Karlee: Welcome to the National Library of Australia for a National Simultaneous Storytime. 

Here at the Library, we acknowledge the first Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of the land that we're on today. We pay our respects to the elders and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I wonder where you're joining us from today. 

My name's Karlee and I work in the Education team here at the beautiful National Library, and we love reading. I've got a friend who is ready to read for us. Ben, would you read a story for us, please?  

Ben: Hello, everyone. I would love to. Let's read. This is Simultaneous Storytime book, 'The Truck Cat' by Deborah Frenkel and Danny Snell.

Some cats a house cats. Some are apartment cats. Some cats live on farms. Some live in the city. But Tinker was a truck cat. Tinker lived everywhere.

He lived in brick motels with beetles, in the bathtub, in rest stop huts with rats in the rafters, in depots, dancing with dragonflies. But mostly home was the cabin of Yacoub’s B-double tri axle truck.

He drove it all around the country, learning the strange new landscape. On the way, Tinker sat on the passenger seat, keeping an eye out for interlopers.

In the truck there were different things depending on the day sometimes apples, sometimes pears, sometimes lots and lots of eggs. Yacoub had to drive carefully because otherwise those eggs would all get scrambled.

Other humans didn't always understand Jacoub. His jokes, his words, his silences. But Tinker knew that when Yacoub was quiet, he was busy remembering. And that when the was done, he would switch off the radio and hum tunes from his home country, or tell Tinker about the food these Nina used to make way back.

Tinker also had an old home full of mewing siblings. There was a mama cat way back and a warm basket, so Tinker and Yacoub remembered their memories together.

Then at night, when the truck stopped to rest under the Milky Way, Tinker sat on Yacoub’s lap and purred into the sky, "Can you see the shooting star?"

But one morning someone else arrived, a little white flutter, asking Tinker to play tag. He did his best. He leapt. He lunged. But butterflies are tricky for even the daintiest of truck cats. Here. There. Over under here. There. Over. Under. Here. There. Over. 

BEEP!

Under. Wheels whooshed and flashed, but Tinker lay still until cool hands lifted him from the road, held him gently, and carried him to a car. The hands belonged to Mari.

At Mari’s bakery there was yogurt which Tinker didn't like, and a fish head, which he did. So Mari gave him another the next day and the next.

But Tinker worried about Yacoub alone in the truck with just eggs to talk to. He worried about Yacoub all summer long. Yacoub worried too. From town to town to town and back again. Then one day he smelled something familiar. The warm spices of home leading him to a bakery window where someone familiar purred against the glass. Yacoub ordered everything on Mari's menu to celebrate. 

He said it was just like Nina's cooking, maybe even better because it came with company.

Lorrikeets landed in the lemon tree and pigeons pecked in the petunias, but Yacoub and Mari kept talking in the same language, understanding each other.

Tinker waited at the door to be let out. He was not impatient whatsoever.

Now Tinker isn't always a truck cat. Sometimes he's a bakery cat, sometimes a sofa cat, sometimes he's a picnic cat, and sometimes a train cat.

But wherever he goes, Tinker is certain of one thing. Home is everywhere.

And that's the end of the story. So thanks for reading 'The Truck Cat' with us today as part of Simultaneous Storytime. And now we're going to head down to our Special Collections Reading Room, where Billie and Jess have found some really interesting things in our collection that relate to trucks and cats.

Billie: Thank you so much, Ben, for reading that beautiful story. It's one that we both love. So my name is Billie. My name is Jess. We are here in the Special Collections Reading Room at the National Library to look at some of our collection items to do with tracking and cats and information.  

Jess: We had to go through 11 million items to find these three ones for you. What have we got here, Billie?  

Billie: So here we have a map of New South Wales from 1884, and it shows some of the different stock rats, because your group traveled from town to town to town delivering things like food and produce. However, back in the 1800s, we use things like railways and trucks and oh my goodness, droving.

Jess: Droving. Is that what these lines over here might be?  

Billie: I believe so. So when we look at this map and we look at our notes, we can see that all of the truck routes are mainly up and down the coast. But the further inland you get, the more we're relying on railways. And also walking up there just by foot.

So delivering cows and different animals farther inland. And you said this was a map of New South Wales. I wonder if there's anyone watching from New South Wales that might be able to find their town or city on this map, and I wonder if there's some other state maps that we could find from the same year that would show up the same thing as well?

Jess: So in 'The Truck Cat', Billie, Yacoub traveled around with mostly produce in his truck didn't he?  

Billie: He did.  

Jess: But I'm wondering if we can deliver other things using trucks. Maybe information?  

Billie: Maybe. What do we find next in our Collection?  

Jess: Well, we found a picture of Canberra's mobile library truck, which probably traveled around with books. Maybe. I mean, we have over 4 million books in our collection, so that's a lot to deliver out to different places.

Jess: Maybe just a smaller collection of books. Then I wonder if any of you have ever seen a library truck in your town.  

Billie: I wonder which school library truck travels and how you know where it's going to appear next. Talking about interesting photos and thinking about those traveling routes when we're going through our collection, we noticed that there are a lot of cats that go on many adventures.

Billie: So here we have two very different photos. The one that you had.  

Jess: This one looks much smaller than my photo.  

Billie: It is. So this is actually a glass plate negative from the 1930s. If you look closely it is actually number 2000 and 509. Of over 18,000 glass plate negatives in our Fairfax collection here at the Library. That is a lot of photos really is.

So glass plates are very fragile and we do have to protect them. So we have a very special team here that preserve and look after our items and also make them available for people at home to find online on Trove.  

Jess: Does that mean that people who are watching National Simultaneous Storytime online can go and find this one themselves?

Billie: They can. And in fact, we actually have a copy we can show you. Now, as you look very closely at this photo, you can see that there is a couple on a boat in Sydney Harbour, but they've also brought along their dog and a very grumpy looking cat. Wonder what that cat's name was?  

Jess: Yeah, I wonder if this cat was anything like Tinker in our story, 'The Truck Cat'. And if it may have gone on any adventures like Tinker did? If you were writing your own story like the Cat, what would you write about and what would you name your cat?  

Billie: Thank you so much for joining us and reading 'The Truck Cat' today, and having a chance to look at some of these amazing objects in our collection.

Jess: Thank you Billie. Thank you everyone. Thank you.