Happy July 4th to all my American readers!

Today in Adelaide it’s 11 degrees Celsius, wet, grey, windy and miserable so you can imagine how happy I am to be going to Italy next week. My ‘Italian’ sister Jan is marrying her beau Giuseppe, so we’re expecting a fabulously good time. Both my sisters are getting married again this year: each for the third time! I’ve been so boring by comparison.

On the home front all is well. My mother is safely and happily ensconced in the same home that my darling dad died in earlier this year. The staff are like much-loved family to us because we’re in and out every day. My younger sister Alison is now employed there two days a week as a ‘diversionary therapist’: ie. the old folk clean her silver (!!) and read nursery rhymes aloud to each other, and sing folk songs, among other things.

Chloe, whom I can’t really talk about now that she’s a teacher, has fallen in love with teaching, and seems not to regret for a moment having changed careers. She is monumentally happy.

Malcolm has signed on the dotted line and will be retiring from Flinders University in seventeen months and twenty seven days. He’s not counting the days, I am: I need a slave very badly, and he can spell, which is always useful in a slave. He’ll be able to travel with me more often from 2004 onwards which I will love. Being on the road all by yourself tripping here and there in America and to China and around Australia is lonely on your own, but it’s great fun if there’s someone to share the highs and lows with.

On the work front Im writing a new story called The Green Sheep in collaboration with Judy Horacek, the cartoonist, whose e-mails are so funny I feel like writing a new draft every day just to hear her reaction. I have never worked so closely with an illustrator. I’m finding it very exciting and liberating. Our literary agent Jenny Darling is thrilled too: half the work and twice the profit. . .

The Magic Hat has sold out wherever I’ve read it, which in the last few weeks has been around Australia where I’ve had a hilarious times with teachers, parents and a variety of people working in children’s services. Non-Australians might have a hard time finding these places on a map‹they’re in four different Australian States: Pt. Augusta, Pt. Lincoln, Mt. Gambier, Shepparton, Brisbane, Coff’s Harbour and Devonport.

Prior to that I was at the International School in Beijing for three days talking to 1,400 students from around the world. Divine experience. And of course there were two days of tourism packed in after that and heavenly food packed in every night. I stuffed myself, frankly. Malcolm and Chloe came too. My most vivid memory is coming down from the Great Wall of China in a toboggan: who me? Yes, me. With tight jeans on as well.

I had a hectic but glorious four visits to the USA between February and May. I have now been to the USA 70 times and when I got home from the last visit I was so tired I looked 70! I am only 56, remember.

This weekend Im off to New Zealand for the New Zealand Reading Association Conference. It will be even colder than Adelaide at this time of the year so I am may not de-frost while Im there although I am always given the warmest of welcomes.

And this week, joy of joys, the new play for children based on Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, opens at the Festival Centre in Adelaide. I’ll see it on Friday night for the time. I have had no input to it at all so it will be a grand surprise. Cate Fowler of the new national company for children and families: Windmill Theatre, had produced it with a fabulous choice of director, lighting designer, set and costume designer and cast. The old people are puppets about a mile high. I have dedicated the show to my dad who was of course the original Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge. It’s strange and wonderful to see his name in lights three months after his death.

I continue to seethe about politics in Australia and America, let alone Elsewhere, but let’s not spoil happy news talking about such diabolical events and people we hope never to meet!

Much love,

Mem xxx