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Alison Lester: But these are some of the books that I've made when I've been travelling around different schools
and it's nice for you to just see how easy it is to make a book.
This is from a place called Maningrida, which is way up in the north where the kids don't speak very much
English, so it was made as a book to learn English.
'We go hunting, hunting kangaroos in the bushes with our rifles.
We go hunting, hunting goannas in a hole with our sticks.
We go hunting, hunting stingrays in the creek with our fish wires.'
So you can see the kids have done all the pictures and they look fantastic.
'We go hunting, hunting for file snakes in the billabong with our hands.'
File snakes are these big fat things like pythons with really baggy, rough skin and you have to feel in the mud for them, like this.
Ooh! And there's always crocodiles in there too.
And it goes through many, many huntings until the last one is, 'We go hunting, hunting paddle-pops in the tuckshop with our money.'
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Alison Lester: This is a really nice one I did at Mornington Island last year.
Mornington Island is right up in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
And it's just a really simple text.
Beautiful pictures, the kids did, just with wax crayon and vegetable dyes.
'Our island lies beneath a clear blue sky surrounded by the turquoise sea.
Beneath the sea dugongs sleep on banks of sea grass.
Turtles glide through the clear water.
Sharks and stingrays patrol the channel.
On the coral reef rock cods swim, giant clams open and close and the seaweed swishes like a forest.'
And it goes on, 'Every tide the ocean leaves a gift of shells sprinkled along the beach.'
I'll just get to the very end, there's one here I really like.
So it goes through the day, 'The clear white moon shines down as the fruit bats fly out for food.
Late at night ghost crabs make patterns on the sand.
One howl becomes a chorus as the dogs sing to the moon.'
And then the last page is, 'The bloodwoods whisper in the night breeze. Our island sleeps.'
So, it's pretty simple to make a book, isn't it?
Like, if you just plan it properly you can put it together really nicely.
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Alison Lester: And this is another lovely one from another place in Arnhem Land where we did it all with just
two colours of conte, like charcoal, and even though lots of people did the pictures, because they all used the same material, it worked.
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