AustLit

'On the morning of February 6th, the seventy-one-year-old Australian children’s-book author Mem Fox arrived on a United Airlines flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles. She was en route to a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the theme of diversity, where she was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech on teaching children to read. Fox, whose 1983 book, “Possum Magic,” is the best-selling Australian children’s book of all time, has travelled back and forth to the United States more than a hundred times in the course of her life. This time, she told me recently by phone, “Things began to unravel when the digital photograph machine—you have to walk through one at LAX—malfunctioned,” and an immigration official told her, “Oh, just go down there and speak to a real person.”'  (Introduction)