‘Tomorrow’ author John Marsden dead at 74

The Tomorrow, When the War Began author paved the way for more recent fantasy blockbusters, such as The Hunger Games.

Writer and teacher John Marsden in 2021. Picture: Julian Kingma

The writer and teacher John Marsden was working at Geelong Grammar’s rather strict Timbertop campus in the early 1990s when he first encountered reluctant teenage readers.

Books are boring, they told him.

Marsden, who has died at the age of 74, responded by writing a vibrant tale, just for them.

Tomorrow, When the War Began, published in 1993, sold in the millions, and became a film, and a TV series.

That book in time became “The Tomorrow Series” of seven books, describing the invasion of Australia by a malignant, foreign power, narrated by a girl, Ellie Linton.

Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden.

The books paved the way for more recent fantasy blockbusters, such as The Hunger Games, which owe a serious debt to Marsden’s vision.

Marsden had great faith in his own ability to engage kids, and in their ability to advocate for themselves.

Educated at The Kings School in Parramatta, and the University of Sydney, Marsden abandoned a promising career in the law to work in an abattoir and a mortuary, before falling into teaching.

He worked in conventional classrooms for a time, but in 2006 opened the first of two of his own schools in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria, where he encouraged students to run free, climb trees, and challenge conventional groupthink.

John Marsden is an author and principal of alternative bush school, Candlebark at Romsey.

He told The Australian in 2021 that helicopter parenting was no good for kids. Parents should “step back” and let kids be bored.

“I used to have Matchbox cars. I would draw towns on the driveway with chalk. There’d be bank robberies and ambulance smashes, I’d create all these stories,” he said.

His two schools, Candlebark and The Alice Miller School, encouraged kids to get dirty and maybe even risk minor injury.

There was a four-year waiting list to get in.

“Running a school is probably the most intense and complicated job I’ve had in my life,” Marsden said, but he had a great sense of humour, and the kids were encouraged to laugh and play while they learned.

Pan Macmillan Australia, Marsden’s publisher, labelled the Tomorrow books “the best series for Australian teens of all time”.

The cause of Marsden’s death this week was not immediately announced.