Vale John Marsden

20 December 2024

We were all saddened to hear of the death of John Marsden. He was certainly the greatest Australian writer of books for adolescents in my lifetime.

I knew him well. He was in my class at boarding school and we were in the debating team together and rivals for the oratory prize. He was a day boy.

He used to wait at the bus stop and talk to the more junior boys there. This was thought of as a bit unusual. No one usually took an interest in kids younger than themselves. Older kids usually went to the library and only appeared just before the bus went. He also did not catch the first available bus, but stayed at the bus stop talking- not many people realised that. It was not until years later that the reason became known to some.

His father hit him frequently and he did not want to go home. Years later he told the story that he had been sitting on his mother’s knee when he was quite young and she had asked him. ‘Do you love me?’ He had replied ‘I don’t know’, and she promptly pushed him off her knees onto the floor. The idea that the question needed to be asked is so odd that the reply becomes less so. There is no doubt that his childhood was very unhappy.

We went out one evening to a debate and came home by train. Some of our group smoked and then when he got home he unfortunately hung his coat over a chair and the cigarette packet came tumbling out. His father gave him a beating as usual, and insisted that all his friends, i.e.us, come to the car park to be ticked off by his father or he would take the matter to the Headmaster- a very serious matter at that time. His father duly drove up, wound the window down and berated us, standing in the car park. John was quietly dying of embarrassment but, hey, that was life at school. But while we were thinking about getting away from school and its problems, he was thinking about how things could be better and talking to kids at their level about their issues. He understood adolescent kids because he talked to them a lot.

He left home soon after he left school and had some years of financial and personal hardship, with some of the parents of his schoolmates helping him.

I lost track of him for some years, as neither he nor I were very active in the old boys for a long time as he had moved to Melbourne. I had become aware of his writing and read ‘Letters from the Inside’, the correspondence between two 15 year old girls who start as pen pals. One is in gaol, though it is not clear why, and the other lives in fear of a violent brother. The fact that he could write so credibly from the perspective of adolescent girls was quite extraordinary, and he left readers tantalised at the end. He met my son when he was just a baby but later my son became a huge fan of his Tomorrow series. He was so enthusiastic about John’s book that his teacher credited him with getting the whole class to read it.

John stopped writing to set up his school, funded considerably from his book royalties and embodying the ideas he had developed from looking at the dysfunctions that he had experienced and the successes he believed were possible.

When John came back as the honoured speaker at a school reunion I caught up with him, which was great. He was working very hard, running the school that he had started with a skeleton administrative staff, and all the while writing to the people who wrote to him, answering their questions, helping them with their fears and firing them with his enthusiasm. But he was still smoking and it had taken some toll of his health so (as usual) I urged him to Quit and put in place a succession plan at the school. He did those things, though I do not claim it was due to my urgings.

I had always had the dream that I would go to his school and teach for a while, things that kids are not taught these days, perhaps in the time after exams when the kids are merely filling in time waiting for the Christmas holidays, or speaking at a speech day. Sadly, it never happened. When I went to Melbourne, it was either term time and he was too busy, or holidays when he went away.

He died suddenly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, so this will not happen now. As we get older, we need to be more urgent with our intents.

Fortunately he will have many friends and many writers able to give credit to his greatness, but also to understand and express his warmth and his humility.