My adoring, biased, supportive husband kept my spirits up, as did booksellers and librarians whom I knew, and they all encouraged me to try, and try again. Hush the Invisible Mouse was rejected nine times over those five years, which was extraordinarily discouraging, needless to say. Julie VIvas did several glorious paintings, which I sent with the story to nine different publishers over five years.

I learned later than one should never include artwork with a manuscript: the publisher finds the illustrator in 99.9% of cases. Is it any wonder I received a high distinction? Here are two of the adorable pictures Julie did for Hush the Invisible Mouse. My lecturer, Felicity Hughes, raved about my story and urged me to try to have it published. It was probably the luckiest day of my life. My colleague, Tom Gleghorn, suggested an ex-student of his from the Sydney Art School: Julie Vivas. I thought that I might perhaps blind my professor to any weakness in my story by having some glorious illustrations to hand in with it. I was lecturing at a teachers’ college at the time (Sturt College of Advanced Education) so I asked a colleague in the art department if he could recommend an illustrator. I wrote a four and half page story called Hush the Invisible Mouse. In the years that I’d been reading to Chloë I’d been shocked and dismayed by the very few Australian books available for Australian children so I determined to write a very Australian book. It was a lesson well taught, and well learnt.

No wonder the lecturer had set the task-we all discovered how difficult it was to write for young children and our estimation of children’s authors rose sky high. ‘How easy!’ I felt that the assignment was beneath me. In the introductory class I was horrified to discover that, in an otherwise highly demanding academic course, one of the first assignments was to write a children’s book. She was such an avid reader I couldn’t keep up with her passion for books so I decided, as a non-traditional student, to take a course in children’s literature to find out about as many books as possible that might interest her, particularly those that had been published since my own childhood. “Once upon a time, but not very long ago, deep in the Australian bush, there lived two possums.

4 pics 1 word fox gambling