Nerissa Jackson, Yetman Public School teacher’s aide, answers.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun today. We’ll see you in just over half an hour,” Elliott tells Jackson brightly from his hired four-wheel drive.

“Alright, we’ll see you soon,” Jackson says, cool and professional, on speaker phone.

But Jackson’s voice rises an octave as she hangs up: “They’re half an hour away!”

Elliott and Phommavanh pull up outside the school and see the notice board: FAMOUS AUTHORS VISITING. FREE BBQ LUNCH. ALL WECOME.

Jackson is waiting nervously inside the arched gate commemorating Yetman school’s centenary in 1967. The esteemed visitors would’ve been better to take the sealed road from Warialda rather than risk the roos on the dirt road they took, she tells them.

But never mind. They’re here.

Principal Charmaine Johnston greets the visitors in the staff room whose table is laden with homemade cupcakes, sticky date muffins and an iced loaf. Later there’ll be burgers for lunch.

Jackson declares she’s never again going to organise anything so stressful as an authors’ visit to the school. But the keen young aide has excelled. Nothing as exotic as a real writer — let alone two — has ever come to the tiny school with 23 students between kindergarten and year six.

“I think (the students) will just be excited that somebody new has come,” Mrs Johnston says.

“As you can see, we’re a long way from everywhere.”

At Yetman, 675km north of Sydney, the students already love books.

“But it adds another element when someone comes who is an author and can show their love of books,” Mrs Johnston says.

Today, children from two other schools are visiting Yetman Public to join in the fun of hearing the authors. Kids from Bonshaw Public School and Toomelah Public School have swelled the excited audience to about 40.

Elliott and Phommavanh have flown from Sydney to Moree, and driven two hours to Yetman, to visit the kids as part of the second annual Australian Reading Hour.

The Reading Hour is a publishing industry campaign that on Thursday featured hundreds of organised author and reading events. The event trended number one on Twitter all that day, says organiser Louise Sherwin-Stark, CEO of publisher Hachette Australia.

Although Phommavanh once visited a Papua rainforest village to talk about his books, he still ranked Yetman high on his remote list. Certainly, no other author ventured further afield for Reading Hour, Sherwin-Stark says.

If you haven’t already guessed, Phommavanh and Elliott are children’s authors. They are both comfortable in front of a young audience and are hugely entertaining.

The Yetman kids knew the authors would read from their latest books. But they got much more than that.

Elliott, a wiry 45-year-old who worked on Nickelodeon for years, brought a case filled with rubber spiders.

Phommavanh, 35 years old and a former teacher, was armed with plush toys including a blue bear called Grumpy. Both writers proved to be masters at entertaining the kids in the covered outdoor learning area.

Phommavanh wore a T-shirt promoting his latest book, Natural Born Loser. And Elliott started his talk with a self deprecating comment.

“You might think we’re really famous and people want your autograph, but you spend most of your time sitting by yourself and feeling like a big nobody,” he says.

The kids are soon in stitches.

Elliott scores squeals of laughter when he reads a chapter from his latest book, The Turners, published by Hachette Australia. It’s about a family whose members each turn into a different kind of animal for 15 minutes every day. The don’t want to, they just can’t help it.

The discussion turns to spiders. Ella says she caught a huntsman with her friend Daisy, and they released it on the doorstep of some French backpackers. Elliott, meanwhile, is acting out the story as Ella tells it.

“Let’s release the spider!” Elliott yells.

Brodie, William and Emma step up, and are blindfolded. Elliott gets out his rubber spiders and drops them in the cupped hands of each student. But these are bush kids, and they barely flinch.

Elliott says writers often draw on their own experiences, and that the kids could write about holding a “spider”.

“Everyone was wondering what’s going to happen next,” he tells them.

“The teachers are thinking they’ll have to call the police about a spider bite. You were wondering if you were going to get bitten — and the rest of you were hoping they would get bitten.”

Phommavanh is up next, and straight off tells the kids, echoing the reality of ural life, if they don’t read his book he’ll chop off his toy chicken’s head. They scream with laughter.

Phommavanh says his first book was about his embarrassing family. Embarrassing families are always a good subject, he says.

“Write a story about your family and we discover more about your culture as well,” he says. Phommavanh’s family background is Thai and Lao.

He reads from his new book about someone being pestered by a mosquito, and asks the kids to think of a “secret weapon” to kill the insect.

“A shotgun!” yells one student.

“An egglifter! A frypan! A spatula!”

At the end, school captains Demika and Chris thank Elliott and Phommavanh for bringing the kids so much fun during the drought. Many of the kids are from struggling farms, but they’re “pretty resilient”, Mrs Johnston says.

They all have chores.

“The other day I drove past Will. He was out on his quad bike, looking after the cattle on the side of the road,” the principal says.

Will’s mate Chris, 11, helps unload feed for the cattle. Both boys are enthusiastic readers. Will’s parents have just ordered him an anthology of the Sherlock Holmes stories and he can’t wait for it to come in the post.

Teacher Craig Duncan of Toomelah Public School said his students, who are all indigenous, love reading.

“Our kids are very well cultured in language and dance, so storytelling for them is just another part of (that tradition),” Duncan says.

The authors’ visit was, however, “inspiring”.

A delivery of Elliott and Phommavanh’s books, donated by the publishers, will soon arrive at Yetman, Bonshaw and Toomelah schools. The kids have had to wait because the courier only comes every second Friday.

But getting real, live authors at a tiny school like Yetman? Now that’s a very rare event.