John

This is how much of an influence John Marsden had on me – I can’t even start a tribute post without his writing advice popping into my head. Within seconds of me thinking the words ‘It’s hard to know where to start when it comes to John’, his concept of the ‘delete cliché’ button is right there, demanding to be pressed.
 
So I’ll do my best to follow his lead and be honest, direct, unsentimental, and swear liberally.
 
I can’t remember where I was when I first read Tomorrow When the War Began. I can’t even quite remember how old I was. I think I was in year five but honestly it could have been year four or year six. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the case I was probably too young and that’s exactly why it was the right time to read it.
 
What I do remember is how it felt. The book was bracing and scary and brutal and devastating. The whole series was. It burnt itself into my brain and very quickly I was pushing it on everyone else in my year level.
 
To offset any accidental claims about my level of influence - I went to the Mansfield Steiner primary school and there were only nine people in that year level. But soon they were all reading it and soon we were all obsessed. We quizzed each other about minutiae from the books. We shared horror and heartbreak at certain moments. We debated and discussed the characters as though they were real people.
 
They felt like real people. I think that’s a huge part of what made the series so impactful. That you could have somebody like Kevin, nobody’s favourite character, a dickish farm lad who complains and pisses everyone off and yet still gets the job done with brutal determination. Or Chris, the loner poet who can’t cope with the war and ends up the first to die of our heroes – not in battle or a raid or an ambush, but because he drunkenly crashed a car getting more booze. His friends find his twisted, rotting body days later. I’ll remember that scene for the rest of my life.
 
Or Homer, the troublemaker turned leader. Lee, the intense, quiet, mysterious object of affection who proves a little too good at killing. Fi; a dainty princess who is in fact tough as nails. And Robyn. I don’t need to say much about Robyn. If you read the books, you know.
 
But of course it was all about Ellie. John often spoke about how her voice just popped into his head, clear and entirely herself. When you read the books, you believe that. Ellie was irreverent and down to earth and temperamental and stubborn and real.
 
When I learned as a kid that John’s inspiration for Ellie, Charlotte Lindsay, was a Mansfield local, I was starstruck. Charlotte now runs the Ink Bookshop and we’ve become good friends, but part of me remains a little in awe of her. She’s Ellie.
 
The Tomorrow series will always be what John is most famous for, even if it’s far from all he did. There really has never been any other Australian book series like it. It was aimed at teenagers but my Dad read them as fervently as I did. In fact, I’m pretty sure of that Steiner class, most of our parents ended up obsessed.
 
It was different to something like Harry Potter which was huge at the time. We all loved those books but growing up in a small Australian country town meant that a series about Australian country kids fighting back felt uniquely ours. The fictional setting of Wirrawee wasn’t based on anywhere in particular but you didn’t have to squint very much to imagine it as Mansfield. The surrounding mountain ranges, the farms and paddocks out of town, the deep bush where you could easily disappear, the Showgrounds – we had all of those. So did hundreds of other country towns all across Australia. That didn’t stop me secretly being sure that Wirrawee was really Mansfield.
 
John wrote plenty of other books too, and while none would ever reach the same level of success as Tomorrow, many of them packed powerful punches of their own. The ending of Letters from the Inside still haunts me. The Great Gatenby made me laugh a lot. And then there was the non-fiction. Secret Men’s Business was a guidebook to growing up with lessons I still rely on. Marsden on Marsden was like getting a chance to look behind the curtain. For a while there, if I was reading anything there was a good chance that John had written it.
 
What was it that made his work so singular? The characters were a big part of it but that’s rarely enough. There was the action too, sometimes the sex which was a bit alarming and a bit exciting at that age. But I think more than anything it was the honesty. John refused to patronise or censor. He knew his readers were thinking about sex and death and morality and growing up and so he wrote about them without dumbing anything down. I think, in the end, the secret to his brilliance is kind of that simple and that hard to replicate. Very few of us are able to be as honest and articulate and curious as John always was. In writing and in life.
 
Not long after starting high school, I went to John’s writing camp. He ran them out on his Tye Estate, a huge sprawling expanse of bush that is now home to his school Candlebark. This was about as terrifying and surreal to a twelve-year-old me as it was possible for anything to be. I remember arriving with Dad and looking around for our first glimpse of the man himself, only to realise he was already there, deep in casual conversation with kids and parents.
 
He was so unassuming. Even when the first workshop started there was no fanfare. It was just ‘alright, might as well get to it.’ I couldn’t believe he was real but he was.
 
Now here’s the thing I’ll always remember about John – not the writer, but the man.
 
At this time in my life, having just started at a high school that was nowhere near as small or welcoming as the primary I’d known, I was having a pretty rough time. I was a sensitive and creative kid in a place that rewarded neither of those things. I don’t want to either play down or inflate my experiences with bullying. I don’t think they’ve enormously shaped me but nor do I think there was no impact.
 
At the time though, it kind of dominated my life even if I thought it didn’t. After that first workshop I hung around as John packed up, wanting to talk one on one with him. John was friendly and direct, asking me about school and life and as I answered I broke down crying in front of him.
 
He didn’t offer platitudes or overt cooing sympathy. He asked me about it. Calm and reasoned and never less than kind. He listened. He was there.
 
I marvel at that to this day. It still feels embarrassing, to have a moment of such vulnerability in front of someone you admire more than basically anyone else. But he didn’t treat it like that. He just took the time and the care and the patience to hear me when I most needed it.
 
A couple of years ago, John was caught up in a controversy over some comments he’d made about bullying, Every time some holier-than-thou commentator spat and seethed about how John Marsden didn’t care about bullied kids or he thought they deserved it or any other bad faith misreading of his words, it made me want to throw hands. With what limited platform I had I told that story. Not because I wanted to, but because it revolted me that anybody could think that John Marsden of all people didn’t care about struggling kids. Caring about struggling kids was the cornerstone of his whole fucking life’s work. And more than that, it wasn’t just a philosophy he espoused in his writing – it was one that he demonstrated with a lonely crying twelve year old he’d just met.
 
I stayed in touch with John for a while after the camp. I sent him stories I’d written, which he not only read but gave feedback to. It’s only recently I’ve come to fully understand how special that was. I struggle to find the time to read stuff my closest friends send me and I’m not nearly as in demand or well regarded as John was. That John could read the not-very-good work of a kid who had once come to his camp speaks to the man he was.
 
But it also speaks to a truth about John that became clearer with time. He will be remembered for his books. But his true passion and his true life’s work was, I think, education. He was a teacher before he was an author and in his last years he went back to education, founding an alternative school on his own property. I’m not convinced John ever quite cared about his writing as much as he cared about the impact he could have on young people. There’s a well known story about how whenever John would visit schools, he would wait until every kid had a chair and was sitting on his level. He wouldn’t run the workshop if they had to sit on the floor. John’s philosophy was one of mutual respect. But part of respecting someone means being willing to tell them things they don’t want to hear. I think that’s why he got in trouble as often as he did.
 
I lost touch with John over the years, both as a writer and as a mentor. I think the last I spoke to him was when I sent him a copy of my badly self-published first book. True to form, John replied with a copy of his own latest book. I think he was sent The Hunted when it came out, but I don’t know if he ever read it. I hope he did but honestly I doubt he would have remembered me. I went to his camp in 2003 - by 2020, I can’t even imagine how many kids had been taught by him.
 
Last night, I heard the news that John passed away. It was a punch to the gut. I wondered if I had any right to feel grief, given how long it had been since I spoke to him. I wondered if sharing my personal story would be somewhat exaggerating what small relationship I did have with him.
 
And then I saw the posts. From so many of my author friends. Photos of them with John as kids and adults. Stories of the impact he’d had. And I realised something.
 
My relationship with John Marsden meant the world to me, but it wasn’t special or unique because John had those connections with so, so many people. He changed countless lives. And isn’t that just fucking incredible? To think that he could shape me, creatively and personally in ways that still stick with me, and I was just one of thousands?
 
Think about that impact.
 
That’s who John was. There was nobody else like him. I don’t think there will be again. There will be lots of articles proclaiming that we have lost a titan of Australian literature. And we have, even if I think John would have raised a bemused eyebrow at being referred to that way.
 
But what we’ve really lost is far more incalculable than someone who wrote a few good stories. The stories were never the most important thing to him. That they were as good as they were despite the fact just illustrates his brilliance.
 
John Marsden was one of the bestselling authors in Australian history. He wrote books that were beloved by millions, that were made into films and TV shows. He could have left it there and it would have been more than enough. But he cared too much to leave it there.
 
Thank you for everything John. You were my hero as a writer. You became my hero as a person.
 
Thank you. 

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