From today's The Australian online:
IN Elma Crane's primary school class in Brisbane, some time during World War II,
one little fellow sat up straight and attentive among his rowdy classmates.
"I don't remember his academic work," Mrs Crane, 93, said yesterday, "but I
remember David Malouf as the polite little boy who always sat right in the
middle, always doing the right thing."
She cannot recall the exact afternoon she took up a copy of Homer's Iliad and
began to read to the fidgety class of nine-year-olds at West End Primary. It was
a way to fill in the final hour of a wet afternoon, and the Iliad was somehow to
hand. She knew it was the kind of "compelling story" children would respond to,
full of adventure, mystery, action and power.
Malouf remembers so well how galvanised he was by Elma, then Miss Findlay,
reading out loud from the epic story about the Trojan war that he included a note
about his teacher at the end of his new novel, Ransom.
etc
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