Imagining places

Photograph taken at the launch of 'Imagine this Place' at Pembroke Primary School

Imagine This Place is a bilingual book in Hakha Chin and English. Hakha Chin is one of the languages spoken by some people from the Chin State in western Myanmar/Burma. There is some more information about migration from Myanmar (Burma) to Australia here.

This book was created by students of Pembroke Primary School in Mooroolbark Victoria and their families. At this school over half of the student population speak a language other than English at home.

part of the illustration of the city

Imagine This Place

In Imagine This Place readers are asked to think of life as a book and ‘our time together would be just one chapter in a much longer story’. In this imagining, there are chapters that come before, as well as ones that will follow.

Readers are taken to different imagined places – a snowy capped mountainous location, ‘a perplexing place’ of deep outer space, a noisy yet convenient city as well as a living rainforest ‘that connects the past, present and future’.

Personal stories of migration and movement are not a feature of this book - the authors instead invite readers into their project of thinking about place. As readers we are asked to join in, to look around us right now and describe ‘the setting for this chapter in your story’.