User Profile

Lian
Tanner

Lian Tanner has been dynamited while scuba diving and arrested while busking. She once spent a week in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, hunting for a Japanese soldier left over from WWII. Her best-selling Keepers Trilogy has been translated into 11 languages, and won two consecutive Aurealis Awards for Best Australian Children’s Fantasy. Her first picture book "Ella and the Ocean", illustrated by Jonathan Bentley, won the NSW Premier’s Award for Children’s Literature. Her latest children’s novel is "A Clue for Clara", a puzzling and hilarious mystery about a small chook and a big crime. More about Lian and her writing can be found at liantanner.com.au.

People

A portrait of the writer as a young woman

by Lian Tanner

30 Jan 2022

It’s a strange thing to be suddenly reminded of what life was like nearly 30 years ago. Sometimes it’s a photo that takes you back. Or a smell. Or a letter found at the back of a drawer...

History

Nothing bigger than a goat

by Lian Tanner

12 Oct 2021

I must have walked past it a dozen times without realising it was there. But one day last winter, something caught my eye. A wooden cross. A scattering of bricks. As cars rumbled along South Arm Rd at the bottom of the hill...

About books

Finish first, start later

by Lian Tanner

04 Oct 2021

When I was in my 20s, I tried to write a children’s story about two characters called Mr Gumshackle and Miss Leatherbarrow. Looking back, the idea was way too cute, and I was trying to be too clever, and I doubt if anyone except me would have been interested in reading it. That’s part of the learning process, of course, writing badly over and over again until you start to improve. Or, as Samuel Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

History

Connecting to country

by Lian Tanner

08 Jul 2021

On an overcast winter’s day in early June, a group of 50 people ranging from babies in backpacks to 70-year-olds sets out to explore the Aboriginal history of the Shag Bay heritage trail on Hobart’s eastern shore. Our guides are Trish Hodge and Mitchem Everett from Nita Education, an organisation that provides Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural experiences to schools and businesses. We gather at the end of Debomfords Lane on Geilston Bay, where Trish welcomes us to country. “waranta takara milaythina nara mapali takara,” she says. “Today we walk where they once walked.” Then we cross the creek to the track that goes up and over the headland, stopping to taste saltbush and samphire on the way.