When I was growing up I kept a shoebox underneath my bed in which I stored precious objects, such as old clock springs, rocks, foreign coins, super balls, marbles, dice, novelty erasers and the little toys out of cereal packets. These objects may not have had any monetary value or been especially interesting to anyone else, but they were interesting and valuable to me.
My collection eventually grew to two shoeboxes and then to a series of large stewing jars, which I kept on my bookshelves so I could enjoy looking at my treasured acquisitions. (My bookshelves were also rapidly filling up with weird and wonderful books that I picked up at secondhand bookshops and school fetes.)
Without really being aware of what I was doing, beyond amusing myself, I was amassing a collection of objects and books that fired up my imagination and would provide an important source of inspiration for the many books I would write in the future. (Books themselves, of course, being containers for collections of images, words and ideas arranged by the writer.)
So you can imagine how happy I was to be invited to curate a selection of interesting objects for the Powerhouse Materials: Paper Exhibition from the vast Powerhouse Collection.
At first the choice of objects was overwhelming but I relied on the instinct of my 10-year-old shoebox-curator to tell which objects were worth displaying.
Ventriloquist dolls, circus and movie posters, puppet theatres, boardgames, vintage ‘joke’ toilet paper and papier-mâché eyeballs, feet and heads all made the grade.
I was delighted, also, that part of the exhibition involved a concurrent writing challenge for students to come up with a piece of writing inspired by one of the objects. And, wow, did they accept the challenge with enthusiasm! More than 300 entries were received, from which the illustrator Bill Hope and I had the daunting job of selecting 5 pieces to present at a final exhibition event. There were over 640 young writers and their families at the event, including the author–illustrators of the chosen pieces.
Writing competitions are always fraught because stories can be very different from one another and almost impossible to compare. Bill and I were looking for original, short, lively pieces that would capture the attention and hold the interest of a large crowd. They also needed to be suitable for Bill to create live drawings as I read them out.
