Students at Mallacoota P–12 College were among the winners of a Reading for Kids Gippsland competition giving students a free online author session with celebrated Australian author Hazel Edwards OAM and her thought-provoking young adult novel, WASTED?.
The connection with Gippsland has an added significance for Hazel, who has strong ties to the region. As a teenager she lived at the Glengarry General Store near Traralgon, where her parents ran the store. Hazel has described those years of meeting people and observing country life as an important apprenticeship for
becoming a writer.
Her latest YA novel takes young readers somewhere very different.
Set around a futuristic mid-ocean Garbage Patch, WASTED? imagines asylum seekers not simply as victims, but as innovators who repurpose waste, create biofuel and use science to build a new future. Teenage Kit observes this changing world through his drawings as the novel explores climate challenges, technology and problem-solving.
The book opens the door to some particularly timely Science Week conversations — artificial intelligence, biofuel, turning waste into resources, climate science, future communication technologies, invention and the
ethical questions that accompany
scientific progress.
Reading for Kids Gippsland also organised a free online Science Week session for educators with Hazel Edwards, supported locally by Charlotte at Schoolworks Bairnsdale, providing an opportunity to explore the novel and its potential for secondary classroom learning.
Reading for Kids Gippsland volunteer Karen Fleischer recently finished
reading WASTED? and admits that futuristic YA fiction isn’t a genre she would
ordinarily choose.
“As an adult reader, it took me a little while to find my feet in Hazel’s futuristic
world, but I’m very glad I persevered,” Karen said.
“Some of the AI capabilities imagined in WASTED? left me feeling a little daunted about where technology might take us, but the story also made me think about the possibilities of science, innovation and turning problems into solutions.
“I became particularly interested in Kit and the way he uses drawing to understand people, explore problems and imagine solutions.
Despite it not being my usual genre, by the final page Hazel had achieved something every author hopes for — I wanted to know what happens next.”
With National Science Week encouraging Australians to explore where today’s ideas may lead tomorrow, WASTED? provides teenage, and perhaps some unexpected adult readers with plenty to contemplate.
