Vale John Marsden

I met John Marsden in 2008 at Melbourne Writers Festival. I nervously stammered out a request for him to sign my copy of So Much To Tell You. I had a first edition hardcover that had held an honoured place on my bookshelf since my first year of high school. I have it still. I was able to tell him what that book had meant to me as an awkward bookish adolescent, and how seen I felt by his writing.

John Marsden’s ability to understand and describe the inner lives of teenagers was one of the talents that garnered him millions of readers. Who could doubt the impact and reach of the Tomorrow series, which stands in a very small list of Australian young adult novels that most Australian adults of a certain age could instantly name.

Even beyond the exploits of the iconic Ellie and her friends, John’s novels for teens were suffused with empathy and heart for the adolescent experience, its inherent loneliness and painfulness. In his writing, I always found a deep respect for the lasting emotional wounds teenagers suffer which other adults blithely dismiss with a “you’ll grow out of it.” John seemed to understand that, while inherent to the process of maturation, the slings and arrows of adolescence weren’t something to leave behind, they were the building blocks of character.

I devoured the Tomorrow books like so many peers. The stakes for his characters could not be higher – physical danger, of course, in a rural Australian landscape ravaged by war, but also emotional jeopardy, in which failure to make a truce with loss, grief and shame might render life unliveable. Marsden allowed his young characters to be flawed and vulnerable, even unlikeable, but he also imbued them with independence and capability and daring.

This respect for risk-taking and its importance to resilience carried through into John’s education philosophies as a school founder and principal. He wrote about the need to encourage young people to contend with risk in context, to get a bit scuffed up and to find the inner resources come through it, not unscathed, but okay. John’s life project, it seemed, was not to quarantine or inoculate or isolate our children away from suffering, but to help them learn how to be okay.

John Marsden’s career was not without controversy. His public dismissal of school bullying as “peer feedback” aroused passionate condemnation. At times his rosy-eyed view of what a childhood should be seemed moored in an earlier time which could not contemplate the complexities of digitally-mediated friendships and global media saturation. One speculates he would be heartily in favour of the upcoming ban on under-16 use of social media.

At the heart of his writing, was a deep sense of justice on behalf of teenagers and an unflinching awareness of the ways adults manage, regularly, to mess them up. “We kill all the caterpillars and complain there are no butterflies,” he wrote in The Dead of Night, the second book of the Tomorrow series. Whether as author or educator, John always championed young people as whole individuals with rich inner worlds who deserve agency, understanding and compassion.

I am sad we have lost him. 74 is young when there are yet more books to write. John Marsden will remain an icon of Australian literature whose legacy is to leave generations of readers with a determination to keep their hearts open, even when it hurts.

Kate Eltham

Chair, LoveOzYA