Pretty Youthful
Starla Martineer
 Starla Martineer, who turned eleven in February this year, showed that junior members of GCWA can also pull their weight. Accompanying her mother Marion to help run the Association’s Evandale stall on Australia Day, she cheerfully filled sheets of paper with pictures and words for the Hills Hoist display. Many were encouraged to join in by her example, and so she earned herself the grateful thanks of GWCA and this month’s spot as Featured Member.
She likes music, drama and art. She draws with pens and pencils, and has dabbled in oil based acrylic. She decorated the walls of her Nan’s bathroom with painted fish.
Highly attuned to the effects of colour, she describes her favourites as electric orange, fluoro green and bright purple. By contrast, dark colours make her feel sad. Her bedroom is painted a soft mauve and bright blue. She says this gives a dreamy effect.
At a school disco last year she had her blonde hair cut like her favourite performing artist, Pink. She prefers casual dress - the tomboy look - although pretty dresses are also beginning to have appeal for her.
If she could be famous for something, she would choose singing and acting.
Starla is a voracious reader. At the moment she is on the fifth book of the J.K. Rowling Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Last holidays she read the whole series of Emily Rodda’s Deltora Quest, fifteen books of fantasy fiction, the gist of which she describes as ‘Three unlikely heroes on an adventure quest to save their land from the evil clutches of the Shadow Lord.’
 Asked if she ever writes her own stories, Starla tells of an exercise during school that she enjoyed where she and her classmates had to choose a period in time, a place, a person and an animal. Thus, Maddie and Stripe the dog were created. They went on an excursion to a future world through a time machine. The trouble was, says Starla, that the story kept evolving.
Perhaps this is how young novelists are made – they have an idea and they just keep on writing.
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