Who’s that knocking? Alison Lester visits Anglesea Primary School

Ms Lester has written and illustrated more than 25 picture books.

She won this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) Children’s Book of the Year Award: Early Childhood for Tricky’s Bad Day, and also won CBCA’s Picture Book of the Year in 2005 for Are We There Yet?: A Journey around Australia.

Anglesea Primary School principal Murray Surkitt said he was delighted to see the students get so much out of the visit.

“The children were so inspired by Alison’s drawings and stories.

“The aim of this visit was to stimulate our students and give them some ideas to produce high quality writing for others to enjoy”.

Ms Lester shared some of her storytelling techniques with the students. She also gave a water colour painting demonstration, before inviting students to try the painting themselves.

The students will use these paintings as prompts during future writing lessons. In an interview on her website,

Ms Lester said she never worked towards creating a message when she was writing a story, but liked books “where kids are being adventurous and doing exciting things and somehow forcing themselves to do stuff that they might be a bit scared of, but winning”.

“Books that are happy and entertaining like Clive Eats Alligators tell a story and are quite nice because they are all about being an individual and following your dreams and that it’s okay to be different, so that’s the message in them.”