“Well hello, Imagination Library graduates.”
Dolly Parton’s unmistakable easy southern drawl rings out from parents’ laptops as excitable five-year olds enjoy a video message from a grandmotherly figure they know as ‘The Book Lady’.
Thanks to the Imagination Library, children have been captivated by Dolly Parton for decades, without any knowledge of her redheaded rival Jolene, her stint as one-third of a workplace coup, or the 3,000-plus songs she wrote in her lifetime.
“This may be your last book from my Imagination Library, but you have to promise me you will keep on reading,” Parton continues with her homespun charm. “Every book is a treasure, and every time you open one up, you’ll meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.”
This week the world mourns the passing of Parton, with tributes pouring in for the long-time Queen of Country Music. But for 30 years, Parton’s legacy has extended beyond the rhinestones, honky-tonks and heart-swelling key change, to also quietly instilling a love of reading in preschoolers around the world.
“There is no time limit to what you can do or how far you can go. You are terrific and remember that I will always love you,” she continues in her trademark playful sparkle that lit up the Grand Ole Opry.
“It’s the book lady, signing off.”
Parton grew up in extreme poverty in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children to her parents Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton. Parton adored her dad, describing him as “the smartest man I’ve ever known” with a good head for numbers.
However, he never learned to read or write after leaving school at a young age to work to help support his family. “I knew in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from seeing all his dreams come true,” Parton said on social media.”Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission.”
In 1995, Parton launched The Imagination Library in her home county of Sevier, Tennessee to ensure all little children could enjoy the magic of books no matter their circumstances.
Today, the Imagination Library has spread to five countries (including Australia) and has gifted almost 320 million books. Every 1.3 seconds, a child somewhere in the world receives a free book from Parton.
Currently in Australia there are 50,000 children on the program and over 1,100 of those are in Macquarie Park and surrounding suburbs.
The impact of this on children’s lives has been substantial, and thanks to a world-first study by Macquarie University alum Dr Claire Galea , Parton lived to see just how life-changing her program was.
“The real heroes of our story are the thousands of local organisations who have embraced my dream and made it their own,” reads a letter from Parton on the program website. “They raise millions of dollars each year and wake up every day with a passion to make sure their kids have every opportunity to succeed.”
In Australia, these heroics began with United Way Australia (UWA), the local arm of the largest privately funded not-for-profit charity in the world, which launched the program in regional NSW city of Tamworth.
The city, dubbed the country music capital of Australia, holds an official sister-city bond with Parton’s adopted hometown of Nashville and hosted Parton herself on her last Australian tour in 2014. In 2019, Tamworth Regional Council became the first in Australia to enrol every child born from that year onwards. Uptake reached 98 per cent.
Watching all of it was Dr Claire Galea: statistician, impact analyst and PhD candidate in Macquarie’s School of Psychological Sciences. With funding from UWA, Dr. Galea became the first academic anywhere to formally evaluate what the program was doing to children and families, beginning with Tamworth’s 2,600+ enrolled children.
Her first longitudinal study found Tamworth children were read to more often, for longer, and had more books at home than the average Australian child. Caregivers reading daily were nearly five times more likely to still be doing it years on. Children read to daily, at three years, showed stronger emerging literacy skills.
“Everybody asks me, but what makes it work? It’s a book a month, every month,” Dr. Galea said. “It doesn’t matter where the child lives. It doesn’t matter the socioeconomic deprivation; it doesn’t matter the caregiver’s education. The program just works.”
The numbers describe reading. What Dr. Galea keeps returning to is belonging.
“Tamworth parents and teachers are telling us how the library encourages friendships,” she said of her early findings. “In their first week of preschool, all the kids got a book called Big Brown Bear, and all the children were reenacting the story in the playground.
“It doesn’t matter where you’ve come from or what you do. If you’ve read the same book, you’ve both been to the same place,” Dr. Galea said. “It creates a level playing field.”
Going global, however, required Macquarie to commit to something no Australian university had granted: global, high-risk ethics approval. Without that, Dr. Galea says, the industry partnership with the US-based Dollywood Foundation would not have happened.
It took 300 hours, a series of presentations, and a written statement from the Dollywood Foundation’s president, but the process paved the way for the whole future of industry partnerships at Macquarie.
In 2025, Dr. Galea released a new survey of 86,206 caregivers across five countries, revealing that after just 10 books, children in the program were at least four times more likely to show stronger emerging literacy skills. They were nine times more likely to be read to four or more days a week, and 15 times more likely to join in during shared reading.
This study is currently the largest dataset in the world on shared book reading in the home, and Dr. Galea’s findings are now core global messaging for the Imagination Library, presented everywhere from library conferences to the US Senate.
Living down a 15km dirt road, reading to her daughter over breakfast and breaking in horses in her spare time, Dr. Galea never envisioned she’d be working in a paddock one morning, and flying out to present at the World Literacy Summit by afternoon.
Today, she is Head of Research at UWA, and her research team is, in its entirety, are Macquarie alumni. Each has multiple manuscripts in peer review.
Their work is expanding to Benalla in Victoria, to South Australia with Raising Literacy Australia, and to new partnerships with The Smith Family. Internationally, a research collaborative now spans 12 universities, with the UK’s national conference in September and interest from Oxford, the University of Tennessee and the University of Birmingham.
“Together we can inspire Australia’s children to dream more, learn more, care more, and be more,” Parton said at the Tamworth launch of the Imagination Library. Or, as she put it in her open letter to communities everywhere – the first step is always the hardest, but you’ll never know unless you try.
“Keep reading and remember – I will always love you.”
