the museum of australian children's literature

This is a good place, with weekend bread* all week long, it's a writers' retreat where I don't have to pay, where there are fresh eggs, sixteen puppies and four dogs.

There's Where the Forest Meets the Sea, Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge and Barbro Lindgren's The Wild Baby**.

There's all those Paul Jennings Un- books and The Wayne Manifesto and Penny Pollard's Diary.

There's Killer McKenzie, a whole mess of well-thumbed Margaret Clark books, about fifteen copies of Bridge to Wiseman's Cove, advance reader copies of late-90s Australian YA, there's Margo Lanagan's perfect Touching Earth Lightly.

I haven't lived at "home" since I was seventeen, but that just makes going to visit even better. And it's not just the puppies and the homemade sourdough and the lovely things to read...

*at my house we only buy special sourdough (like Irrewarra or Phillippa's or Zeally Bay) on the weekends, for a treat.
**not Australian. but still the best.