For a generation of Australians who grew up in the 90s, John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began series was a rite of passage. Told through the eyes of 16-year-old Ellie, the series begins when a group of teenagers go on a camping trip without their parents: a liberation younger readers could only dream of. Over a week spent in the idyllic bushland, they tell stories, explore crushes, vie over friendships. But, when they return home, Australia has been invaded and their families taken prisoner. They are now at war.
My friends and I immersed ourselves in these books, gathering at the start of each new school day to discuss each character development and plot twist. If one best friend got ahead of another, they were instructed to stop and wait. For many, it was our first encounter with sex – I still remember balancing a friend’s copy of that book on its spine and watching her face turn a rosy red as it fell open to the most-thumbed over page: that scene between Ellie and Lee.
The series makes its televisual debut on Saturday, in an adaptation for the ABC set in the modern day. As a new generation is introduced to this group of friends, Guardian Australia staff look back on the books they grew up with.
Elle Hunt: I wrote a spin-off series to Animal Ark
From about the age of eight I devoured the Animal Ark series about Mandy, the wholesome daughter of two country vets, and her animal-related adventures with her best friend, James. Defined by their alliterative titles – Kittens in the Kitchen, Pony on the Porch, Puppies in the Pantry etc (an exception was made for the Australian special edition, Koalas in a Crisis, which I remember thinking was a cop-out at the time) – 62 books about their adventures were written from 1994 by “Lucy Daniels”.
The discovery that Lucy Daniels was not a particularly prolific, animal-loving author in the English countryside but rather a “collection of authors under the direction of Ben M. Baglio” (a New Yorker!) ranks high among my most character-forming childhood disappointments.
Animal Ark might not have been one woman’s labour of love but my genuine affection for the books did inspire my own: Mandy is Murdered, a gory spin-off series totalling some tens of thousands of words, which I co-authored with my younger sister. Set in the future after Animal Ark, in which Mandy and James were unhappily married, every story concluded with James conspiring with Mandy’s resentful animal companions to bring about her death.
None of these texts remain but I remember them involving a lot of cackling. “There was one about monkeys savaging her in Barbados,” volunteered my sister when I recently asked her about them. We kept the alliterative titles.
Calla Wahlquist: Terry Pratchett taught me to read
My parents didn’t know what they had started. When they figured out that the weird stop-motion animation that transfixed their six-year-old child for five minutes every night was based on a book, they tracked down the lone copy of Terry Pratchett’s Truckers in the Wangaratta city library.
We read the series a chapter a night: first Truckers, then Diggers, then Wings. It was about a nome called Masklin who, sick of nearly being eaten by foxes every night, jumped on the back of a truck with his family and ended up in a department store populated by other nomes, whose cosmology was based on the great deity Arnold Bros (est 1905). They were ruled by warring aristocratic families: Stationeri, Habidasheri, Millineri, Del Icatessen and Young Fashions.
Funny books that get funnier the more you read them are the best motivation for learning to read. Once I’d run through that series a couple of times I discovered Pratchett had written even more books, with jokes that I really didn’t understand but could nevertheless recite on demand. What followed was a terrible phase of putting footnotes in everything* and, eventually, an adulthood spent writing things down for a living.
I’ve never written anything as good as “the sky rained dismal” though.
*This never works.
Brigid Delaney: The Catcher in the Rye understood me before I did
One night, my mother came home from book club with a very plain-looking book. It had a silver cover and no pictures, not even a blurb, just words on the front: The Catcher in the Rye.
Without even asking mum if she was done with it, I took it up to my room.
Imagine flying into a dark city when there’s been a power failure – there are only a couple of lights on. Then the generator kick starts and everything suddenly lights up as far as the eye can see. That was my 12-year-old brain while reading The Catcher in the Rye. It lit me up in a way nothing ever had before. The book understood me before I even understood myself. Salinger had written it for me. Holden Caulfield was cool, sensitive, tough, troubled, funny, smart, tender, filled with strange longings, confused and difficult. He was a boy alone in the world but, in reading the book, I was there with him. And in the way of magical thinking when it comes to books: he was there with me. I could not feel alone in the world if there was Holden Caulfield in it.
It had been Sweet Valley High and Anne of Green Gables until then. Catcher was my bridge to grown up books, and grown up emotions. I couldn’t go back after that.
Joshua Robertson: Slaughterhouse-Five is why I’m a writer
I was 13 and lounging in the lap of unfamiliar luxury at the Australian high commissioner’s residence in Kuala Lumpur when I was struck by a certain ennui.
As a guest of my diplomat uncle (once removed), I had grown oddly immune to games of badminton, laps of the pool, jogs along the swanky Selangor golf course and breakfast banquets of tropical fruit. So I went to a bookshelf and picked up Slaughterhouse-Five.
I thought it was a horror story. I was unwittingly transported into the world of Kurt Vonnegut. A world where the only sane response to witnessing mass civilian slaughter by one’s own countrymen was to chronicle its grotesque absurdity and the poignant details of all pawns of war with unsparing humour.
Inspired by his own experience as a prisoner of war in the firebombed German city of Dresden, this book was a revelation. Not least because of Vonnegut’s style. Short sentences. Lots of jokes. His own cameo as an imprisoned grunt hurling his guts up. Effortless lampooning of authority. It was like MASH except with time travel and human capture by aliens, for display in an interplanetary zoo. I wouldn’t be writing this now but for finding that book. Would’ve become a lawyer or something. Thanks, Kurt.
Steph Harmon: Anastasia Krupnik is my favourite ever heroine
The Tomorrow series was important for my transition into teenage-hood but, before that, I was all about Anastasia Krupnik: a neurotic, bespectacled 10-year-old smart alec with a wart on her thumb, a bust of Freud in her bedroom and a goldfish named Frank.
Anastasia’s parents were lapsed Jews living in Boston. Her father was a deeply sarcastic Harvard poetry professor, her mother an artist and a feminist, and reading their dinnertime banter was the most envious of another family I have ever been.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these books is that the bizarre storylines I was certain I couldn’t be remembering correctly have, through a quick Google search, turned out to be true. Yes, Anastasia and her father did create a “Non-Sexist Housekeeping Schedule” to help out her mum. Yes, she did debate the ethical dilemmas of accidentally mailing a dog turd with her school’s values class. Yes, she did answer a personal ad in the New York Review of Books and wind up on a date with her best friend’s older uncle.
In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Lois Lowry revealed the inspiration behind Anastasia was the daughter of the then president, Jimmy Carter, who would stick her tongue out at reporters. “She was always being obnoxious,” Lowry said. “There was this one time when this very solemn interviewer asked 10-year-old Amy, ‘Do you have one message to give to the children of the world?’ and she said, ‘No!’”
That tells you just about everything you need to know.
Warren Murray: The Amityville Horror might be standing behind you
When I was 13 or so, I happened upon a copy of The Amityville Horror – the “chilling true story” of a New York haunting that was later adapted into film.
This book terrified me – I would only read it sitting in broad daylight outside the house, with the sun beating reassuringly on my back – and, because of some sort of reference in the story to evil spirits using portals to get at the living, I developed a superstition about not sleeping with drawers or cupboard doors open.
Over the years into adulthood, this paperback somehow followed me around. I was sure half a dozen times that I had thrown it out but it would turn up in the unpacking next time I moved house. On moving back to Australia after a long stint overseas, I found it again when I opened up boxes of books that had been sitting in storage for 10 years.
I took a mental snapshot as I consigned it to the wheelie bin. This time I know it’s gone for good ... or is it?
Gabrielle Jackson: Anne of Green Gables is basically me
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery was more than my favourite book as a child. Here was a red-headed girl getting into all sort of scrapes, losing her temper, daydreaming and doing very well at school. Anne was me!
From Anne I learnt that my daydreams weren’t something to try to conquer – they were something to celebrate. She taught me it was important to beat the boys in school and that I didn’t have to be nice to a boy just because he paid attention to me. She helped me overcome my insecurity about having red hair. Before I met Anne, I used to say, “My hair’s not red, it’s dark!”
When I was reading Anne of Green Gables and all the wonderful books that followed in the series, it stopped mattering to me that I wasn’t as pretty as my blonde and brunette friends. What mattered was studying and dreaming and reading and writing.
I’ve got to say, Anne got me into a lot of fights with the boys when I was young but these days, when I tell my boyfriend he’s my Gilbert Blythe, he doesn’t even seem to mind.
