd Alexander to Barbra Wersba and Paul Zindel.

Anne Kool was the school librarian – Dutch, matter-of-fact but sympathetic – and she welcomed me whenever I could take refuge there. Anne was also a volunteer at the small Kerikeri Public Library and invited me to work there as a volunteer too which came with the bonus of being able to tap into that adult collection. In the 1970s the Kerikeri Public library was housed in an old former school building with sash windows and high ceilings; it had a small collection and about 200 paid up members. It was a highlight when the National Library Country Library Service van arrived three or four times a year to refresh and extend the collection – all the volunteers were keen to be part of that selection process.

3 Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls, Caitlin Moran, Huffington Post, 14 November 2012 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/caitlin-moran/libraries-cathedrals-of-o_b_2103362.html

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I was what you could call an eclectic reader, or perhaps undiscriminating could be another description – To Kill a Mockingbird, The Thorn Birds, Anna Karenina, Gone with the Wind; from Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nicholas Monserrat, Dickens and Brontës, Papillon and Catch 22, Daphne du Maurier and Georgette Heyer, Jean Plaidy / Victoria Holt / Phillippa Carr (three of the eight pseudonyms for the same author!), Vera Brittain, Gladys Aylward, Morris West, Rebecca West, James Michener, Leon Uris; from Rosamund Lehman to Wilbur Smith… it was all grist to the mill!

I devoured books, and I was grateful for the escape they offered – “a place to go when we have to stay where we are”, as Mason Cooley said. Books took me to a world beyond my current time and place. As former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, said, “We treasure books because they are the individual’s portable, affordable link with the memory, mind and imagination of the rest of humanity.”

I’m telling you this because it is about my experience of how crucial it was for my wellbeing growing up to be able to read and to be able to access books by the armful from a library. It is how libraries became essential to me and will remain so all my life. Browse, borrow, read, return, request, renew – the generosity of what libraries offer fills me with delight and pride. Meg Rosoff captures that magical freedom, ease and autonomy in her poem, ‘To whom it may concern’ in a Guardian article, Love letters to libraries.4

You may be pleased to hear that as well as book character companions I did actually make human friends at Kerikeri High School and am friends with them still though we are spread around the country and the globe. I discovered sailing in the stunning Bay of Islands and Northland coastline – dolphins and sunshine, beaches and bays, swimming and diving and picking up shells, and adventures in real life…. Gradually I found my feet and started to feel at home.

4 Love letters to libraries, The Guardian, 5 Feb 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/05/love-letters-to-libraries-robin-ince-meg-rosoff-and-other-famous-names-check-in

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Skipping quickly through the following years I did a degree in English and Education, then sailed for a year to Australia and Pacific Islands on board the 9.5m yacht Moonpenny where provisioning the boat with books was only a whisker behind provisioning the boat with food and water.

Next, I worked at the University of Auckland Library with a cheerful bunch of other “March to Novembers” – Michele James, Margaret Tibbles, Karen Peat, Elena de Roo and more… There was a letter of complaint to the newspaper which Norval Gibson-Smith read to us, about the unacceptable noise levels in the University main library. “By far the worst offenders” it said, “are the staff whose laughter can be heard ringing through the stacks”. Norval said to us, pleadingly, “I DO want you to be happy, but can you be happy quietly?”

I followed up with a Diploma in Librarianship at Victoria University and the best part of that year was volunteering in the Wellington City children’s library with Ruth Halliday. Next I was a children’s librarian at Karori for about a year with the admirable Dorothy Mitchell, and irreverent Sue [Delamare] and Helen [Kemp], and felt honoured to be following Margaret Mahy’s footsteps as she had worked there once upon a time. Then off to England and travel through Europe, settling for a while in London and working in a bookshop – Hatchard’s of Piccadilly, the oldest bookshop in England, founded in 1797. This was “the year Coleridge took opium and wrote Kubla Khan, and the novel Pride and Prejudice was still in manuscript form, and called “First Impressions”. 5 Hatchard’s was a department store of nothing but books, with the prestige of Royal Warrants and a clientele that included loyal and knowledgeable readers, authors and publishers, mail-order customers all around the world, and the rich and famous.

A favourite Hatchard’s story is of an old fellow, up from the country, dressed in tweeds, who came into Hatchard’s with his list of errands from his wife and asked, “Do you have a copy of Face Cream by Elizabeth Arden?” Bless. I worked in Paperbacks which was definitely – literally and figuratively – “below stairs” in the Hatchard’s hierarchy, but it was fun and social, replete with readers and tradition, and I had the good fortune to find more than books there – more on that later.

I travelled some more and when I settled back in New Zealand I knew exactly where I wanted to start work – at National Library Services to Schools. I’d been set on the role since hearing about the Advisers’ work when at Library School we visited the Tawa centre and I met Barbara Murison. I had been taken for a while with the idea of travelling with the Country Library Service, taking books to libraries in country towns like Kerikeri, visiting remote farms and lighthouses, a folding camp stretcher bed in the bus and all that, but really I was captivated by the School Library Service and what it offered – libraries and children’s literature and education and public service – a unique intersection and a perfect combination for me.

5 Hatchards The Matilda Project: Bookish Adventures 30.11.2013

https://matildaproject.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/hatchards/

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I got my foot in the National Library door surprisingly easily as a reference librarian – not long after arriving back in New Zealand I came to Auckland and made a time to meet Joy Hopkinson and drop off my CV on spec one Thursday afternoon. I discovered to my surprise when I arrived that the appointment turned out to be an interview with Joy, Lachie Shea and Jocelyn Kerruish. I was offered the job the next day, Friday, and started on Monday, my birthday, so it’s easy to remember the date. It took a bit more patience to get the Adviser’s job I had set my sights on but it happened a year or so later when a vacancy came up, and I have never looked back. I used to feel anxious at performance review time when I would be asked about my career ambitions and aspirations for the future, where I saw myself in ten years’ time and so on, but I just knew I loved exactly where I was and wanted to stay.

When Malcolm Ross heard that the former job title for Advisers was “Organising Librarian” he hooted with laughter and said that I was BORN an organising librarian. He may have been intimating an element of “bossy” in there somewhere, but for now, let’s just call it “facilitating”!

Chapter One of my time at Services to Schools was in Auckland, and my patch especially was schools in West Auckland, from Manukau Road out to the Waitakeres – oh my good little Westie schools, they were the best (that’s where I first had the pleasure of meeting Pauline McCowan at St Dominic’s) but all the advisers worked collaboratively for courses and events across the region, and there were many…. In the first year of Tomorrow’s Schools, 1990, when schools had autonomy over their own professional development budget, the advisers ran nine four-day courses, Monday to Thursday, in Term 1 (it was a three term year then), with 20 or more teachers and librarians at each. That was my first year as an adviser and it was how I learned about the job from my generous and experienced colleagues – Karen [Du Fresne], Catherine [Lee] and Amanda Cooper. It may be a cliché to talk about a family atmosphere, but the Auckland centre had such a strong culture, whether weekly waiata practice led by Violet and Mere, social club events with Alicia [Nowak] making us all laugh, or coming in to work at 4am to get better (dial-up) internet speed during the mammoth automation process.

Chapter Two was the move in 1998 to Kerikeri, where my family all lived, to work with Dyane Hosler in Northland. It was perfect timing for this relocation – the Services to Schools director, Pamela Hulston, thought that all Advisers needed was a car and a laptop and they could be based anywhere rather than clustered in cities, and so I was able to set up a unique arrangement of working from home looking after schools in the Mid and Far North – the Bay of Islands, Hokianga and up to Te Aupouri Peninsula.

So here I work, in my National Library Kerikeri office in the house we built, with windows on two sides giving both morning and afternoon sun and views to the scruffy garden, and here’s a picture of my office buddy, dear old Frodo. When my colleague Indira saw this photo she asked when this particular footstool feature was going to be rolled out nationally across the organisation.

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I’m grateful for the flexibility that working from home has offered me, for the trust and support of managers who have made it work, and I can reassure you that while I might sometimes be wearing slippers at my desk, Casual Fridays does not mean, as a colleague in Wellington enquired, that I come to work in my pyjamas.

The first 10 to 12 years of my time in the north with Dyane [Hosler] aligned with a hugely generous period with the then ASB Community Trust, now known as Foundation North, actively supporting school library development through grants, especially when applications came in conjunction with National Library involvement with the school. I think the first application I did was for Te Tii School, for the bold and enormous sum of $3,000 in total, but over time the grants came to include money for books, usually around $10–15,000, new shelving, automation hardware and software, and furniture – issue desks and chairs. I remember for Whangaroa College Library we applied for and got $65,000! The ASB Trust donated around 2 to 3 million dollars to school libraries in the Mid / Far North over that time, as well as more in Dyane’s area of Whangarei, Dargaville and Wellsford, and libraries were transformed as a result. It was a busy and rewarding time for the pair of us; working with Dyane as my manager was a real delight and, like Karen, she is a dear friend and valued sounding board to this day.

I love before and after pictures, and could show you plenty of the various library makeovers but here are just a few to give a flavour – little Te Kura o Hata Maria o Pawarenga in the North Hokianga, a Catholic school next to the convent and church, the library full of clutter, big sort out and weed, new shelving and an enticing “new” library created…

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or Panguru, Dame Whina Cooper’s turangawaewae, from grey walls, floor, shelves and even books, to colourful mural covered walls and multi-coloured shelves – some green, others blue, yellow, or red.

At Ōmanaia School in the Hokianga the principal Luke Hiki relocated his office to provide a library space and with new paint and carpet, ranch sliders out to a deck, colourful shelves, a growing collection, automation and comfortable furniture we created a library that is like a pair of open arms.

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The library opening and blessing there was a glorious event on a still misty morning that warmed with sunshine on the first day of Matariki, with kuia singing waiata and dancing gently, barefoot, with beautiful hand movements. There was kapa haka from the children, and speeches from lots of people including the BOT chairperson, Dave Titoki, talking about attending the school himself (back when it was Ōmanaia Native School), reading books from the “library” which was a shelf of books in the corridor on the way to the toilets, and the impact at 6 years old of discovering Where the wild things are, a book he has never forgotten and shares now with his mokopuna.

It is those stories of a book or a library making a difference, even if for a single child, that make it all worthwhile. There are lots of stories, as well as mine, of rescue by library, with heartfelt descriptions of the way libraries and librarians, books and reading bring hope and comfort, reassurance and respite.

Sometimes it isn’t a case of rescue – sometimes it is a book that inspires. Karen told me once about her sister, Jenny, reading Mr Popper’s Penguins as a 7 or 8 year-old and falling in love with the idea of Antarctica – a passion which saw her travelling there as an adult, advising on cleaning up the environment. I love the idea that an element of her career, and important contribution, could be traced back to a seminal chapter book fuelling her young imagination. CS Lewis talks about this, how fiction gives us the chance to explore the ideas of different lives:

“We can strip the knight of his armour, to reveal that he looks exactly like us, or we can try on the armour ourselves to experience how it feels. Fiction provides the ideal opportunity to try on the armour.”

This is the powerful effect of reading, and fiction in particular, to foster empathy – to walk in another’s shoes, and see the world through their eyes, and come to understand, and care more. I subscribe to Henry James’ assertion that there are three things in human life that are important – the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. As Matt Haig says, “reading is love in action”:

“Reading isn't important because it helps get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.”

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For many children in Northland, especially the Far North, there are not many books in their homes, a culture of reading, or easy access to a public library. Eighty percent of the schools in the Far North are, in old parlance, Decile 1 and 2. The school library is often the main, if not only, source of books, and the best chance and wherewithal for many children to become readers and increase their life chances as a result. I remember education lecturer (and Kids’ Lit Quiz Master) Wayne Mills saying in a talk that reading ability is the litmus test of academic success at secondary school. Perhaps this, from Ted Hughes, sums up what we want for every child, for them to find the key to turn their world:

“Even the most misfitting child who's chanced upon the library's worth, Sits with the genius of the Earth and turns the key to the whole world.” from ‘Hear it again’, in Collected Poems

I used to think, in the words of the movie, Field of Dreams, “build it and they will come” and that making a bountiful and engaging library might be all that it would take to give children that key. I thought, how could anyone resist the invitation of a glorious panorama of picture books, or finding just the right chapter book for thrilling adventures?

I soon came to realise though, that libraries can’t be passive places, they need to be active. No matter how generous the financial investment, bountiful a collection or appealing an environment, the absolute magic ingredient has to be there, in the words of the well-known whakatauki:

He aha te mea nui ō te Ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.

Author and reading advocate, Aidan Chambers calls them “enabling adults” – the parents, teachers, librarians and more who create readers by providing resources and time, stimulating a desire to be a thoughtful reader, demonstrating and modelling what it is to be a reader, and responding to build a reading culture and community. Another of my reading heroes is author, poet and UK children’s literature Laureate and reading campaigner, Michael Rosen, who issues us this challenge: 6

“We have to be committed, ingenious, flexible and experimental in coming up with ways of making literature come alive for every single child - no exceptions allowed.”

It is this passion, practice and commitment that is at the heart of what all of us gathered here today live and breathe. Working in an environment with library colleagues, teachers and friends that share these aspirations is what has been so motivating, so rewarding and so enduring for me.

An event like this is rather like the best elements of a big year birthday party, or maybe a farewell from work, or even this earth, with lots of memories recollected and affectionate things being said, but it also gives me an opportunity to warmly acknowledge the people who have meant so much to me in my work, though the risk of naming some is to leave out others.

I have been so fortunate to work in an amazing team of dedicated and generous colleagues across Services to Schools and the wider National Library, as well as many inspiring teachers and librarians in schools and libraries in Auckland, Northland and throughout the country, and over many years.

6 Laureate Log 11 Michael Rosen’s website / For Adults – News

https://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/for-adults-news/

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I’d like to make a particular mention of my friend Anne O’Brien, here today, a remarkable person and teacher, and the Teacher with Library Responsibility at Three Kings School when I first started as an Adviser. I would suggest strategies for the library, Anne would implement them, brilliantly, and then we had a model to show other schools, “Hey everyone, look, do it like this…” Beyond the library world Anne’s later gifts to me have been plenteous supplies of fabric from her recycling initiatives, and if any of you have a tribble, tuffet, cushion or some such from me you can thank Anne for it too!

I’ve been especially privileged to have worked with managers whom I admire and respect, heart and mind – Elizabeth Jones, Karen Du Fresne, Dyane Hosler, Wendy Macaskill and Geraldine Howell. Your collective commitment, vision, hard-work, integrity, and enthusiasm have been a beacon for me to follow, and I am so very thankful for all your unstinting support and encouragement, latitude and scope, and inspirational example. Thank you so much for being here today, and Karen and Dyane flying up from the South Island – I’m incredibly touched.

And finally, I’d like to acknowledge my husband, Kevin [Dowley]. We celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary yesterday, and I feel so lucky to have found (in a bookshop, of course, the aforementioned Hatchard’s of Piccadilly) and married such a wonderful man – so clever, and funny, and above all, kind. Of course, he is also tremendous reader – an avid, eclectic and thoughtful reader. When we were driving to Auckland on Friday, I commented on some amazing cloud formations and Kevin said, “Yes, they were made in Sector 5”, referring of course to the brilliant wordless picture book Sector 7 by David Weisner, and I thought how lucky I was to have a husband who can reference picture books and share the delight.

Readers are made by readers…

Kevin is also a lovely reader-aloud, and not just to little children – if I’m too tired to read at night but not quite tired enough to fall asleep straight away, I’ll say to Kevin reading beside me, “What are you reading?” which is code for “Will you read to me?” and it only takes a page or two of his gentle voice and I’m away – especially if it’s some account of Napoleon’s light infantry or, memorably, a history of the fight for the 1832 Reform Act about the British electoral system which would only take a paragraph to work its magic.

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Our house and our lives together are full of books – a happy union of librarian and bookseller. My notion that owning a second hand bookshop might mean some of our tottering piles of books find their way to the bookshop’s shelves has not proved to at all true, in fact the direct opposite is the case, but we wouldn’t (quite) have it any other way.

I’ll finish now with a poem from – let’s call him a Northland poet – Glenn Colquhoun7

In other words

A poem is a way of knowing you are alive. As shocking as fish leaping out of deep water. As sharp as light stabbing through a row of trees. As bold as opening up your eyes during prayer. As simple as lying awake in the middle of the night listening to the sound of people snoring. Every minute of every day of every life is a full library.

May the lives of all of us and the people we love be libraries full of beautiful and powerful stories.

Thank you!

7 In other words, by Glenn Colquhoun, from An explanation of poetry to my father, Steele Roberts,

2001. Used with permission.