Rani's Sketchbook

Ian Cameron

a screenplay

Seventeen-year-old, Rani, born to Vietnamese parents in a small regional town on Australia's east coast, attends her local high school and works, part time in her parents' restaurant. Seen as different and with a life narrowed by the limitations of school and work, she creates a private world through her extraordinary talent as a sketch artist. However, when a simple school research assignment sends her to the local nursing home, a new world opens. Rani meets eighty-year-old, wheelchair bound David, a long-retired teacher of English literature. It is here that friendship, tragedy and a love of art and literature allows both to explore meaning and to discover the power and beauty of difference.

 

About the Author

Ian Cameron was born in the Northern Rivers of NSW in 1955. He grew up in Manly on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, enjoying what he calls “the halcyon days of 1970s surfing.” He studied at Macquarie University, the University of Sydney, and RMIT, and went on to teach English and History in NSW, as well as in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He later became a lecturer in Education, working in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and across coastal Australia. Ian spent six memorable years living and working in Vietnam. He now resides with his wife, Thuy, in Ballina, on the land of the Bundjalung people.
Rani’s Sketchbook is his debut publication.