WriteOn

Stop the press – the 2022 WriteOn competition winners can now take a well-deserved bow. 

Held annually by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) to encourage excellence in creative writing, the WriteOn winners’ entries appear in print in The Best of WriteOn 2022 anthology hence they are published authors, many for the first time but hopefully not the last.

The writing stimulus for the young writers from Years 1 to 6 was a photograph of children playing a water game with toy ducks at a sideshow alley amusement park with stuffed toys as prizes.

WriteOn silver medalist Zara Jindrich’s (pictured above) thought-provoking piece Waste not, want not touches on our consumerism society, and asks us to consider at what cost to our environment?  Zara’s story gives readers genuine food for thought.

Waste not, want not

By Zara Jindrich

The sound of ripping rent the still air at Fred’s Fantastic Fair. Two kids were pulling a toy apart. I was one of them. My friend and I lay on the ground, panting. We were covered in polystyrene and bits of broken toy. Then … the lights went out. All of a sudden, the fair was as dark and as still as a graveyard at midnight.

I stood there, frozen in shock, and as I did, I thought I heard a noise behind me. I turned quickly, twisting my neck, and this is what I saw. Behind us was a carnival game. As I watched, one of the toys fell off its hook. I reached forwards to pick it up, but as I did, I heard another flop. Glancing around I saw that another toy had fallen off. Or had it jumped? Wild thoughts such as these began chasing through my scared mind, like fish darting around in the sea. Another fell, then another, then another. I turned to run and tell my friends, with only one thought in my brain. The toys were alive!

As I ran, I made the fatal mistake of looking behind me.  As I did so, I tripped on a tuft of dirt and fell flat on my face.  As I struggled to get up, I felt a pair of soft, squishy toy hands grab my legs.  Then, much to my horror, I felt them grab my arms as well.  I had been well and truly captured by the toys.

I was dragged up the mountain that had loomed above us at the fair.  Glancing down nervously, I saw, to my surprise, a pile of toys in the canyon next to us. As soon as I looked down at the pile, I realised there were hundreds of perfectly good, discarded Pop Its.

After many cuts and scrapes, the toys dragged me to the obsidian mouth of the cave. The toy who had captured me, turned and grimaced, and I didn’t like the look on his face. When he spoke, his tone was calm but furious.

He said, ‘You humans are wasteful. You throw away things even though they are not broken. You wreck the environment, and we want revenge.’

Next to the cave was a steep drop, and it was there that I tried to escape. As I broke free of the toys, I ran towards the rickety bridge that hung over the canyon. As I neared the middle of the bridge, a horrible creaky groan stopped me. What if the bridge collapsed? As I stood, paralysed in the centre, I knew it was my job to save the toys and the environment. If I ever made it back home, I promised to teach children all over the world to cherish their toys and only buy what they needed. I would also make sure that toy manufacturers stopped using plastic.