‘Live in the light, but carry the dark’: John Marsden’s books are his legacy – but so is his empathy

Celebrated author and educator John Marsden, best known for his dystopian young adult Tomorrow series, has died aged 74.

The bestselling author of more than 40 books, Marsden spent his early years in country Victoria and Tasmania, before moving to Sydney when he was ten. There, he attended the strict Kings School, where he “got in endless trouble” as a secondary student and “defied every rule and regulation”.

His difficult early life seemed to feed into his work as a writer and teacher of young people, including founding two alternative schools in Victoria: Candlebark, a prep to year seven school, in Romsey (founded in 2006), and a secondary school, the Alice Miller School in Macedon (in 2016).

Reflecting on the Tomorrow series, which has sold millions of copies worldwide, he wrote,

I resented the control adults had over my life. I got sick of being told what to do and when to do it, what not to do and how I should be. I daydreamed occasionally of a world where the adults miraculously disappeared.

In his books, he was able to give licence to his daydreams.

‘He helped me understand’

I read his early novels in high school. Those were the days when friends passed books around, before phones. I can picture the bedroom where I encountered So Much To Tell You (1987), about a traumatised teen who confronts her wounds through writing a diary – and the friend who owned it, whose own family life had splinters of darkness.

But 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.

Like Marsden, I look at young people, whether they’re my characters, my children or my students, and I see their strengths. I listen to them and hear the stories beneath their stories, their incredible capacity for survival. He helped me understand what young-adult fiction could do to counteract negative or cynical stories about “young people today”.

Alice Pung, Marsden’s friend and fellow young-adult author, wrote today:

John was an introvert – sometimes could barely look another adult in the eye – but when he spoke to young people it was truly transformative: he wiped the boredom from their faces.

After a “lonely and disturbing” time during his first stint at university (he dropped out of four different degrees before studying teaching), Marsden spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

“I was really illiterate, emotionally, and that was a product of family and school,” he reflected in 2018. He began his teaching career aged 28, starting his degree eight years after leaving the hospital.

Stories as a form of resistance

Marsden was an English teacher when he set himself the goal of writing his first novel in three weeks. In So Much To Tell You, Marina is an elective mute who has suffered severe trauma. Her voice is restored through the keeping of a diary, at the suggestion of her English teacher. The book won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award in 1988.

This motif of characters taking their narratives into their own hands, through letters or a diary, recurs throughout Marsden’s work. Books like Letters from the Inside (1991), Checkers (1996) and Dear Miffy (1997) use this form to present the inner worlds of characters whose narration of their own stories becomes a form of resistance.

In the Tomorrow series, the novels are narrated by Ellie, chosen by the group for her strength as a writer, to keep the record of what happens next.

The first Tomorrow novel, Tomorrow When the War Began, was released in 1993. Marsden follows a thought experiment. A group of kids are on a camping trip when their country town is taken over by an invading force. These country kids use their resourcefulness and knowledge of the landscape to fight back and free their families. By putting agency and action in the hands of kids, questions of ethics and morality become fluid – and the philosophy, rather than politics of war becomes the focus.

The Tomorrow series was translated into multiple languages. The books shaped the reading appetites of more than one generation of young people, starting with my own. The first novel was adapted into a movie in 2010, and a television miniseries in 2016, bringing the series to new readers.

The series has been criticised for contributing to xenophobia through its invasion narrative. But Marsden has said this was not his intention, and that he wouldn’t write the books now due to “horror at the way refugees who have come to Australia have been treated”. The capacity for teenagers to survive and thrive against the odds, to care for each other and put others lives before their own, resonated in his work.

As one of his characters, Chris, writes in book two, The Dead of the Night: “I live in the light / but carry the dark in me”. In her book, On John Marsden, Alice Pung notes: “A young adult has to spend some time in the dark to have sharper vision”.

Invitations to think deeply

Marsden also wrote a number of books for younger readers. His arresting 2008 picture book The Rabbits, with illustrator Shaun Tan, connects a history of colonisation to environmental devastation. Tan describes it as “an invitation to think deeply” about who we are and who we might become.

Marsden’s work offers no easy answers, but it regularly asks us to look closely at things we might want to turn away from.

Marsden’s philosophies of children’s literature carry over into the schools he established. In a promotional video for the Alice Miller school, Marsden reminds us adolescence is not just a time of academic learning, but of intellectual growth – as well as social and emotional growth.

The schools foster students’ sense of self-efficacy. An overnight camping trip at the Alice Miller school sees students heading out into the bush on their own to cook dinner, sleep in a tent and make their own way back. This stands in stark contrast to a risk averse, overprotective adult culture that wants to protect children from difficulty, both in real life and in fiction.

Marsden expanded on these philosophies in books like The Art of Growing Up (2019) and Take Risks: Raising Kids Who Love the Adventure of Life (2021).

In 2018, he called running a school “probably the most intense and complicated job I’ve had in my life”.

Feeling the full range of stuff

In Marsden on Marsden (2000), he talks about first encountering a girl like Marina in So Much to Tell You during his stint in a psychiatric hospital. He, too, experienced “time in the dark”.

Sometimes characters give us writers a chance to rehearse how we make sense of a life. As Marsden’s own creation, Ellie, says:

Life’s about a hell of a lot more than being happy. It’s about feeling the full range of stuff: happiness, sadness, anger, grief, love, hate. If you try to shut one of those off, you shut them all off. I don’t want to be happy.

She continues:

I want more than that, something richer. I want to go right up close to the beauty and the ugliness. I want to see it all, know it all, understand it all. The richness and the poverty, the joy and the cruelty, the sweetness and the sadness.

Marsden spent his writing and teaching life looking right up close at the beauty and the ugliness. When politicians, teachers or media wanted to paint teenagers as lazy or soft, he saw their extraordinary capacity for feeling and action.

His legacy will live on in Ellie, Marina and all his creations, as his books continue to be read and lived through by generations to come.

This post was originally published on here