Rippin yarns make Sally the new Australian Children’s Laureate

When Sally Rippin was little, she started writing her own stories. The family was living overseas for long periods and when they ran out of books, her mother would give her pencils and paper, and Rippin would make her own, usually featuring herself as a fairy or a princess.

“There were a lot of them that you could probably find scattered around the house; stapled bits of paper with my drawings and scribbly handwriting on them.” She thinks she was six when she started, and “I reckon I just haven’t stopped”.

Sally Rippin wants to increase public awareness of children’s difficulties in learning to read.Credit: Justin Mcmanus

Fast-forward a few decades, and the Melbourne-based children’s author has had so many books published, she can hardly keep an accurate count of them all. But she knows it’s more than 100, and that her sales have topped 10 million copies in 18 countries – “it seems like Monopoly money when you get those figures”.

She is, apparently, the highest-selling female author of children’s books in Australia. Among all those books are the Billie B Brown and Hey Jack series – 25 titles in each series – several other series, and a couple of young adult books, including her first published title, Chenxi and the Foreigner.

Now she has been named the eighth Australian Children’s Laureate. She will serve for a term of two years, following writers and illustrators such as Alison Lester, Leigh Hobbs, and, most recently, Gabrielle Wang.

“It’s such an incredible thrill, and particularly following in the footsteps of some of my own heroes. The wonderful thing is apparently, once a laureate always a laureate, so I’ll always be the eighth. That’s going to go on my tombstone.”

As the laureate, Rippin wants to increase public awareness of the difficulties children face in learning to read and the most effective techniques available. Her mantra will be “all kids can be readers”. Her first book for adults, Wild Things, is about how we learn to read.

“I found reading easy, as did my older two children. But my youngest son has dyslexia and ADHD, so had a very different experience of school than I did or his older brothers,” says Rippin.

“So I was given firsthand the opportunity to see how challenging our education system can be for kids who learn differently. That was the impetus to research and write Wild Things, and now I feel that being laureate is a great platform to open up discussions around how we can better support teachers to better support neurodiverse kids within our school system.”

She describes Wild Things as a book written by a parent who did everything wrong. She hesitated writing it because she thought: “Who am I to think I have any advice to give other parents?”

“I was learning much too late to be able to give my son the proper support he needed, but had lots of friends with kids starting in the education system,” she said.

“Really, the book is the book I needed when he first started school, and it’s my gift to parents who are starting down that journey and consider their child in the same way. Giving them everything that I learned, that way it doesn’t feel so wasted; all those things, all those hard lessons, I get to share them.”

Having taught writing for children at RMIT and run courses at Writers Victoria and the Centre for Adult Education in Melbourne, she says she’s excited by the future of Australian children’s writing. “I see a lot of talent coming through.”

As to the influences on her own work, she cites Roald Dahl and Judy Blume. “I know for some valid reasons Dahl’s gone a little bit out of favour, but I loved everything he wrote. I loved his capacity for imagination, his ability to go inside the mind of someone else – and also his ability to go into dark places, which some children’s authors can avoid, often for good reason. And then as a teenager, I think I was obsessed with Judy Blume.”

Rippin has hired a personal assistant to help with the increased workload she faces as laureate and carrying on with her own writing. And she has one other important commitment to fit into her schedule later in the year: she has just got engaged to an old school friend whom she has known for 30 years.

“I’m going to make marriage fashionable again.”

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.