The much loved Australian author of young adult classics. He was a truck driver, then an English teacher, a very successful writer, and the principal of two schools he founded. He was highly influential in Australian literature and education, and was a strong advocate for teenagers throughout his life.
Marsden's family moved around when he was growing up, and he spent time in both Tasmania and in Sydney, where he attended The King's School. His education was a mixed experience, and he talked about both teachers who inspired him, and others who bullied and discouraged him. He experienced mental illness as a young man, and became a truck driver. He then studied to become an English teacher and by all accounts was That English Teacher Who Changed Your Life.
While teaching, John decided it was time he actually finished writing a novel, and set himself a challenge to write daily, and delete nothing until the book was finished. It worked. His first novel, So Much To Tell You is the story of a traumatised teenager who keeps a journal at her new boarding school. The book was a huge success with teens, teachers and parents. Forty years later it is still a powerful book, honest and urgent and raw.
Common features in John's novels are young female protagonists telling their stories in the first person, sometimes through letters or diaries. In the 80s and 90s they were somewhat controversial because no subjects were off limits. The teenagers in his books talk about, live with, and deal with sex, love, drugs, friendships, families, mental illness, self harm, death, and war. John's belief that teenagers are capable of dealing with life and literature shines through his books: he never used his fiction to moralise, he never shied away from writing frankly about difficult topics, and he didn't try to sugarcoat life. While his books are usually uplifting, and encouraging, they aren't wrapped up neatly into happy endings. Sometimes terrible things happen to good people, to characters you love. Sometimes characters have impossible decisions to make, and they don't always get it right. Sometimes there is no real ending, and he leaves the reader to figure things out for themselves. Throughout his life, John's conviction that teenagers should be trusted to handle things for themselves, and that modern parenting is overprotective, led to both great books and upset adults.
Marsden's most successful books are the series that began in the 90s with Tomorrow, When the War Began, which grew to seven main books and a number of followup volumes. This series centres on a group of teens who are out camping when Australia is invaded, thereby escaping being rounded up with the rest of the town, and their experiences as guerilla fighters. This series was wildly popular through the late 90s. Long before Australian teenagers had heard of Harry Potter, there were queues of kids at bookshops on release day, and the seventh and final book in the Tomorrow series was such a huge event that it doesn't even have the title on the cover (come to think of it, I can't tell you the title off the top of my head). At the time, the series was criticised in some quarters as being too violent and morally ambiguous for teenagers. More recently, it has been criticised for xenophobia/racism: while it made narrative sense to have the invaders be an unnamed but geographically close Asian neighbour, racism by white Australians against Asian people has always been really bad, and he later acknowledged that the books in that context did hurt people.
A common theme in criticism of John's views was that he had no children of his own, and therefore had no grounds to offer advice to parents. Okay, look, that's a fair point to make - I'm a parent now, and I can't tell you how bloody annoyed I get when childless people try to offer advice on baby care. But while John didn't have kids, he spent his life listening to kids, and had a rare ability to empathise with and see life through the eyes of teenagers, and back when I was a teenager, every time he offered a controversial view I was firmly on his side - he didn't have kids but he got what it was like to be a teenager in a way very few adults ever do. He met us where we were. Once, when he gave me a copy of a book I already owned, I asked him to sign this one for my sister, so she would give my copy back, and she could keep the signed one. John asked her name and signed the book:
"Dear Themis,Give Nemosyn her book back - now!Best wishes,John"
Pretty sure my sister has never forgiven either of us.
Even after he left teaching to write full time, John continued to have a deep drive to help kids learn - learn to read, learn to write, learn to be in the world, learn to be themselves. He published a few nonfiction books on topics including general knowledge, writing, teaching and adulting. In later years he published more for younger children, collaborating with some very gifted illustrators on picture books.
When John achieved financial success as a bestselling author, he bought The Tye Estate, a property near Romsey, Victoria, where he initially taught writing workshops. The property, a large and largely untouched piece of bushland, had belonged to a wealthy Victorian family who used it as a holiday home through the early part of the twentieth century. It was eventually gifted to a charity, who built holiday barracks and a hall, and had camps and vacations for deaf and blind children. When John bought the property, he had plans to use the barracks accommodation to host camps for kids who would come to spend time in the bush, playing games and writing. He had a small but functioning farm on the property, growing fruit and vegetables, and regularly had visiting backpackers to stay and work on the farm and the camp kitchen.
For many years John hosted writing camps for school groups and adults, and spent many evenings with his guests in the large communal hall in front of a roaring fire, sharing stories and playing games he had invented or collected using the boxes of scrabble tiles he kept on the mantelpiece (the game now sold as Bananagrams was one I initially learnt from John as Take Two). A deeply introverted man, and socially a bit awkward, John spent more time listening than talking except in the classroom, where he transformed into a passionate, articulate, charismatic leader, who had - forgive me - so much to tell you, and every word was worth listening to.
He wrote a number of books on the property, notably Winter. When I visited The Tye Estate I spent several hours tramping along dirt tracks at his direction, to read each chapter in the place where it was set. For chapter three, he said, I would have to be awake early and head back down the driveway:
"The time was around 6.45....I went through the front door and down the hill, across the drive I'd come up last night with Ralph. the old fountain was still there but I through there'd been a statue of a lady on it, a lady with an umbrella. She'd gone now, maybe folded her umbrella and snuck away to a new home..."
Anyone can read Breakfast At Tiffany's outside Tiffany's, but to sit on a log by a creek in the stillness of a winter morning, sent on my own little adventure by the author, was a magical and somehow intimate experience.
John eventually opened a primary school on the property, of which he was the principal, with a focus on encouraging students to develop independence and resilience through outdoor play, adventures in nature, and self-reliance. Soon after he opened a high school nearby. Both schools have been very successful, and I wish I lived close enough to send my own kid there.
Late in life, John married Kristin, and through her became stepdad to six boys.
With two schools, a wife and a large family, John wrote less in his later years, however Tomorrow, When the War Began was made into both a movie and a TV series and was quite successful in those formats. While the popularity of his books has faded as his original fans grew up, they remain firm favourites with Australian kids, and his books are now considered classics.
News of John Marsden's death in late 2024 generated an unusually large number of articles in newpapers and opinion sites in Australia. Marsden won awards, broke new ground, sold millions of books, but above all he connected with generations of Australian kids, and Australian writers. All the articles I read - and I read a lot - all said much the same thing I did below in my 2018 update to the original writeup: John Marsden's books helped me to grow up as a better person, and then John helped me become the writer I am today.
Update 29 September 2018
Not very long after I wrote the original writeup, and barely out of my teens, I spent a glorious weekend at a writing workshop at John's rural property down in Victoria. He was a fantastic host and one of the best teachers I ever had. I never wrote about it because it seemed to big, too meaningful, to commit to paper, a moment of huge significance in my journey into adulthood. Nothing particularly interesting happened, except in my own head.
Looking back though, there were a couple of things that still stand out and are worth sharing, I think, with anyone who wanders past to read it. The first was that John writes so well because he listens so well. He really, deeply listens to people. I've tried to do that in my own life. I don't know if it has made me a better writer, but it has certainly made me a better person.
The second which I share here purely for any like minded Marsden fans. I begged him to tell me what happened to Mandy and Tracy. I may have had tears in my eyes. If you read it you'll know why. "Nemosyn," he said, "you already know what happened."
Update 15 March 2025
Writeup completely overhauled and expanded after John's death.