The Chronicles of John

There is no doubt that John Marsden's resume would be a document to behold. He has written thirty-five books, including the popular Tomorrow Series, he is Australia's best-selling author for teenagers and has won numerous literary awards. He is also a teacher, an influence on the careers of many authors and has a reputation as an educational visionary.

This year John opened a school, teaching prep to Year 7, on his property near Melbourne, where he is both the school's principal and a full-time teacher. With the release of the final installment in the Ellie Chronicles, Circle of Flight, John took time out from his busy schedule to chat with Karin van Heerwaarden.

Your first novel was published almost twenty years ago after having worked in a variety of jobs. When did you first start thinking of yourself as a writer?
Grade 4, when I was nine years old I suppose. We had a class newspaper and I found it very exhilarating to write things and get them published in the class newspaper so that was when I first realised the power of writing I suppose. And then I started to think I'd like to be an author and just became aware of that whole process.

Tell me about Candlebark, the school you opened on your property earlier this year.
Well, it's the most exciting thing I've ever done I suppose. It's just great. I really wanted to test all the theories I had about education … and it just seemed to click from the first day. And I guess more than anything I wanted to prove that if you treated children well and courteously and decently then you really wouldn't have any problems with them and, more than that, if you provided a really enriching and exciting curriculum and great teachers you'd just be blazing away at record speed. That's how it's pretty much been.

If you could change one thing about the Australian education system what would it be?
Space. I think what I'd do is close down all the golf courses and convert them into schools so that each school has about five acres; if you've got a 1,000 kids, five acres is kind of a minimum. Schools are so crowded that's there's constant tensions and conflicts and people just running into each other, literally and metaphorically. They crowd each other, they jostle each other, they get in each other's way, they annoy each other. And here, [at Candlebark] to see them running around with heaps of space, it's amazing because it produces straightaway an atmosphere of good will and diffuses all of those tense situations.

Circle of Flight is the last book in The Ellie Chronicles. Is this the last we'll see of Ellie and her friends?
Yeah, absolutely. Postively, Definitely. I love writing about her but there comes a time when you've got to move on.

When you sat down to write an episode in The Tomorrow Series or The Ellie Chronicles what did you do to get inside the head of Ellie?
I never had a problem doing that. I think once I get the voice of a character I can stay in that voice as long as I need to. Getting the voice can take months or years and that’s just a mental game or a brain thing where somehow I have to be able to take on the language of the character and once I've done that I feel I've captured the essence of the person. And that can happen quite suddenly or it can be fairly difficult. In the case of Ellie it happened quite suddenly but after the idea being in my mind for many years. Gradually she evolved and one day she started talking and at that moment I started writing.

What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Opening the school for sure.

How has your writing process changed since you first began writing?
I feel I write much more tightly now; I'm much more aware of language. I use language much better than I did in my first novels. The process I don’t think has changed, I've just learnt heaps. Stuff that used to be intuitive I'm now more consciously aware of. And I use a computer now.

What are you reading at the moment?
Heaps of stuff. Rereading Summerhill by AS Neill which is a seminal text about alternative education. The other day I finished that Booker listed one by Hyland. It's great; what a writer. It's only her second novel; I'm just getting the total of it. It's disturbing; it's not a comfortable read. The authenticity of it was beyond question. Carry Me Down it was called. The other one I've started reading is sort of outside my normal genre, it's called Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, a fantasy for adolescents. It's really good; it's really poetic and quite rich, so far.

You've been shortlisted for this year's Melbourne Prize for Literature however you're not interested in awards. In the event that you win will it cause you any conflict to accept the prize?
I'm interested in this one. There's only been a couple of awards in my life that I've really cared about and this is one of them because it's for a body of work, it's not just for one book. By the same token this award I got the other day, the Lloyd O'Neil award, was equally meaningful for me because it wasn't for the one book it was for a whole lot of stuff.

[The Melbourne Prize for Literature, announced on November 15, went to Helen Garner.]

Are you working on a new book currently?
Yeah, I'm playing around with something I started about six or eight years ago and I just revisit it occasionally between books and write a bit more and I really like it. I'm really enjoying it and I'm really having fun with it. I'll keep doing that but in a much less intense way than I usually do because there just isn't time. Maybe at Christmas I'll give it a decent shot.

Karin van Heerwaarden

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John Marsden - interview

Book: Circle of Flight
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Price: $29.95

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