Nim's Island
Authors: Wendy Orr
W
ENDY
O
RR
lives on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula with her
dog and other family. She was born in Canada and grew up with
various pets, in various places across North America and France.
Once, when her family sailed to a new home, the dogs wore
life-jackets, but the guinea pigs had to stay in their cages.
A few years after Wendy wrote
Nim’s Island,
a film producer in
Hollywood took the book out of the library to read to her son – and
the next day emailed Wendy to ask if she could make a movie of it.
Wendy said yes! They became good friends and Wendy had the fun
of helping write the screenplay, and learning that making a movie
was even more complicated than writing a book.
It was very exciting for Wendy to watch her story become real
on the screen, and to meet the actors who were bringing her
characters to life. When she walked through Alex Rover’s home
she felt as if it was somewhere that she used to live! But she thought
the best of all was getting a big sea lion kiss from Selkie.
Wendy is the author of several award-winning books including
Nim’s Island, Nim at Sea, Spook’s Shack, Mokie and Bik,
and for teenagers,
Peeling the Onion.
K
ERRY
M
ILLARD
was born in Canada and grew up surrounded
by all sorts of animals, including a monkey. Later she moved
to Australia and became a vet. One day Kerry took her crazy dog
to dog school, drew some cartoons for their newsletter,
and accidentally began a new career as an award-winning
cartoonist and illustrator, and author.
Wendy Orr
pictures by
Kerry Millard
This edition first published in 2008
First published in 1999
Copyright © Text, Wendy Orr 1999
Copyright © Illustrations, Kerry Millard 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The
Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander St
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Orr, Wendy.
Nim’s island / author, Wendy Orr.
East Melbourne, Vic. : Allen and Unwin, 2008.
ISBN 978 1 74175 473 5 (pbk.).
A823.3
Cover illustration: “NIM’S ISLAND”™ & © 2007 Walden Media. LLC
All Rights Reserved
Text illustrations by Kerry Millard
Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes
Set in Minion
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
With thanks to my parents, who searched their log books
and photograph albums to help build Nim’s Island,
and to all my family, friends and internet acquaintances
who answered my requests for odd information on coconuts,
whistling shells and broken rudders.
W.O.
I
N A PALM TREE
, on an island, in the middle of the wide blue sea, was a girl.
Nim’s hair was wild, her eyes were bright, and around her neck she wore three cords. One was for a spyglass, one for a whirly, whistling shell and the other a fat, red pocket-knife in a sheath.
With the spyglass at her eye, she watched her father’s boat. It sailed out through the reef to the deeper dark ocean, and Jack turned to wave and Nim waved back, though she knew he couldn’t see.
Then the white sails caught the wind and blew him out of sight, and Nim was alone. For three days and three nights, whatever happened or needed doing, Nim would do it.
‘And what we need first,’ said Nim, ‘is breakfast!’ So she threw four ripe coconuts
thump!
into the sand, and climbed down after them.
Then she whistled her shell, two long, shrill notes that carried far out to the reef where the sea lions were fishing. Selkie popped her head above the water. She had a fish in her mouth, but she swallowed it fast and dived towards the beach.
And from a rock by the hut, Fred came scuttling. Fred was an iguana, spiky as a dragon, with a cheerful snub nose. He twined round Nim’s feet in a prickly hug.
‘Are you saying good morning,’ Nim demanded, ‘or just begging for breakfast?’
Fred stared at the coconuts. He was a very honest iguana.
Coconuts are tricky to open, but Nim was an expert. With a rock and a spike, she punched a hole and drank the juice; cracked the shell and pried out the flesh. Fred snatched his piece and gulped it down.
Marine iguanas don’t eat coconut, but no one had ever told Fred.
Now Selkie was flopping up the beach to greet them, but: ‘We’ll come in too!’ Nim shouted, and dived off the rocks.
Selkie twisted and shot up underneath, gliding Nim through the waves, thumping over, ducking under. Nim clung tight, till she was half sea lion and half girl, and all of her was part ocean.
Then Selkie and Fred went to sunbake on the rock and Nim went back to the hut. She poured a mug of water from her favourite blue bottle, brushed her teeth above a clump of grass that needed the spit, and started her chores. There were lots today, because she was doing some of Jack’s as well as her own.
L
ONG AGO
, when Nim was a baby, she’d had a mother as well as Jack. But one day, her mother had gone to
investigate the contents of a blue whale’s stomach. It was an interesting experiment that no one had done for thousands of years, and Jack said that it would have been all right, it should have been safe—until the Troppo Tourists came to make a film of it, shouting and racing their huge pink-and-purple boat around Nim’s mother and the whale. When Jack told them to stop they made rude signs and bumped their boat against the whale’s nose.
The whale panicked and dived, so deep that no one ever knew where or when he came back up again.
Nim’s mother never came back up at all.
So Jack packed his baby into his boat and sailed round and round the world, just in case Nim’s mother came back up out of the ocean somewhere else and didn’t know where to find them. Then one day, when the baby had grown into a very little girl, he’d found this island.
It was the most beautiful island in the whole world. It had white shell beaches, pale-gold sand and tumbled black rocks where the spray threw rainbows into the sky. It had a fiery mountain with green rainforest on the high slopes and grasslands at the bottom. There was a pool of fresh water to drink, a waterfall to slide down and, in a hidden hollow where the grasslands met the white shell beach, there was—‘A place for a hut!’
And, around it all, so that only the smallest boats could weave their way through, was a maze of reef, curving from the black rocks on one side to the white cliffs on the other.
Jack sailed back to a city for the very last time. He filled up the boat with plants for a garden and supplies for science, and landed on the island to build a home for just him and his daughter, because he knew now that Nim’s mother had stayed down at the bottom of the sea.
Like a mermaid, Nim thought.
He built a hut of driftwood logs and good strong branches, with a palm-thatched roof and a hard dirt floor. He put up a satellite dish, and a solar panel to charge the batteries for a torch, a mobile phone and a laptop computer.
He made sleeping mats stuffed with rustling palm fronds, a table and two stools, a desk, bookcases and shelves for his science stuff, coconut-shell bowls and sea-shell plates. He dug a vegetable garden in the rich soil at Fire Mountain’s base and planted avocados, bananas, lettuce, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, sweet potatoes and tomatoes, and bamboo for making pipes and useful things.
Then he went on being a scientist, and when Nim got older, she helped him. They read what the barometer said, measured how much rain fell every day and how strong the winds were, how high the high tides reached and how low the low tides fell, and then they marked the measurements on a clean white chart with a dark-blue texta.
They studied the plants that grew on the island and the animals that lived there. They put blue bands on the birds’ legs and wrote down the numbers so Jack could remember
the birds’ birthdays and who their mothers and fathers were. (Nim remembered anyway.)