Book Week Virtual Event: Pop-up Poetry

Join Museums of History NSW and Story Factory Digital for Book Week 2024 and learn how to create poems that add a little magic to the world.

During this virtual event, students will be introduced to convict love tokens and prompted to create powerful written messages of their own.

Love tokens are small keepsakes in the form of a message or symbol carved onto a coin that convicts gave to their loved ones before they were transported to NSW. The token symbolised the moment of separation, and each one was also a small act of rebellion – by destroying a coin, the convicts were breaking the law (again! what cheeky rascals!).

Drawing on these objects and the personal stories of real convicts, students will explore the power of words and learn how to create a poem of their own. Like the convicts who concealed objects in hidey-holes around the Hyde Park Barracks where they were discovered decades later by archaeologists, students will then be encouraged to place their poem somewhere for others to find, read and perhaps be transformed by. Their words will act as spells, adding a little magic to the world as part of Book Week 2024.

You will need:

• Pen or pencil
• A printed copy of the Pop-up poetry worksheets (PDF)
• A surface to write on (desk or clipboard)