Suzanne Leal

Hi Cassie.

look it's a little bit different to a normal book club I'm the sort of person that is often late places and always panicked when I am late and I thought okay if I'm setting anything up myself I want it to be really easy so that people like me feel happy and no one feels panicked if they're late if they have to leave early if they haven't read the book that's been set so um

It's half an hour.

It's on Thursdays at 8 o'clock to 8.30.

People come as they can.

They come all the time.

They come once in a blue moon.

And they tell me and tell each other what they've been reading.

So we don't set a book.

We just have a chat about life, about books, and for the writers amongst us, what we've been doing in terms of writing.

Well, it was quite interesting actually when the Black Lives Matter hashtag was having great prominence.

My sister-in-law is from America and she's part Venezuelan and she wrote this

blog about being at school when she was eight and being told that there were too many people to play a game and that to decide who was going to step out, they'd choose who was the darkest or the person with the darkest skin would step out.

And that was her.

And she wrote this years on in the wake of Black Lives Matter and talked about one woman, a

who stood out with her and talked about the need for Jennifer's.

And I think it was that blog that I put in the newsletter that I have every week that really prompted a lot of discussion.

It's prompted discussion about what we do in terms of Black Lives Matter, the question of appropriation in work, the questions for Australians in knowing more about

our Indigenous heritage.

So Dark Emu has been a book that's come up time and time again.