AUSTRALIA: Kwogi strives to save forest
Copyright 2001
The Mercury, Hobart
December 29, 2001
By ELLEN WHINNETT
DEEP in Wendy Hanson's imagination lives in a cute, furry green creature called a Kwogi.
The Kwogi lives in a 300-year-old tree called Myrt and his best friend is a small boy called Iver. When development threatens Myrt, Iver and all his forest friends come to fight for his survival.
And so is born The Toothpaste Trail, a children's book with a significant environmental message.
Ms Hanson, a former Tasmanian and student of Devonport High School, wrote and co-illustrated The Toothpaste Trail as a way of helping to save native forests.
An author and journalist, she left Tasmania in the '70s to travel and work before settling in Darwin.
She is home on the North-West Coast visiting her parents and three brothers, and getting her self-published work into book stores.
"The Wilderness Society in Hobart and Adelaide have picked it up and I hope to move on to Greening Australia next," Ms Hanson said.
"It does have an environmental message."
With its beautiful illustrations and collection of characters, including possums, spiders and the cake-munching weed-creature floggels, the book aims to entertain very young children.
However, Ms Hanson, who writes under the name Pia Pippa, has had feedback from older children.
"A class of nine-year-olds read it for the environmental message," she said.
The Toothpaste Trail has been five years from conception to distribution, and several other books are already forming in Ms Hanson's mind.
Like all self-publishers, she now faces the daunting task of getting her book distributed without the weight of a major publisher behind her.
But she is spurred on by success stories such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, both of which were rejected many times before being picked up by a publisher.