Nim's Island film release dates

April 3 2008 for Australia
April 4 2008 USA (and Canada??)
April 4 2008 Malaysia
April 9 2008 France
April 17 2008 New Zealand
April 19 2008 Israel
May 1 2008 Singapore
May 2 2008 UK
May 8 2008 Netherlands
June 27 2008 Latvia
July 17 2008 Argentina, and Chile
July 18 2008 Brazil
25 July 2008 Mexico, and Spain

Australian Young Writers

Last night Tom and I went to the Children's Charity Network dinner to celebrate the Australian Young Writers and Artists. Of course it was a great - and glitzy!- night catching up with friends and meeting some new people, but it was also a real thrill to meet the kids who'd been selected as the winners from all the thousands of young Australian writers and artists who'd entered. I've been reading the book of the winning entries during the day, and it's very exciting to see what they've accomplished. The winning art was displayed last night too - some amazing pieces. I especially loved the painting of an erupting volcano!

One of the nicest moments of the evening was when everyone at our table introduced ourselves - we were sitting with Shaun Bullock and his parents, from Tamworth in Queensland - and soon discovered that he'd won the the Young Australian Writer of the Year. How lovely to be able to share the experience with them!

dreams unlimited

A friend sent me a clipping a few weeks ago from the Cobram Courier, the local paper of where we used to live. For those who don't know it, Cobram is a small town (about 4000 people when we lived there, though I think it's grown a fair bit since) in the Goulburn Valley irrigation farming area of northern Victoria (Australia) Of course since we had a dairy farm we didn't even live in Cobram; we were about a ten minute drive out in an area called Yarroweyah.

The clipping was a lovely little note congratulating me on the film and mentioned that although I'd been a writer when I lived in Yarroweyah, my career had really taken off since we moved closer to Melbourne. Of course this is true in the sense of the film happening.

But I felt that I really wanted kids to know - not just in Yarroweyah or Cobram, but any small towns around the world, when you sometimes feel that great things can only be accomplished in big cities - Nim's Island, the first Australian children's book to become a Hollywood feature film, was written and published when I lived in Yarroweyah. (Ark in the Park, which won a CBCA Book of the Year (junior readers) was written when we lived at Yalca, another tiny farming area.) Where I lived didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to Paula Mazur picking the book up in a Santa Monica library, or to Walden Media’s decision to film it.

So it doesn’t matter where you live – what’s important is to follow your dream the very best way you can.

On being an extra

I promised I'd get back with a bit more about our visit up to the set... better late than never!

Everyone kept telling me that the two main things about being an extra were good food and excruciating boredom. The first was certainly true – the food on the set was some of the best we had on the Gold Coast, and I simply can’t figure out how they served a top restaurant standard in those numbers, and on variable times. I have enough trouble with a dinner party for four!

But bored… no. Even going to Wardrobe to have our clothes checked seemed exciting (we’d been given instructions on what to wear – I’m embarrassed to admit what a huge suitcase of selections we took in our panic to get it right, though in the end Tom’s apparel was still augmented from props!) But the main thing was watching the process from the inside, being part of it, repeating my tiny ‘role’, over and over, as many times as it took for that split second of film to be completed, and understanding a little bit more of the process of making a movie.