Sharing Favourite Stories

Peter: As the youngest of three children, my early reading was guided by my two older sisters. We loved Blinky Bill, the Gumnut Babies and The Magic Pudding, although the majority of the books we consumed came from Britain – especially Enid Blyton and W E Johns. My sisters moved on to Mary Grant Bruce and I became entranced with the Aussie poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, among others. My mother was a primary teacher, and my father loved to read. He was the third oldest of 10 children and had to leave school aged 13 to find work, so never achieved his ambition to be a teacher. But he bought us lots of books, including Arthur Mees’ 10 volume Children’s Encyclopedia. Boni and I did well in English at school and met when we both attended university and studied English and Australian Literature there – each of us the first in our families to complete formal tertiary studies, during the 1970s.

Boni: Reading and writing (across a range of genres, including prose and poetry) and making my own handmade books and cards, have been a lifelong pleasure and source of learning for me. One of my strongest influencers was my junior high school teacher, Mr John V Byrnes, who encouraged all his English students to read and write in all possible forms, including through a novel writing competition. He was a keen collector and proponent of Australian literature and left as an end-of-life legacy his collection of first edition signed copies of Australian writing to the City of Orange library as a special collection (named after his mother Mary Elizabeth Byrnes, who grew up around Orange and was a source of early Australian folk song collectors). Recently we added to this collection some of our own Australian books. Knowing about this collection in Orange also helped develop our own appreciation for the value of contributing to institutional as compared to personal collection of national writing. Hence our pleasure in supporting the national collection of Australian children’s literature at the University of Canberra.

After we married in 1974, we had a son born in Adelaide in 1976 and a daughter born in Tonga in 1978, and we surrounded our son and daughter with books – in their early years Peter usually read them (and himself) to sleep every night. The supply of books was facilitated with our move to live and work in Tonga, where Peter managed the country’s only bookstore – the Friendly Islands Book Shop. Not only could we source plenty of Australian children’s books, but from Tonga we were able to import books from anywhere in the world. We also commissioned and published educational books for local schools in both Tongan and English. As they grew, our children dived into our shelves of Australian classics, and they also enjoyed reading newer authors, including our collection of Morris Gleitzman books. We also took them to meet Australian authors, including Jackie French and Mem Fox, whose books were firm favourites.

Now we have four growing grandchildren, all of whom love to read and to be read to. We have also enjoyed taking them to book launches by Australian authors and buying them new editions and releases. The younger ones are currently captivated by the Andy Griffiths Tree House series. And our ten-year-old granddaughter recently enjoyed a book launch at Glee Books by Brooke Scobie, an Australian author new to us all.

Over the years, Peter made large pre-reading scrapbooks for all of his nephews and nieces, then our children and grandchildren as presents for their second birthdays. We also assembled our personal collection of around 15,000 books incorporating children’s fiction and picture books, literature, poetry, non-fiction and reference books, the majority of which we have now donated to various academic institutions, libraries and charitable organisations in Australia and overseas.

NCACL’s comment

One day Peter and Bonnie Maywald appeared at our door, along with their two young grandchildren. They had read about our 50^th birthday in March this year and thought they would come have a peek. They asked if we were interested in book donations. Our answer? A resounding yes! Over the next few months, the Maywalds offered us several books from their personal library. Those we didn’t have, we were thrilled to add to our collection. We have many editions of some of these books, like the Blinky Bill collection. Others, like a couple of the song books we had never seen before, we enthusiastically sang them through the door right onto our shelves. Our goal is to collect every edition and every reprint – a BIG objective, but with donors like the Maywald family, we may just succeed.

Sharing Favourite Stories
NCACL would like to aknowledge Jasmine Vidler, Reading and Writing Coordinator Central West Libraries, Orange for kindly arranging the image of the Mary Elizabeth Byrnes’ plaque and an image of the Library’s external view in Summer which we have gratefully included into this wonderful blog.

A very comfortable armchair in front of the collection is an added bonus.  City of Orange library

See also:
Friendly Islands Bookshop – bookshop in Tonga
50th Birthday Celebrations 2024 – NCACL
50th Birthday Gallery & Exhibitions – NCACL
Responses to Shaun Tan’s Digital Artworks – NCACL

Posted by: NCACL | Published: 29 Oct 2024