Australia’s Children’s Book Week is celebrating its 80th year in style, with children donning their best costumes for the traditional parade in schools across the country.

The event has the theme “Book an Adventure”. It is run by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, which has been promoting literacy and reading for children since the end of the second world war.

Book Week began in 1945 when a group of women wanted to raise the profile of Australian children’s literature, according to Jo Panckridge of the Children’s Book Council.

“These ladies, way back in the 1940s, started working to encourage authors and illustrators to write books that would resonate with Australian children,” Panckridge said.

“We’d had so many English books up until then coming into Australia so they felt that children needed to know a little bit more about their country, their culture and the things that resonated with them.”

But Book Week has a special importance in the 21st century: in 2023 the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 76% of children aged between five and eight read for pleasure but just 63% of those aged 12 to 14 did the same.

“Book Week is a celebration of the best Australian literature, it’s a celebration of reading, a celebration of the joy of being able to read in this country and to encourage and advocate reading for pleasure and reading books to children,” Panckridge said.

“Book an Adventure” was chosen as the theme this year because “with books, a reader can venture anywhere at anytime and can meet any number of people from the past to the future and the present without ever leaving their bedroom”, Panckridge said.

Elijah Wood has said that his salary for The Lord of the Rings movies was “not massive” and that appearing in the films was “a real gamble”.

According to a report in Business Insider, which carried quotes from the star at the Texas film awards in March, Wood said the fact that the actors had to sign up for all three films at the start meant that their fees were not related to the film’s financial success. “Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life.”

Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the trilogy of films directed by Peter Jackson and adapted from the epic novels by JRR Tolkien, said the actors understood the significance of the project. “The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives for ever.”

It has been previously suggested that Wood earned about $250,000 (£190,000) for the first film, but the actor told Business Insider that this figure was not accurate and that “it doesn’t matter”.

The size of the fees paid to the cast of The Lord of the Rings compared to stars of other Hollywood movies has often been noted, with Cate Blanchett, who played the elf Galadriel in the series, saying on the Watch What Happens Live talk show in 2024 that she “basically got free sandwiches” and “no one got paid anything”. Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas, said in 2019 that he had been paid $175,000 for all three films, while Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) said he got $250,000.

Released between 2001 and 2003, Jackson’s three-film series grossed $2.96bn at the worldwide box office, with a reported budget of $281m.