The Dead Bones Society, a series of “comedy horror” workshops aimed at gifted nine to twelve year old boys, has won a NSW 2007 Local Government Cultural Award. The workshops, which take place after-hours at the Australian Fossil and Mineral Museum in Bathurst, are run by Charles Sturt University (CSU) tutor and literacy consultant Paul Stafford and mentored by male teacher education students from CSU. Mr Stafford describes the Society as a “secret club. Boys love the idea of a creepy old museum at night”. Scott Bell, a fourth year primary education student at CSU said he could see the boys’ self-esteem building over the course of the workshops. “To put it bluntly, reading and writing are considered by many boys to be girly, so these were boys who can be picked on because they like to read, but it was a good blokey environment where their writing styles improved. It pushed them into deeper levels of creative writing.”