rue Victor Michelot, Toulon. Rose set off from here on her original voyage around the world.

This week Rose de Freycinet has set off on the next phase of her journey around the world. First stop Japan where Henry de Freycinet, now has his long-awaited copy. Brian Beaton, from Artemis International Films, has the new version and Stephen, the script writer from Sydney, will have his copy in the next few days. Although still in draft form the manuscript has reached the stage where it is ready for new, fresh eyes to read it. I am looking forward to hearing the comments of all these people.

Books by Elaine Forrestal on display at Kyilla Primary School

There I was at Kyilla Primary School telling real stories of shipwrecks, pirates and lost treasure, as part of my week as Writer-in-Residence, when I discovered that two of the students at the school had actually been marooned on a tiny isolated island for five months! They were sailing the world with their parents when their yacht suffered a disabling incident. Although they were all safe, they could not go anywhere and were forced to survive by living off the land, as the native inhabitants of the island do. So the stories from my books, Straggler’s Reef and Black Jack Anderson were only too real for them.

During my stay at Kyilla each of the students wrote a story of their own. Naturally these two girls, whose mother has written a book about their experiences, had plenty of ideas and experiences to draw on. Other students wrote about a range of different things. Each class had an introductory workshop to get them started and a polishing workshop, a day or two later, to bring their stories up to publication standard. The innovative and hardworking members of the school P&C Association plan to collect up the stories and publish them in an anthology. The finished book will be sold to raise money for school facilities.

I, for one, can’t wait to read the stories in their published form.

After several outings in the city recently, Miss Llewellyn-Jones was pleased to be back in the Wheatbelt. As we approached Watheroo, after going uphill and d-o-o-o-w-n along the Mogumber Road, the countryside leveled out and we arrived in Watheroo. Miss Llewellyn-Jones and Teddy felt right at home amongst the windmills, wheat silos and wild flowers. Students at the Watheroo Primary School had no trouble recognizing Miss Llewellyn-Jones’s house as a converted silo – the type that was common in the ‘olden days’ but is no longer built in the corners of farm paddocks. Modern trucks and road-trains have made these quaint little storage facilities obsolete, but you can still find them, often neglected and falling down, on farms that were established in the last century.

As Writer-in-Residence I worked with all the students in the school to help develop their writing skills. Each student wrote a rough draft of a story of their own and we talked about what would happen when they went back to what they had written and tried to improve on it. In the Upper Primary classroom I told them the story of Lilly which, when told to me, sparked off the whole of the Eden Glassie Mystery Series. The students then wrote stories based on their own experiences of living on farms with dogs, horses, tractors, quad-bikes – all the same things that my characters live with on Eden Glassie. I hope to have an opportunity to see some of the finished work that these students produce.

Covers of all four books in the Eden Glassie Mystery series

During Term 3 I spent a week at Gibbs Street Primary School and on Friday I was given a guided tour of the displays of finished work in their Library. There were stories based on my workshops, reviews of my books and artwork produced by the students to illustrate the stories they had written. A lot of drafting and re-drafting had been done and the displays reflected just how much imagination, creativity and hard work had gone into these stories. Congratulations to everyone involved.