Award-winning Australian author John Marsden, best known for his multimillion-selling Tomorrow series, has died aged 74.
Dr Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, Literary Studies, Faculty of Arts
Contact: +61 423 873 770 or [email protected]
Comments attributable to Dr Russon:
“It was the Tomorrow series that hooked me: afternoons spent as a 20-something in the
Northcote library, reading compulsively. As a children’s writer and creative writing teacher,
I’ve tried to stay loyal to that young-adult self, who couldn’t stop turning the pages. He
helped me understand what young-adult fiction could do to counteract negative or cynical
stories about 'young people today'.
“Marsden’s Tomorrow books emerged during the golden age of Australian YA (Young Adult), published around the same time as Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi and Maureen McCarthy’s Queen Cat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life. This was before The Hunger Games and John Green, when Australian writers were pushing boundaries and basically inventing a new genre.
“He didn’t try to untangle the complexity of Australian society. He saw how things were
related: colonialism and environmental destruction in The Rabbits, the ongoing
accountability of settler-colonials, and he didn’t back off from that.
“More complex was the empathetic characterisation in the Tomorrow series of Lee (whose parents are from Vietnam and Thailand) and the way Marsden articulates the racism and cultural pressures he faces, alongside the shadowy threat of an unnamed invading force from a neighbouring country that resonates with Pauline Hanson’s politics of racial paranoia and retains shades of Menzies’ yellow peril.
“Marsden himself was later uncomfortable about these contradictions, though he pointed out that war was a useful device in fiction for putting young people under pressure and seeing how they would cope. In the end, part of the respect of writing for young people is leaving those contradictions with them for them to untangle.’’
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