Chief Minister's Reading Challenge
http://www.msreadathon.org.au/
Reading opens up new and exciting worlds waiting to be explored.
To help you discover the fun and rewards of reading, and develop a love of good books, I have established the Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge.
The Challenge is to read 12 books in one year, with 8 of the books coming from the Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge booklist. It is a demanding challenge but one I hope you can meet. When you do you will receive a signed certificate to prove you have met the Challenge. I will also award book prizes to schools where there has been outstanding participation in the Challenge.
Best wishes and happy reading!
Katy Gallagher MLA
ACT Chief Minister
Contact Details
| Email: | literacy.numeracy@act.gov.au |
| Phone: | (02) 6205 7063 |
| Fax: | (02) 6205 9340 |
The Challenge is grateful for the support of ACT Government public librarians in the organisation of the event.
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The Paperchain Bookstore Manuka are proud sponsors of the Chief Minister's Reading Challenge |
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AMBASSADORS FOR 2011
Virginia Haussegger
Virginia is the face of ABC TV News in Canberra. She is an award winning journalist, author and commentator whose extensive career spans more than 20 years.
I love books. I love everything about them. I love the look and feel of them; the smell of them; and I love to read them! I never go anywhere without a book in my bag, just in case I have a few spare minutes to escape into the world of words, thoughts and stories. Books are my best friends.
When I was a girl at school my head was always full of stories and I spent much of my time in class looking out the window day-dreaming, and plotting new adventures up the Magic Faraway Tree. The English author Enid Blyton wrote a series of books about the Faraway Tree and I cherished every one of them. Reading took me to amazing and fascinating places: the sort of places I could never discover on my own. Imagine being able to climb to the top of a tree and suddenly find yourself in a completely different world, where anything and everything was possible! The characters Moonface and Silky became my favourite friends and even the Saucepan Man and Dame Washalot. Later I read the Famous Five series and then The Secret Seven books, where children solved mysteries and made incredible discoveries. I suspect those books helped encourage me to become a journalist.
I always loved reading adventure stories and as I got older I read crime fiction and travel stories. Now I will read anything that takes me away from my world and helps me imagine a different life. And yes, even though I'm very busy every day with the news and spend many hours in a windowless television studio, I still love to day-dream!
Anthony Hill
Anthony Hill is a Canberra-based author of 16 books for children and adults. In 2002 his book Soldier Boy won the Ethel Turner Prize for children in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. His most recent book Captain Cook’s Apprentice, won the 2009 NSW Premier’s History Prize for young people.
The Power of Books
When I was a boy I once read a book that transformed my life. It was Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner; and as I responded with deep emotion to the story of this fictional family, I realised for the first time the power of printed words not only to express an author but also to touch the inner life of a reader. I resolved then that one day I would try to write such books for myself.
Now, many years later and as an Ambassador for the Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge for 2011, it is my great pleasure to pass on this most important message to you. Books can be fun. They can make you laugh. They can make you cry. They can take you to parts of the world and of the imagination that you never knew existed before.
Books can teach. They can have pictures to illuminate the words. But above all they have this power through reading and learning to change your life. To stir your dreams. To open ambitions. To see them fulfilled. So that perhaps, indeed, you’ll one day write books of your own to touch the lives of the generations yet to come.
Happy reading, with my warmest good wishes.
Anthony Hill
Canberra 2011
