Safety Pins, Hair Dye, and Reflections on Book Week

Lyndon Riggall presents a thoughtful and thought provoking post to wrap up Book Week and remind us all of its importance. 

 

One of my earliest memories is of being a punk.

It is 1996, and I am six years-old. Our librarian, Mrs Westerneng, has read us the shortlist for the CBCA Picture Book of the Year award. Jessica Carroll and Craig Smith's Billy the Punk is the clear favourite. In the book, a boy called Billy spots a group of punks at the local market and very quickly adopts their style: neon hair in various shades spiked up at wild angles, ripped shirts and pants, cotton looped over his ears with a safety pin attached so that the pin hangs below them like earrings. Billy seems very happy with his new way of life and refuses to change until one day he sees some soldiers marching down the street…

 

That year, all of us at my primary school were punks. Chickenfeed’s green and pink hairspray shelf was a wasteland, and if anyone had a genuine wardrobe malfunction that needed fixing with something from the jar of safety pins in Mum and Dad’s dressing table it would have to wait; the needs of a six-year-old rockstar reigned supreme. I imagine that many parents sighed a gasp of relief: a ripped singlet and some hair gel is a small price to pay for a costume, and quite frankly it was all any of us wanted to be. For a single day, our beautifully middle-class community became an alternative wonderland as bangles and chains jangled and we tried not to poke each other’s eyes out with our rainbow-coloured spikes as we lunged for the downball out in the yard.

 

I think of these memories when Book Week rolls around again each year and we face the now-customary barrage of commentary on not only the winners, but also the complexities of Book Week itself as an inclusion on the educational calendar. Inevitably, some schools cancel costumes, others offer tips on how to blitz the competition, and there are always cries for the framing of Book Week to be more Australian, more literary, more bespoke, and less reliant on parental energies, film franchises and financial wealth. This year, there has been a noble push from several journalists covering Book Week to divert attention to libraries and library staff, recognising that it’s very easy to whack on a red-and-white Where’s Wally? top and say that we care about young readers, but that this rings false if we are simultaneously under-resourcing and under-funding many of our public libraries. Here in Tasmania, recent reports about the current state of literacy paint a continually concerning picture of progress, and a focus on reading is likely to remain Tasmania’s most important educational goal for some time into the future. For me, once a child has learnt to read (and I accept that this is a simple statement to breeze past), the answer was, is, and always will be remarkably simple: if we learn to love books, the development of our literacy is natural, joyful, and lifelong. 

 

Book Week might seem like a distraction from the real issue here, but I can’t help but feel that it remains a necessary part of the puzzle. I love watching children clutching the book that their chosen character has emerged from, showing it to others around them and explaining what it means. Literary awards, of course, are problematic in their way, but I can’t help but light up with the cheers of a room full of students as the winners are announced (noting that usually they don’t seem to mind who that is as long as the celebration is suitably raucous). I am watching my favourite local and national authors jumping in cars, off planes, and on hotel beds, knowing that this time of year is a huge chance for them to take their tales on the road, and I am thinking about books: not just the ones that I have been reading more recently, but the ones that I have grown up with and which have shaped me: the pages and words and fictions which make up the chemical structure of a young boy’s literary DNA.

 

Being a member of Billy the Punk’s gang was one of my most treasured memories of primary school, but it wasn’t the safety clips and hair-dye that made it special: it was the creativity and imagination that was part of every moment of that journey… the power of a story coming to life. As we pack away this year’s Book Week costumes and debate the results of the awards and wonder if all of it is really even worth it, I encourage us to take stock, to keep it simple and to see everything for what it really is…

 

In a world and a country and even a state in which reading is still a radical act, perhaps we can all be just a little bit more punk.

Lyndon Riggall

 

Lyndon Riggall is a writer, teacher, and co-president of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. He has written the picture books Becoming Ellie and Tamar the Thief, and is a 2024 Premier’s Reading Challenge Reading Champion. You can find out more about him at www.lyndonriggall.com or on social media @lyndonriggall.