"We were very lucky at Mount Margaret. Even though the education department wasn't responsible for the education of Aboriginal children at that time, we had a mission school."

"One of the things they instilled in us was a love for reading, and they had a library there. And every Saturday we would go and change our library books with their stories, like 'Milly Molly Mandy', and stuff like that."

"It was so exciting, learning to read and that's where I realised the power of words and reading and to this day I still love reading."

She had to learn and speak English at the mission school, but never stopped speaking her own language, Wongutha, and in 1992 she published four bi-lingual story books for children on traditional teaching stories.

"I felt that I should write the legends from my dreamtime, the stories that the Grannies told us up in the sand hills around Edjudina sitting around the campfires listening to our stories."

"They were exciting and I thought I needed to spend some time to do the writing."

"I support bilingual education. The kids need to know English, because they are living in an English society."

"In the beginning, we were living in a total Aboriginal society and when we went to the mission we were taught your language and it was exciting, we had two languages, some of us had three."

"At the same time I thought that Aboriginal people must never forget their language and their stories."

May O'Brien's face lights up when she talks about the work of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and the work it does in giving children books of their own to keep and take home.

"The foundation is giving books out free, so that the kids can have at least one thing that's theirs. It gladdened my soul to see the faces of the kids out there in the desert at Warburton sitting there with these books."

"We in schools must make reading the most exciting subject in the school so that all the kids want to read."

"That's what happened to us, we wanted to read all the time, so when we were supposed to be doing our work, sweeping the dining room floor we'd be looking at our book with the broom in our other hand."

"Reading is exciting and I want to pass that on."