Nine-year-old Rishi Kesh carried his battered copy of Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories to the steps of the bright yellow bus parked outside Parramatta West Primary School to trade for a new book inside.
Kesh's classmates jostled around him as he surrendered the Arthur Maxwell collection of morality tales, and then silently ran his fingers over the book spines. "Wow", said one over his shoulder. "This is cool," gasped another.
"Picture books on the bottom shelf, older books up top," directed the librarians on Russ the Bus, a travelling book exchange of Sydney's inaugural Children's Festival of Moving Stories. When the hour was out, demand for Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series had outstripped supply, boys rushing for books with a strong dash of humour, or coveting tales of fantasy and high adventure. For their next school visit, the librarians noted they also needed Roald Dahl.
Kesh left the bus clutching Donovan Bixley's Monkey Boy, part novel, part comic, about a young boy who joins a crew of misfits and bullies aboard a warship where his job is to scamper through the ship to fetch gunpowder for the cannons.
The boy didn't start reading until he was seven. He has only owned 10 children's books in his life. Monkey Boy is book number 11. Pakistan-born Rida Zainab swapped a golden book title, Scuffy,The Tugboat, for Richard Tulloch and Terry Denton's Twisted Tales. She is big sister to little brother Sheraz, to whom she reads his favourite Zac Power stories.
Parramatta West is one of 20 secondary and primary schools the festival's travelling library will visitin western Sydney in the next two weeks. The shelves have been stocked with more than 2,000 books donated by publishers like Hachette, Allen & Unwin, Scholastic, Penguin Random House, Pan MacMillan Australia, Simon & Schuster and Walker Books.
A line-up of 25 authors will feature in the festival's 40 or so scheduled events, which include visits to Blacktown, Bankstown, Liverpool and Penrith libraries. Australia's Children's Laureate Jackie French, and children's picture book author Mem Fox, will discuss their books and writing, and there will be a pyjama-clad celebration of reading at Parramatta's Riverside Theatre on November 28.
The children of class 3/4C are precisely the kind of eager kids, hungry for learning, the festival wants to reach to foster a love of reading. The two week program is presented by the Sydney Writers' Festival, which wanted to give this celebration of children's literature it's own space separate from the School days and Family Day it runs in May.
"There are more children in western Sydney than anywhere else in NSW," says the Sydney Writer's Festival head of children's programs, Jeanmarie Morosin. "A child helped to connect with the joy of reading will benefit from a lifetime of improved literacy." Eventually, Morosin would like to see the Children's Festival of Moving Stories evolve into an event similar to Imagine, in London's South Bank, where a panel of local schoolchildren theme events.
Parramatta West is a primary school of 640 students, comprising 52 nationalities, the newest enrolments from Syrian refugee camps. Some 86 per cent of students come from non-English backgrounds. Inspired by the Russ the Bus experience, the school is thinking of organising its own fortnightly book exchange. Principal Anthea Donaldson says so many of her charges had parents who were either unable to read them or had no experience of English language storybooks. "We have to do it all."
Will Kostakis, author of Stuff Happens: Sean and the young adult novel, The First Third, grew up in Earlwood and Bronte and books are "a huge part of who I am". "I'm still young enough to remember author events at my school. Seeing the author in the flesh demystified books, it showed me someone actually wrote them, that you could make a career of it. It gave me a path to follow."
