What is Children's Book Week in Australia?

By Sherryl Clark

Probably the question before that is: what is the CBCA? It’s the Children’s Book Council of Australia, which has been going now for 80 years! To quote from their website:

The CBCA was founded in 1945 in a time when Australian children’s books were few, and Australian authors and illustrators were virtually unknown. The following year, 1946 the The Book of the Year Awards, an annual award to promote books of high literary and artistic quality was established. These awards are now the most influential and highly respected in Australia.

Its key purpose of promoting children’s and young adult books has been made possible by thousands of volunteers over the years, as well as sponsorship. The awards are very influential, but also can have the inverse effect (as we see in NZ) of the shortlisted books being highly promoted while everyone else’s books miss out and fade away. However, a few years ago, some of the committee realised that they needed to make more of the Notable Books lists, and now these also get a lot of promotion.

The judges are also volunteers, and there is one from each state/territory. The CBCA also runs a Shadow Judging scheme where students do their own discussions and judging of the shortlists, with assistance from the organisation. CBCA also has a theme each year with an illustrator’s image on merchandise and posters etc.

You can find out more about the CBCA on their website, and also see the shortlists for this year’s awards - https://cbca.org.au/

The big week for authors and illustrators is Children’s Book Week, and in 2025 it runs from 16-23 August. What happens during Book Week? Firstly, it’s the one week of the year when you are most likely to be invited for a school visit and presentation as part of the festivities. Lots of primary schools have a Book Parade on Friday of that week, where kids dress up as their favourite book character and parade at morning assembly (or another time during the morning before all the costumes fall apart!).

Some schools, though, feel that Book Week is a bit busy and crammed, and they will book their author and illustrator visits for other times, which is also good. I think that Book Week helps to make schools aware that these visits are a great thing and good for inspiring kids to read. High schools don’t really do Book Week though, in case you were wondering.

Here in NZ, Storylines organises the amazing tours in different areas around the country – but wouldn’t it be wonderful if schools were all given some money each year to have a couple of authors or illustrators do visits? Read NZ does do a lot of work to promote school visits - https://www.read-nz.org/what-we-do/writers-in-schools - but many of our schools are quite poor when it comes to activities like this and have to prioritise their funds for other things first. How we wish it was different!

(Note that schools get their first school visit subsidised if they are a member of Read NZ (membership is $150 a year) and subsequent school visits/ workshops that year need to be paid for at the Read NZ rate, all info on their website.)