Dim's Write Stuff

In the lead up to the silly season where, as everyone knows, the best present of all is a BOOK, it’s time to throw some scintillating options at you. This collection features content showcasing our reef and ocean life with a few surprises along the way. Click on title links to access more information for perfect summer reading. Enjoy! A Is For Australian Reefs: A fact astic Tour by Frané Lessac This is an ABC book with a difference. It’s not simply a collection of alphabetised sea creatures but a colour saturated, detail imbued meander around our coral reefs which includes nomenclature (species names) and terminology. Random fun facts pop up on every page adding interesting and depth to one of the most biodiverse environments on the planet. Highly recommended. Walker Books Australia, October 2022 ISBN: 9781760652258 Big World, Tiny World: Reef by Jess Racklyeft Another memorable masterpiece highlighting ocean life in and around our beautiful reefs. Racklyeft combines lyrical ve...

Over a slew of silly seasons aka Christmases, I’ve reviewed some truly stunning Christmas inspired books. You’ll find many of them  here  and as curated booklists at  DIM’S re VIEW S . This year, like my intake of dried fruit treats and sugar, I’ve reduced the selection to this humble handful. Droll wit, Aussie flavoured, and spirit-filled are the themes of the day or rather season so, enjoy! Happy Christmas! How Does Santa Go Down The Chimney? by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen Good question lads. This, my non-Shakespearean friends, is the real question, one exasperatingly left incompletely answered. This book is a magical, maddening meandering through the various ways our St. Nickolas aka Santa, is able to silently and stealthily enter the number of dwellings he does in the time that he has. As we follow SC across the rooftops (and under the front doors) seeking answers, other enigmatic quandaries are raised like whether or not he pauses to do laundry between hou...

Beauty comes in many forms: the bizarre, the whimsical, the wondrous. Author illustrator and two-time Caldecott Medallist, Sophie Blacknall embraces the very best of beauty in her visual and imaginative picture book narratives creating imagery that makes your heart swoon. Here are two of her latest masterpieces. If I Was A Horse When I was much shorter, I dreamed of owing a horse. It was a dead-end desire however my love for all things equine never diminished so instead of walking, I galloped. Instead of speaking, I whinnied. Instead of sitting in the shelter shed at lunchtimes, I careened around the school oval …like a horse. I didn’t just want a horse. I was a horse. This is the premise of Blackall’s 2023 release; exploring what a child would do if she were a horse. This joyful expose of imaginative play and sense of self is splendidly supported by Blacknall’s exquisite illustrations created with a combination of media including watercolours, pencils, and collaged materials res...

Despite having no interest in history as a school kid, my exposure to the past has increased in my adult years thanks to a deepening love for narrative non-fiction. Weaving historical events, facts and figures into an engaging narrative with larger-than-life characters is (for me and many kids) one surefire way of infusing history and those who peopled our past into meaningful context. Novels do this with ease. Here are a few recently released picture books that manage to portray the past in captivating words and pictures for younger readers. Shearer by Neridah McMullin and Michael Tomkins Jack Howe was a tower above men and legend among shearers in the late 1800s. Not only was his sheer physical prowess awe-inspiring but his I-can-do attitude enabled him to beat and set a new hand-shearing record that remains unbeaten. This is his story set in Jack’s day when the wool industry was experiencing a boon like no other before the advent of mechanical sheep shearing. Howe is portrayed with...

As the year rolls on, I am once again involved in the hugely gratifying task of presenting specially curated creative and higher thinking workshops to gifted and talented students throughout SE QLD. The programs are facilitated by G.A.T.E WAYS Education who stipulate a new fresh outlook on a plethora of subjects designed to take students deeper and more decisively into the worlds of language, science, maths, technology and more. For presenters, this is an all-consuming challenge but one that helps stimulate the creative verve and expand knowledge borders. And my latest, adventure? Well, it’s exploring the overlapping territories of lurvvve. Love. What it is. How it affects us. Why it’s the essence of art, history, humanity … life . And, its implications for hook-you-in-never-let-you-go storytelling. This week’s (very belated) list of Book Bites therefore naturally revolves around this omnipresent, omnipotent emotion – love. All in the name of ‘research’, you understand. 😊 This Is ...

This week’s whopper book list features some of the most favoured and favourite Aussie characters of all time: our wildlife. Look them up in your bookshop or library for some full Australiana immersion . Babies At The Billabong by Maura Finn and Cate James Stunning textural illustrations illuminate one little girl’s late afternoon rambles around a billabong where she spies a bush load of Aussie animal babies. Nomenclature and rhyming singalong verse makes this a sweet read for 3 – 5 year-olds. Affirm Press August 2021 9781922419408 By The Billabong by Maura Finn and Cate James This is the precursor to ‘ Babies …’ and sports just as many gumnuts and superb imagery. A fun and frolicsome exploration of collective nouns that makes a gorgeous bedtime read. Affirm Press April 2020 9781925972474 Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu by Pamela Freeman and Liz Anelli Anelli’s mixed media artwork and Freeman’s elegant yet fact-driven narrative informs and entices readers to look...

In honour of a brand new year that is carrying with it some woeful old worries and exasperating new concerns, I thought it might be nice to focus on something a little different and uplifting. And what better way to discover new things than in a book of words, like a dictionary, like an alphabetical listing of a collection of word books, with pictures. Ahem, so with that tenuously linked introduction out of the way, let me begin with something small and bright and beautiful: a book list about bugs ! Click on the title links to explore these books further and access ways to acquire them. (The) Bug Collector by Alex G Griffiths A benign visit to the museum of Wildlife with Grandad exposes young George to the wonderful world of bugs prompting him to curate a collection of his own. After much laborious effect and ingenuity, he does so but soon discovers that such fabulousness is not destined to be trapped within a bottle. A beautifully conceived and crafted picture book that will en...