sallymurphy.com.au

Sally Murphy, Australian author

Happy Australia Day

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Happy Australia Day. What better thing to celebrate than the wonderful country where I live. As the new Australian of the Year, Lee Kernaghan said in his acceptance speech, there is no greater honour than to be Australian.

Anyway, here I am dressed up for the Corrigin Australian Day Breakfast. I had fun with the temporary tattoos, though you can see only one in the photo. The other essential item for my annual Australia Day costume is the earrings, miniature Australia-shapes, with the flag on them (you can see them in the second photo). I’ve had the earrings for more than twenty years and remember them as being only a few dollars when I bought them, so they’ve done well.

After attending the breakfast with five of the Murphlets and my beloved, I had a relaxing day – watched the women’s final of the Australian Open Tennis, a little of the Australia versus India cricket test, and also took the Murphlets to the local pool for a cool down, and the annual bombie competition. Lots of fun.

Also finished reading three books – Victory, by Gary Crew, a wonderful Aussie author, and two little chapter books from the Captain Cal series.

All in all a pretty good day – community, family, sport, and, of course, good books

I hope you had a similarly full and enjoyable Australia Day if you’re an Aussie and, if you’re not, that you spared a thought for Australia – a pretty good country, if I do say so myself.

Aussiereviews Updated

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I’ve just updated Aussiereviews with thirteen new reviews, all children’s and young adult books. Probably my favourite in this batch was Dragon Moon, by Carole Wilkinson (Black Dog), the final title in the Dragonkeeper trilogy. I was at the launch of the first title at the CBCA conference in Hobart in 2004, and remember Gary Crew singing its praises. He said something along the lines that the book would be the making of Carole and of Black Dog (I hope I haven’t misremembered this). I agree with him. This whole trilogy has been just beautiful, and, though Black Dog do produce oodles of good books, these are the nest.

Murphlet three enjoyed the two Jackie French books – Rotters and Squatters and Gold, Graves and Glory – which he read while he was sick and subsequently reviewed for the site. He gets a buzz out of reviewing for me, and his mother gets a buzz out of having a son who shows writing talent and an interest in what I do.

My ftp has been slow uploading the new pages today so while I was waiting I went back and looked at some my older reviews – the very first ones I wrote for the site, actually­ ­­­­– and fixed some typos and broken links. It was pleasing for me to see that my reviewing skills have grown since I started the site. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since I’ve written over a thousand reviews over the years. When I started the site I had no idea just what it would evolve into, but I’m pretty proud of it.

I think if you can look at what you’re doing and feel proud of it, you’re doing okay.

sallymurphy.com.au