January, 2025

A furry visitor to the valley, enjoying a refreshing dip

The Ten Best Things that didn’t happen to me on December 31

1. The solar system was not destroyed by a tentacled galactic overlord from Proxima 1;

2. No watermelon exploded (let us not forget the Great Watermelon Catastrophe of New Year 2019, when every surface in the kitchen/living room was splattered with soggy red watermelon corpse and the place stank like a brewery with a hangover);

3. The wombats continued to ignore the kitsch Christmas doormat. Wombats have better taste;

4. No one in our extended family, two or four legged, got food poisoning;

5. The telephone only cut out twice (this is well below average for our aged Telstra system);

6. Possum X did not invite 100 friends in gumboots to a New Year’s Eve party in our ceiling cavity;

7. I didn’t lose my glasses.Or my spare glasses; which I need to find my other glasses;

8. I only confused the birthdays of two dear friends, who have forgiven me. I think.

The Six Small Catastrophes that did happen to me on December 31 2024

1. The water tank suddenly remembered it was forty five years old, well past warranty, and began to leak, softly, silently, soakingly, leaving us without enough water to shower or to do the washing;

2. I somehow mucked up the contrast on my laptop so everything is red, black and indecipherable;

3. Microsoft refused to recognise my licence on my backup computer. The Microsoft AI and I had a three hour discussion. I’d like to say ‘I won’ but as I didn’t do anything different on the 1,234rd try maybe the AI became sympathetic;

4. I decided I could find the loo at 2 am without turning on the light (technically this was on Jan 1, 2025). Am now black and blue and purple too;

5. I added the final three hours of edits to the next book and was about to press ‘send’ to the publishers when I realised I had edited the backup, not the actual manuscript. Three hours later the ‘final’ version was emailed off, or rather the version that will be rewritten when Lisa, Kate, Julia and Pam tell me what is wrong with it. Or if they hate it. In which case I will hide under my desk whimpering for two hours, then emerge and write another book, one that is more similar to my other work and that I am sure they will adore…until I send it off, and the terror will return.

Note to all early career writers: you will always be terrified every time you send off the next book. And the more everyone loved the last book, the more panicked you’ll be for this one).

The Wonderful Things that happened to me on 1 January 2025

1. A long conversation with a small boy as he introduced me to his best ‘tree friends’. (Friends don’t have to be people, Grandma.);

2. Actually did send off the manuscript;

3. A wonderful family member found a plumber, ordered a new, larger and totally sound tank, and arranged for it to be installed. We should have shower water again in a fortnight. (We do have drinking water from another water tank, and a bathtub that can be filled with drinking water. Washing will still occur regularly and visitors do not need to wear clothes pegs on their noses);

4. The local roo mob didn’t just ignore us as we wandered past, but looked up and twitched their noses in what might possibly be kangaroo for ‘Hello. We have decided to like you even though you are human, as long as you keep walking and don’t disturb our dinner,’;

5. The first ‘anonymous apple’ (AA) is ripe. The AA is round, flattish on top, pale green and ripened apple by apple from January to May, and no one has any idea what variety it is. The (now defunct) apple nursery I bought it from 20 years ago was unreliable about varieties. But the AA is great chopped in a salad, and makes a sensational fluffy apple crumble, and there is always one ready to be crunched straight from the tree when you wander past;

Delicious and anonymous

6. Other assorted mini marvels, from Bryan’s smile as he gazed down on his creamy chowder made with Michael's home smoked salmon for dinner and the usual ‘happy new year’ calls and emails to the sound of the lyrebird who calls even in a heat wave. As long as the temperature drops by 2℃ Larry starts singing. Sensible lyrebirds sing from mid winter to late spring. I am delighted we have a slightly crazy passionate Pavarotti of a lyrebird in the pittosporum behind the house.

2024 was a lousy year, globally, nationally, and for just about everyone I know. Good things happened too, even wondrous ones: babies born, fabulous books, random acts of kindness; non-random acts of kindness, the way a wombat’s bum wriggles so you have to laugh at it, friends, neighbours… add a few pages of wonders here.

But 2025 will be better.

The most recent books

Tigg and the Bandicoot Bushranger

Age: 9+

Set against the long walk of the Chinese to the goldfields and at the teashop serving the best scones in Goulburn, this is the story of a 12 year old bushranger called Tigg, who only takes half of people’s money and only if they can afford it. “Mad as a bandicoot”, the troopers say. Til Tigg is shot by the mysterious Mr Rudolph, and the book becomes an adventure story that almost seems impossible, except that, like most of my books, every episode is based on real people, true events, meticulous detail and genuine places all composted together to make a story.

What was a European princess doing in the middle of the goldfields?

What does stewed rat taste like?

How do you make a fortune on the goldfields?

Read the book to find out… but also because it’s a great adventure, about a time that is often misunderstood.

The Sea Captain's Wife

For adults

A compelling story of murder, mystery and mutiny on the high seas, and a love so intense it can overcome two different cultures.

When Mair McCrae follows her island tradition and hunts for a husband cast up on the beach, she has no notion that the naked, half-drowned man she rescues is not just Captain Michael Dawson, heir to a major shipping firm, but that he is also obsessed with a ‘ghost ship’ carrying golden cargo.

On Big Henry Island women make the decisions, and knit the patterns that mark a man as their own. But Big Henry is also a volcano, and threatening to erupt. And when Mair breaks with island tradition and accompanies her husband to Australia she finds a danger just as real: a social system that tries to keep women confined to small roles at the edge of men's lives.

As Michael hunts for the ‘Ghost’ in one of the revolutionary new steamships that will change the history of Australia, a string of mysterious deaths haunt the women of the Dawson family.

Accidents, or murder? And why is Mair the only one who can see the truth?

January in the garden

It’s hot. Any sensible creature is snoozing, in the air conditioning or down a wombat hole, not gardening.

Unfortunately, after spring, January and February are the year’s main planting time. Things you plant now will feed you from autumn to spring – and as nothing much grows during winter, you have to get things in now for them to mature in time.

Plant all the cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, peas, and collards you need for winter and spring; in warm areas you can still plant small cucumbers, melons, and bush pumpkins. Plant Tom Thumb tomatoes in a pot to bear through winter.

Anything planted now will take advantage of the autumn flush as it matures. The autumn flush really does exist, just like the spring flush: a sudden burst of plant growth that seems to have no direct correlation with temperature or moisture levels.

Plant more beans as soon as the last lot start flowering; corn when the last lot reaches ankle high; and lettuce, carrots, silver beet, cabbage and potatoes. Plant more zucchini in case the first planting gets mildew (strongly growing young plants are more resistant). Also plant a new lot of tomatoes or take cuttings from old ones.

What to harvest

Pick hop flowers now. You should be able to start picking the crops you planted in spring now: corn, tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, capsicum, and zucchini. January is the bountiful time: it’s as though nature cons you into planting more by showing you how wonderful the harvest can be.

Wheat and oats should be ripening now. Don’t let them get too ripe if you are hand harvesting them, or they may shatter and you’ll lose some of the grain. If it’s hot and dry at least you’ll have tomatoes, zucchini, freckles lettuce and apple cucumbers.

And of course most of  your perennial veg will be harvestable, no matter how hot and dry the weather is - warrigal spinach, spring onions, chilli, bell peppers, garlic chives...

What to plant

Vegetables:

Winter crops like cauliflowers, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, peas, and collards. In warm areas you can still plant small cucumbers, melons, and bush pumpkins. Plant Tom Thumb tomatoes in a pot, to bear through winter.

Plant more beans, corn, lettuce, carrots, silver beet, cabbage, and potatoes, strawberries, sweet potatoes, choko, herbs, artichokes, asparagus, basil, beans, beetroot, burdock, cabbage, capsicum, carrots, celery, celtuce, chicory, corn salad, cress, cucumbers, eggplant, endive, fennel, kale, kohl rabi, leeks, lettuce (may not germinate over 26℃), melons, okra, parsley, pumpkin, radish, salsify, scorzonera, sweet corn, tomatoes, turnips, salad greens like mizuna and mitsuba, and zucchini.

Fruit:

Late cherries, Capulin cherry, blueberry, guava, Jackfruit, lychee, nashi pear, rose apple, peaches, nectarines, plums, plumcots, late apricots, early apples like Earliblaze, Gravenstein, passionfruit in warmer areas, mulberries, gooseberries, early grapes, early almonds, cape gooseberry, Valencia oranges, late blood oranges, a few macadamias, early mini melons, lemons, avocados, babaco, pawpaw or mountain pawpaw in warm areas, strawberries, mid-season raspberries, loganberries, fruit from flowering prunus – good for jam, red, white and black currants, blueberries, banana passionfruit, mangoes in hot areas, Hass avocados.

Pests

Remember that fruit flies are attracted to ripe fruit and mostly breed on the ground: pick all fruit just before it gets ripe, and never leave windfalls more than a day. Watch out for fruit fly breeding in ‘compost heaps’. See Natural Control of Garden Pests (Jackie French, Aird Books) for details of organic fruit fly control. Use fruit fly nets – they work for other pests too; control  28-spot ladybirds on potatoes or tomatoes, with glue spray or repel them with reflective mulch. Use sticky yellow traps or bowls of water with yellow food colouring, or glue spray for whitefly.

The Ten Best Questions to an Author in 2024  

Once upon a time the Questions To Authors came by mail, a box full every week. Like every writer I learned to dread the manilla envelopes of pages of kid handwriting: “Dear Jackie French, Our teacher said we had to write to our favourite author. My favourite author is Roald Dahl but he’s dead so I’m writing to you.”

It was also a problem because no one can read my handwriting – including me – and I already spent so many hours a day typing. Then came websites, and emails.

Every time (i.e. nine times out of ten) someone asked:

• Where do you get your ideas?

• How many books have you written?

• What is your favourite book/colour/football team?

I could refer them to the website, at least for those questions.

Those questions still pop up in most letters, but I’m not going to answer them today. You can find them on my website, jackiefrench.com

These are questions I‘ve been asked many times in 2024, but aren’t on my website, or at least not yet.

P.S If you have a question could you send an email address so I can reply, or (preferably) a stamped self addressed envelope, or – PLEASE – send ANY address so I can reply? I’ve got seven letters from kids with no address or even post mark, and one manila envelope from a school…except there are eight schools in Australia with that name. I am REALLY sorry I haven’t replied. And maybe check my website first?

Do you have an audiobook of...

Sorry, no. I have almost no audio books of any of my works. Often no one even remembers to send me one copy, much less the six free ones an author is supposed to get, and if they do arrive they vanish pretty fast.

I also don’t have anything to do with sublicensing audio rights. That’s done by HarperCollins, my publishers, so I usually have no idea if the audio edition is available. I won’t even know who published it, though it’s often Bolinda Books.

Try the HarperCollins website; try the Bolinda Books website. If you find it is unavailable just possibly HarperCollins may let you make a recording of it for a single purpose, but that’s up to them, not me. I’ll add my ‘please may they record this book’ request to your enquiry, but I won’t have a copy I can send you, and I don’t have the legal rights to make a recording.

How do I stop possums eating my roses?

Plant three Sydney Blue gums in the same hole. Keep them pruned to 1.5 metres high so they always have heaps of glaucous (whitish blue) juvenile leaves, which possums love eve more than rose bid and apple. Add a loquat trees, because they lobe the new leaves, the bloom and the fruit. A fat, well stuffed possum may nibble a bit, but won’t devastate you garden. But if you get rid of it another will move in. Possums were the only species cheering when the First Fleet sailed in, yelling ‘Rosebuds! Apples! Citrus trees!’

You’ll never beat a possum. But bribery will save your garden.

I want to be a writer but am afraid I will never make enough money to buy a house...

This is probably true. But you can make enough money to build one. Visit the library, and look up The House That Jackie Built, about how to build a stone house. There are also books on rammed earth or straw bale houses or ones made of concrete covering old reinforcing and chook netting and a hundred other ways to build a house for under $10,000. Then slowly add to it as the years go by - a few solar panels, a water tank, another bedroom..

Our house was once a machinery shed (long story). It’s grown over the last 43 years. It’s stopped growing now, and few tiles are falling off the bathroom walls and one day we will fix the lower steps so they are climbable, as long as Bryan doesn’t leave his slippers, boots and the tools he plans to use tomorrow on them.

Adults think it’s shabby, partly because all the furniture was either grandma’s, or ‘bush furniture’ made by friends, plus the rugs on the floor are faded, but kids yell ‘I love you house!’ and race around to explore.

A happily shabby handmade home

It’s rich in memories, even if we’ve never had a kitchen or bathroom renovation. How could I change the stone wall Val built, or the wobbly bit Dawn, Michael and I crammed into the formwork because we wanted a swim, then realised it was crooked when we got back but by then it had set too hard to move? It still has the marks from where a kid grew taller and when we laid out a wombat skeleton, naming every bone.

Writers need imagination and research. Imagine you are going to build a house, research it, then do it.

P.S The land will cost you much more, unless you move to a regional area or you come to a granny flat arrangement.

How do you stop a war?

Invent a time machine. Go back to that vital moment when the war was not inevitable, and stop it then. Or go forward, and show both sides that neither will win in the long term, but lose far more than either could imagine.

Otherwise: don’t be tactful or polite with those who take war for granted. Show what war is really like, rather than a great adventure. Enrol in conflict resolution courses where experts study far more solutions than I can dream of.

Can you give me an idea for my next story?

No.

Why write it if it’s not whispering ‘Write me. Now’?

Unless it’s a school assignment, in which case your teacher is trying to get you to start using your imagination. If I give you ideas your imagination is just going to sit there snoozing.

Will you write another Matilda book?

No. But if you get a petition with 5,000 signatures – because publishing books from a series written long ago is expensive– HarperCollins will let me publish another Christmas short story about Matilda and her family, because war correspondent Clancy of the Overflow (great grandson of THE Clancy) has vanished overseas. Only Mattie Kelly knows where he is, and as importantly, where he is not.

Why do wombats eat doormats?

I think it’s the smell. A wombat’s sense of smell is 10,000 times better than a dog’s - and a dog is 10,000 times better at smelling than us humans. The way things taste is often pretty close to the way they smell. A doormat possibly has a complexity of odours only a wombat can appreciate.

Wombats also love eating coarse tussocks as their teeth keep growing all their lives. Food doesn’t get much tougher than a doormat.

An ex-doormat

Will you help me edit/write my book/become my mentor?

I’m now doing some mentoring - including paid editing, helping early career writers write, and figuring out why a book doesn’t quite work and what tweak might make it brilliant.

I didn’t mean to begin mentoring. I just got hooked.

The mentoring varies from a phone call or video chat answering questions about publishing, to polishing a chapter to a good, thorough manuscript assessment: does your book work, and how can it be better?

Ever since I was first published I’ve been asked to mentor authors or to edit their manuscripts. Back then I couldn’t do it, or not well. Forty years and over 100 awards and shortlistings later I have been trained by Australia’s best editors - they hack my work to bits then show me how to make them better, from picture books, books for kids, non-fiction through to historical fiction for adults.

So yes, I can edit your book, apart from proofreading (I can’t spell).

There are only two problems:

1. I have all the tact of a wombat i.e. none. But if you love writing so much you’re prepared to work at it, you are already a writer. I can help you be a better one.

2. It takes time to read a book, think about a book, and explain how a book might be changed... I can only keep one book in my mind at once, so when I am editing, I’m not writing i.e. not earning the money that supports our family. (Writers don’t get superannuation or sick leave, and I have been supporting at least three other people all my writing life.)

I do mentor students for no payment via the University of Queensland. Very rarely - maybe once a year, I’ll work on another book for free, too. Otherwise I charge $200 an hour.

If you can find me a time extension unit, so my days have 30 hours each, I’ll edit your book or story or poem for free. Til then, I need to charge $200 an hour, which won’t cover the hours spent subconsciously brooding, just the hours I spend on the screen or talking to you.

I’ll also answer questions about possums, publications, wombats and how to make a perfect pavlova. The free answers will be perfunctory, as they have been for forty years. But if you want an in depth, paid professional discussion, please say so.

P.S Any time we spend just chatting is not invoiced. We often do a lot of ‘just chatting’.

Can we come and see your garden?

Apologies: for a couple of decades we had an Open Garden four times a year, with vast numbers of scones, visitors, luscious things to eat, and loved it. (Mothball the wombat didn’t, but she was a minority of one). But my husband now has vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s, and finds people he doesn’t know, especially in large numbers, too stressful, plus there may be kids on bicycles and animals munching under a tree. It’s not just my garden, but theirs too, and they say it’s a strictly private garden now.

Recipes I am thoroughly ashamed of but are delicious

Fifty years or so ago I made Coronation Chicken – the recipe invented for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation for a wedding of about 120 people. It took three days. Last week a friend mentioned the Cold Cream Curry Chicken she and her family always have for Christmas dinner, invented by her Mum – and there it was! A ridiculously easy version that (whisper) tastes even better than the three day version and takes three minutes to make.

Barb's Cold Cream Curry Chicken

Ingredients:

1 cold chook, home roasted, or simmered chicken thighs, or bought from a take away, OR leftovers from a roast turkey, skin removed, torn into bite size pieces

Half cup apricot jam

Half cup good chicken stock or gravy (can be omitted but tastes better if you add it. I used turkey gravy made with red wine and bone stock (definitely yum) but I’ve enjoyed a chicken gravox

version too.

Half a cup cream

1 tsp curry powder or paste

1 cup mayonnaise

• Heat gravy, curry, cream and jam on a low heat or in the microwave till the jam melts. Mix well.

• Add the mayonnaise, then stir in the chicken.

• Keep in the fridge for up to two days if you use a commercial mayonnaise, which will have preservatives in it.

• This is thick, wonderful, and far far better than a mix of jam and barbequed chicken leftovers should be.

No Cook Ginger Slices

Slices

Melt:

250 gm butter

1 cup brown sugar

2 tps ground ginger

2 cups sultanas

Half cup cocoa

Stir till all blended.

• Add 1 egg. Stir on how heat till mixed.

• Add 4 cups crushed biscuits. Milk arrowroot and other plain ones are best, but ginger nut and other flavoured ones can be good – different, but delicious.

• Mix well.

• Press into a baking pan lined with baking paper. The slices should be about as thick as your thumb. Not as long as your thumb ie enormous, just slice sized).

Icing

Mix:

3 cups icing sugar

2 tsp ground ginger

3 tb cocoa

2 tb of water, then keep adding a LITTLE more water till it’s well mixed and spreadable.

• Spread evenly on top of the slice.

• Sprinkle with coconut, if you like coconut – Bryan hates it – or chopped crystalised cherries, or just leave it be.

• Leave to set over night.

• Cut into small squares. It’s very good: so good I make it only once a year, as otherwise I’d eat half of it before the squares get into the tin. To be stored in a cool place for up to a fortnight.

Thirty Second Peanut Sauce

Blend:

4 peeled cloves garlic

4 heaped tb brown sugar

4 tb virgin olive oil

Juice 2 lemons

4 tb soy sauce

Half a cup canned tomato puree, tomato passata, or two incredibly ripe tomatoes or as a last resort, a splodge of tomato sauce

2 cups roasted salted peanuts (The spell checker said ‘peasants.’ Do not add peasants to this recipe.)

• Whizz. Eat. Keeps in a sealed container in the fridge for up to three days.

Excellent on potatoes in their jackets, poured over a whole cauliflower cooked in the microwave til soft, as a dipping sauce for spring rolls or for Oodles of Noodles.

Oodles of Noodles

(All ingredients may be hot or cold.)

1-2 cups cooked noodles or pasta per person (depends on the size, appetite and greed of the person)

1-2 cups stir fried veg, per person

½ cup, cooked chunks of fish or prawns, OR leftover chunks of chicken/turkey AND/OR salted cashews AND/OR small chunks of tofu per person

Half a cup peanut sauce

• Mix. Microwave till hot, or eat as a salad.

Fruit and Yoghurt Ice Blocks

• Blend 2 cups of fruit with half a cup of Greek yoghurt. Freeze. Eat.

Just now I’m eating mango ones- just mango chunks blended with yoghurt and frozen) and mixed berry ones, and kiwi fruit, passionfruit and whatever else happens to get ripe ones, and every single flavour is delicious.