Reena Balding grew up in Tasmania and left to travel the world where she worked for a newspaper in Turkey, studied Catalan in Barcelona and became a yoga instructor in Bali. Now living with her family in Hobart, Reena publishes books for the Australian government and writes for children and adults. She has had writing published in a children's anthology raising funds for refugees, The Ballad of Jubal Jacques, and has been the storyteller for the community building project One Community Together. Reena is now working on her first novel for adults based on her years working as a locally engaged staff member at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
WHAT CYA CONFERENCE DID FOR ME
After more than 10 years of writing for children, my first picture book is being released this month, and CYA played a crucial part. I started entering picture book manuscript into the CYA competition each year, tracking how my manuscripts fared, seeing my results improve. My best result in the competition was about fifth one year but by far the best result overall was getting a publishing offer!
That was CYA 2021 and I had booked a manuscript assessment with Maryann Ballantyne from Wild Dog Books. I still remember sitting in the car in Jindabyne, NSW (we snuck in a July school holiday trip between covid shutdowns) with Maryann saying with typical decisiveness, ‘I want to publish your kelp book.’ The words every aspiring author longs to hear!
Of course, it wasn’t that easy, or else this would be a shorter blog post about a book that came out three years ago.
I quickly learned how fortunate I was that my assessment had been with Maryann – she was already interested in kelp and could see the potential in a picture book about it. She also had ideas about how it could be a much, much richer book. ‘You’ll need a First Nations co-author,’ Maryann said. And that was how I came to meet Aunty Patsy Cameron.
We met on a kelp-strewn beach on Tassie’s east coast where women had found tiny shells for countless generations and where a rock turned out to be a sleeping sea lion. Aunty Patsy showed me what she looked for when collecting bull kelp, and selected a few pieces to take home. We spent the afternoon talking about kelp and what made it so important and then created some pieces out of kelp, including a shoe (me) and a water carrier (Aunty Patsy). We wrote the first draft of the kelp book that weekend.
More than four years later, In the Kelp Forest with beautiful illustrations from Belinda Casey, is out from April 2026. I couldn’t have imagined how that one manuscript assessment could have changed my life so much. Through meeting Aunty Patsy I’ve learned so much more about Aboriginal culture, giving me a much deeper appreciation of the Country I live on than when I was a kid growing up in country Tasmania. I now have a job publishing books for First Nations authors at Aboriginal Studies Press, a job that I probably wouldn’t even have applied for, let alone been offered, had I not had the experience of this collaboration. And I’m living proof that sometimes it really does take ten years (or even more) to break into traditional children’s publishing so it's good to have patience.
