Finders keepers: Sita Walker

Writers are always collecting. Ideas for stories, poems, and books can come from anywhere. Things writers see or touch or read can return – sometimes unexpectedly – in the future to inspire them. 

State Library is filled with treasures and curios. In this new series, we invite authors to find an item in our collections that inspires them to write a new, original creative piece of work.

Sita Walker's first book was the memoir The God of No Good (Ultimo Press). It won the Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards. For her sophomore book – a novel this time – Sita was keen to shorten the timeframe and stick to an environment that is extremely familiar to her: a state school in suburban Brisbane. Sita has drawn on her passion for teaching literature to write the spellbinding novel In a Common Hour, which is set during a single school lunch period in a contemporary high school. 

Turning this time to poetry, Sita has written the beautiful poem 'Bookish'. Read it and the story behind her treasure hunt in State Library's collections below. Thank you to Sita! 

I found the 'Tennis ball' book while scrolling on the State Library’s wonderful Instagram page. The librarian Joan of Archives (if you haven’t found her yet, you’re in for a treat) profiles an unusual book made from wood. A hoop-pine beetle carved its path through a tree, then an artist and a book binder and a poet turned those traces into a book. The poem inside the book is called The grub in the wood of time and it’s wonderful. Finding that treasure led me down a rabbit hole of books that aren’t books – there’s a fish book, a ham and lettuce sandwich book, a toilet paper book. 

The creator of the 'Tennis ball' book, Linda Newbown, says: 

“A book is a difficult thing to define because half of it is object and half is an abstract concept. Is a book the sum of certain requisite characteristics? If a book has no pages is it still a book? If it cannot be opened is it still a book? These are the things I like to ask as I make my books. My artists' books are a way of questioning bookishness.” 

As soon as I read her last line, the first line of this poem came to me.  

Below is my version of Linda Newbown’s 'Tennis ball' book – a poet’s way of questioning ‘bookishness’.

'Bookish'

by Sita Walker  
 

They call me bookish because I write books 

But it isn’t true.  

I wasn’t born in an inkhorn  

Or wrapped in newspaper like a fish dinner 

I was born in a country hospital to a mother who didn’t make a sound and a grandmother with broken English waiting in the hall 

If anything, I was tree-ish 

Skip-ish 

Grass-ish 

Blood-kneed and bossy-ish 

Chatty in the company of beetles 

There are no goldfinches in our house 

No tweed-clad professors 

No glass cabinets holding show-plates etched with pictures of puppies or queens 

A big brown dog lies on the grass in the sun 

And a tuxedo cat munches dry bikkies from a dinner plate 

Yes, there are books 

Mountains of them  

But the wine bottles under the sink have screw-top lids 

And 

The candle above the loo says ‘Mango Magic’ 

We are beef mince 

Cheap Tuesday Dominoes 

Builder’s tea with milk and sugar in a mug that says Best Mum Ever 

Blue jeans and a ponytail  

With our feet up on the couch 

The boys are in the yard fixing a dirtbike 

Smelling of engine-oil  

Calling each other names 

Tennis-ball books, the pair of them 

The largest branch of our Poinciana broke off from the trunk and fell 

It bent the Hills Hoist in two 

No more chair swing 

No more shade  

I cried out in the early morning 

And said (mostly) unbookish things 

Then I wept 

Along with the red-eyed Figbirds 

Because the tree was another daughter of mine 

And another mother 

Much lovelier than any book  

And much wiser too 

Bookish is picture postcards of places I have never been 

Celluloid Eiffel Towers 

Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith  

Neck scarves and Northrop Frye and shoulder-pads and 

Simone de Beauvoir in a town car 

Bookish is always romantic 

Sophisticated and smart 

Never a bent Hills Hoist  

Or a dead red Poinciana 

Never chicken korma or cane toads or a parking fine in a cul-de-sac  

Bookish could be the phone numbers scrawled on the wall in pencil 

Over the kettle  

But not the pecan nuts and chocolate bits  

In the Leggo’s Tomato Paste jar below 

But you write books? 

Yes 

People read them? 

Yes 

I write books and people read them 

And I read books 

All kinds of books 

Sometimes I pretend to have read books I haven’t read 

Which is probably the most bookish thing about me 

Would you stop reading if you knew it would lead to death? 

I can’t die  

There’s too much to do 

But, yes? 

Yes 

Would you know God if you never read a book? 

I knew God when I was tree-ish and skip-ish and grass-ish 

In my grandmother with the broken English 

In conversations with beetles 

In the mist in the valley in the town where I was born 

You don’t forget a God 

Who lives inside a fallen branch 

And a red-eyed Figbird 

A tuxedo cat  

And a big brown dog lying in the sun 

And it’s strange but 

I promise it’s true that 

God smells of engine oil 

And sounds like boys 

In the shape of tennis-ball books 

Fixing a dirt bike 

And calling each other names in the yard. 

Sita Walker is a high school literature teacher, freelance writer and award-winning author whose first book, The God of No Good (Ultimo Press) won the Courier-Mail People's Choice Award Queensland Book of the Year Award at the Queensland Literary Awards and the University of Sydney People’s Choice Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her latest novel, In a Common Hour (Ultimo Press), is out now.