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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Meet 11-year-old Bindi. She’s not really into maths but LOVES art class and playing hockey. Her absolute FAVOURITE thing is adventuring outside with friends or her horse, Nell.
'A new year starts like normal—school, family, hockey, dancing. But this year hasn’t gone to plan! There’s a big art assignment, a drought, a broken wrist AND the biggest bushfires her town has ever seen!
'Bindi is a verse novel for mid-upper primary students. Written ‘for those who plant trees’, Bindi explores climate, bushfires, and healing. Written from the point of view of 11-year-old Bindi and her friends on Gundungurra Country.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Reading Australia
This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.
Unit Suitable For AC: Year 6 (NSW Stage 3)
Duration Four to five lessons per week for five weeks
General Capabilities
Critical and Creative Thinking, Digital Literacy, Ethical Understanding, Literacy
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability
Notes
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Novel in verse form, for mid-upper primary-school students.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
y
Kirli Saunders on Poetry and Multi-disciplinary Practice
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2024
27446536
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai Woman, award-winning author and multidisciplinary artist. Her books include Bindi, Kindred and Returning. Her play, Going Home, is in development, as is her first novel, Yaraman. In 2022 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts.' (Introduction)
-
The Voice of the She-oak : Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindi
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Storying Plants in Australian Children's and Young Adult Literature : Roots and Winged Seeds 2023; (p. 107-127)'Bindi (2020), by Gunai poet and children’s author Kirli Saunders, is a verse novel dedicated to “those who plant trees.” Told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Bindi, it is a story of a community caring for Country, while experiencing and recovering from a bushfire. The planting of she-oak seedlings forms the core of the narrative and provides a structure: the verse novel’s three parts are named “Seedlings,” “Cinders,” and “Sprouts.” While Anglophone Australian poetry traditionally depicts the voice of the wind in the sighing branches of the she-oak tree as mournful, the pods of she-oak trees are the only food of the threatened glossy black cockatoo, and in Bindi, the trees are connected with hope and resilience. The “vegetal hope” manifest in Bindi is connected to the materiality, culture and ecology of plants, not just their symbolic function, and is underscored by the use of Gundungurra words within the poems. Drawing on John Charles Ryan’s approaches to vegetal poetics and Palyku writers Gladys and Jill Milroy’s essay “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Family Too” (2008), this chapter argues that she-oak trees in Bindi function as material and semiotic agents of hope.' (Publication abstract)
-
6 Books to Help Talk to Your Child about Climate Change
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 18 October 2023; -
From Grug to The Fire Wombat : Six Books to Help Kids Deal with Bushfire Anxiety
2021
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 12 January 2021;
-
From Grug to The Fire Wombat : Six Books to Help Kids Deal with Bushfire Anxiety
2021
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 12 January 2021; -
6 Books to Help Talk to Your Child about Climate Change
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 18 October 2023; -
The Voice of the She-oak : Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindi
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Storying Plants in Australian Children's and Young Adult Literature : Roots and Winged Seeds 2023; (p. 107-127)'Bindi (2020), by Gunai poet and children’s author Kirli Saunders, is a verse novel dedicated to “those who plant trees.” Told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Bindi, it is a story of a community caring for Country, while experiencing and recovering from a bushfire. The planting of she-oak seedlings forms the core of the narrative and provides a structure: the verse novel’s three parts are named “Seedlings,” “Cinders,” and “Sprouts.” While Anglophone Australian poetry traditionally depicts the voice of the wind in the sighing branches of the she-oak tree as mournful, the pods of she-oak trees are the only food of the threatened glossy black cockatoo, and in Bindi, the trees are connected with hope and resilience. The “vegetal hope” manifest in Bindi is connected to the materiality, culture and ecology of plants, not just their symbolic function, and is underscored by the use of Gundungurra words within the poems. Drawing on John Charles Ryan’s approaches to vegetal poetics and Palyku writers Gladys and Jill Milroy’s essay “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Family Too” (2008), this chapter argues that she-oak trees in Bindi function as material and semiotic agents of hope.' (Publication abstract)
-
y
Kirli Saunders on Poetry and Multi-disciplinary Practice
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2024
27446536
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai Woman, award-winning author and multidisciplinary artist. Her books include Bindi, Kindred and Returning. Her play, Going Home, is in development, as is her first novel, Yaraman. In 2022 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2022 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Books
- 2022 shortlisted Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards — Children's Literature Award
- 2022 shortlisted Ena Noël Award
- 2021 winner Queensland Literary Awards — Griffith University Children’s Book Award
- 2021 shortlisted Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year Awards — Indigenous Children
- New South Wales,