It's Racing Time

It's spring carnival racing time in Australia and what better story than that of the immortal Phar Lap, a horse still beloved many years after his death.

Most Australians have only ever seen Phar Lap in a glass case at the Melbourne Museum, but he's still one of the most popular exhibits and his story continues to fascinate.

In a time of economic hardship, Phar Lap was an inspiration —he won and won and won.

He and his trainer, Tommy Woodcock were very close. Tommy loved the horse.

The drawings above are by our own Moira Hanrahan, of course. There are lots more in the book.

Visit the PRACE PageTurners website to hear the story read aloud.
Order the book.
Look at more books in the PRACE PageTurners Aussie Series.

A Handful of Sand

Anne here, talking today about another of our series #5 Aussie topic books, A Handful of Sand. It's about indigenous land rights — how the Gurindji people got their traditional land back.

As the back blurb says: It started as a struggle for pay and turned into a struggle for land rights. It took nine long years but finally the Gurindji got their land back. Read how they did it.

The book was written by Chris Malakar and, as always, illustrated by Moira Hanrahan. I have to say, I think Moira's drawings are getting better and better and this book contains some great examples.

Here's a drawing of the Gurindji stockmen mustering cattle. It was hard, dusty work and they got terrible pay for it.


The book is also one of our new pale green cover readers — it's longer than most of our books, but still has the same limited word count as the Green level 4 books — 300 unique words. (For an explanation of how we arrive at our levels, go here)

The Gurindji walk-off was a turning point in Australian indigenous history. If you want to read more about it, there's some information here.

There's a very moving you-tube here that gives you a brief look at some of the main events and some of the people involved.

There's a brilliant song here about it by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly.

And if you'd like to hear the book read aloud, there's an audio file here.

You can also order the book.

Moira Hanrahan, the cartoonist

All the drawings in our books are done by Moira Hanrahan, and we love them.

Moira's not a trained artist, but she's been drawing all her life. She started young by drawing unflattering cartoons of her brothers and sisters. She has nine of them so that gave her plenty of practice.


 She moved on to drawing pictures of the various people she worked with, especially school principals and other people who inspired her art to great heights.

The picture on the right is from a fun awards certificate she made. 

Moira's also a musician — she plays drums and the Irish tin whistle. She loves dogs and horses, but isn't very fond of cats. You can probably tell that from looking at her pictures of dogs and comparing them with the ones she does of cats.

In the PageTurner books, what cartoons of Moira's do you like the best?