The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky

The year is 1967. We meet eleven young girls in Grade Four. Their school is a posh one with hats and strict uniform rules. Their classroom is at the top of an old building. There are lots of stairs, 67 in fact, to navigate if anyone decides to venture up there. Miss Renshaw is their teacher. Today she shares some rather shocking (especially when you consider these girls are very young) news with her class that a man named Ronald Ryan has been hanged in Melbourne. Melbourne feels like a far off land to these girls from Sydney.

Their teacher declares the girls will walk to the park today. Across the road from the school there is a green oasis named The Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens. Miss Renshaw tells the girls they will go there to write poetry but ...

"They all knew, even tiny, big-eyed Bethany knew, the real reason Miss Renshaw wanted to go into the gardens that morning. It was not to think about death. Miss Renshaw wanted to see Morgan."

Morgan works in the gardens. "He had beautiful eyes, soft brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy."

Over the coming weeks the girls and their teacher make regular visits to the park. Until one day Morgan takes them all to see a cave, only accessible at low tide, and it is on that day that their teacher disappears.

If you loved the movie and book Picnic at Hanging Rock you will thoroughly enjoy A Golden Day. It is quick read with only 150 pages - almost a novella. 

Take a look here to read a selection of review comments. 

Delicately scripted with little sequestered hooks that add up through the book to provide a softly haunting mood, The Golden Day is visual, questioning, subtle and dreamlike, which only adds to its eerie feel. Dubosarsky's well-rounded characters are charming and evocative. The author has an indelible knack for painting with words - her visual language is a joy to immerse yourself in ...  Kids' Book Review

Dubosarsky has eloquently crafted a coming-of-age mystery novel, inspired by art and news stories in Australia. She shows the impact of this tragedy in beautiful language and carefully formed characters. The girls are inquisitive, loyal, and bewildered. As Robert Frost declares, “nothing gold can stay” – and the same is true for this golden day. The days of innocence end and the girls must face the harshness of their loss. Historical Novel Society

Through precise, vivid descriptions, the third-person narrative evokes the contrast between the girls’ cloistered school lives and the hard realities of the outside world. The students are “eleven schoolgirls in their round hats, with their socks falling down, hand in hand, like a chain of paper dolls”; meanwhile, soldiers are dying in Vietnam, and prisoners are being hanged at home. Kirkus

January is turning into a month of nostalgia. I seem to be mainly reading older books (many or most of which are now out of print). The Golden Day was published in 2011 and short listed by the Children's Book Council of Australia for the Older Readers Award in 2012. There are two covers above one from the original paperback by Zoe Sadokierski and the other is the US reprint from 2015. I happy to say it is still in print. 

This book has a Young Adult feel but really I think a mature Grade 6 reader would enjoy the delicious tension and the intriguing mystery. I started reading this book on the train in the morning and finished it on the return journey - yes it is that good - in fact I was so absorbed I almost missed my stop.  The final section of the book is set in 1975 and the events on that day where we meet the girls, now in the final year of high school, are certain to shock you.

The chapters in this book are named after painting by Charles Blackman. I was also surprised to see my charity sale copy had been signed by Ursula herself in December, 2016 to a girl named Megan. 

Ursula Dubosarsky says: "The idea became at least 30 years ago, when I saw Charles Blackman's wonderful Floating school girl in the National Gallery in Canberra. It's a painting of a surreal schoolgirl in hat and tunic floating above the city in the darkness - like an image from an urban Picnic at Hanging Rock. The flying child may be frightened, but she's also brimming with the joy of a secret life."

Here are a set of very detailed teachers notes from the publisher Allen and Unwin.