Junk Castle by Robin Klein illustrated by Rolf Heimann

 

Mandy, Irene, Con and Splinter live in a block of flats in Meldrum Crescent. There is nowhere around the building for this group of friends to play except for a small 'park'.

"The park opposite wasn't really grand enough to be called a park. It was just a sandwich shaped wedge of lawn squeezed between the Kozinooze Slumberwear factor and a site where a new service station was being built. It had a railing fence around it and a sign which said, 'The Beatrice Binker Reserve'. It was too small for a game of football or a game of anything."

Irene is told to prepare a talk for her class. It can be on any topic. Irene is terrified of public speaking so she is relieved when the braces on her teeth are bent out of shape by a piece of hard rye bread. No speech for Irene. This means Mandy will need to do it and that's just fine with Mandy because she loves addressing an audience. The kids decide the topic should be medieval castles and so they head  over to the library. (You can imagine I appreciate this).

"Their local library was wonderful ... And there weren't any bossy signs ordering you to shush. You were allowed to talk if you did it quietly and away from the section where the students were working. Mandy looked up castles in the subject index and they went to the shelf number."

After all their research and Mandy's successful class talk, the kids decide to build a castle in the tiny park. The men, constructing the new service station, offer to help with the brick construction and concrete but Mr Drake, from over the road, is furious. He writes letters to the council, he makes up a petition, and he even calls the police. Workers from the factory see all the action and they phone a local television station. The castle is fabulous but will the kids win the battle and is there something they don't know about Mr Drake? What does he mean when he tells Mandy:

"I don't want the Beatrice Binker Reserve disgraced on television. It's a memorial park."

Junk Castle was published in 1983 and was short listed by the CBCA in 1984 which by coincidence was my first year of teaching. I have often thought about the little patch of ground where this group of children built their castle. l really like their creative use of the materials they find discarded in their neighborhood, the way the kids co-operate with each other and their wonderful imaginative play. It is now 37 years since I first read this book and I am very happy to report it has stood the test of time. The only tiny dated reference is the mention of cassette tapes which can be loaned from the library.

I thought again about Junk Castle when I shared another old book - Keep Out by Noela Young. I also like to link Junk Castle with another Robin Klein story from her fabulous short story collection Ratbags and Rascals - How Clara Bepps put Strettle Street properly on the Map.

Very sadly Junk Castle is not a title on the NSW Premier's Reading challenge but I am sure this book will still be available in many primary school libraries across Australia. My former library has one copy and the library where I help as a reading volunteer has a set of ten copies! I was happy to see it is still part of the South Australian Premier's Reading challenge. 

Junk Castle is a perfect book to read aloud to a class of students in Grade 3 or 4. You could also use this book as a way to discuss the role of local government and the ways citizens can legally express their point of view through strategies such as letters to the media and petitions. This is one of those precious books which I wish someone would republish. 

Junk Castle is a paean to the triumph of the imagination over stultifying gentility, to the revitalising of dead urban scenes, to the rejuvenation of the spirit. Is that a pile of old rubbish on the Beatrice Binker Reserve (a tiny triangle of cropped grass in a jungle of concrete), or a glitteringly exciting castle? This is a favourite theme of Klein's, a sort of personal war on tidy suburbia - perhaps because `I used to live in a ghastly middle-class suburb that I absolutely loathed. Now I live miles from anywhere out in the bush, in a tolerant, dotty area.' Books for Keeps

Maurice Saxby decribes Robin Klein as "the coolest Australian writer of the 1980s."  [The Proof of the Puddin' Australian Children's literature 1970-1990 by Maurice Saxby page 228]

Take a step back into the eighties to see what upper primary kids did without Play Stations, mobile phones and other electronic gadgetry. Irene has a speech to make at school so it's off to the local library, no world wide web. In the block of flats they have to creep up and down the stairs to deliver messages to each other, no texting. To alleviate their boredom they scavenge around the neighbourhood for building materials and build their own castle in the reserve. The Little Library of Rescued Books