Sally Morgan: Hello. My name is Sally Morgan and I'm the author of Little Bird's Day, which is a picture book for young children. My inspiration for writing this story was my childhood memories of spending a lot of time in the bush at the back of our house. There was a creek there that ran off a large river in Western Australia and not many houses around there in those days. And I used to love going there and spending time, and watching the birds and the animals, and just playing along the creek, catching jewel bees and looking at the wildflowers and spending time on my own. I always felt very safe in that section of bush.

The reason I wrote the story is to encourage young children to think about nature and to spend time outside of the house away from computer games, and just to enjoy and appreciate the natural world that is so important and precious to us.

And Johnny, who illustrated the book, comes from a different part of Australia. He lives about 4,000 kilometers away from me, and he's an amazing artist in his own right and did an incredible job of the illustrations. We've got a good partnership going and he's now illustrating other books with me and I'm writing other stories for him, so we're a really good team together.

I think what's really important for young children is to develop a sense of how precious the natural world is and how it's important that we all take responsibility to care for it. I have three young grandchildren, ages between three and one years old, and I think with the issues we have now with climate change and what we are giving them to inherit and deal with further down the track, it's really important that we start teaching them about the value of the natural world and how we all have to take responsibility in caring for our home, Earth.

I've been involved in also in early literacy for young children. I was an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation for many years, and I'm also involved in Magabala Books' Small Seeds Big Reads program, which puts children's books into the hands of needy children all across Australia. I think books are really, really important because they are a portal to another world, and they open up horizons to children and help them to think about things that perhaps they haven't thought about in the past.

I think the role of teachers and librarians in helping children to see outside their own world is really important, and in giving children access to different stories and helping them to think from a young age about what's important in life.

I hope that everyone really enjoys the book that Johnny and I did together, and maybe children could write their own book or their own story about something in the world that they live in and draw pictures to go with it too.