All posts tagged: John Marsden

Sour milk and sick schools

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Mary Delahunty opened Curdled Milk: Schoolyard Memories by asking the audience to raise their hands if they remembered free school milk, and a sea of hands went up. Not mine, and I was thankful for it as the authors recounted their own memories of small bottles of milk warmed in the sun. The exclusivity of their schools did not save private school boys Ned Manning, John Marsden, and Jon Doust from curdled school milk. Manning remembered forcing himself to drink every mouthful of the thick, sour stuff lest he be punished for wasting it. Delahunty suggested that the modern education system has its own version of curdled milk. Good ideas, like free milk, which go horribly wrong upon execution. Manning believes there are very few truly bad teachers. No teacher enters the profession and remains there, unless they truly want to improve the lives of kids. It’s all the other ‘stuff’ that gets in the way of teachers’ good intentions. The curdled milk it seems is in the system, not those fronting classrooms. The Candlebark …

Where the Wild Things Are: Children’s literature

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When you think of a boy named Max, it’s hard to imagine any other boy but one wearing a wolf suit and terrorising his family. Such is the power of literature we read as children to inscribe images, to create worlds and to spark emotions. When Where the Wild Things Are was published, Maurice Sendak was challenged for scaring children with his vivid imagery and narrative involving violence and power. John Marsden, Morris Gleitzman and Isobelle Carmody, who have between them a readership of millions of Australian children and young people, have all focused on the full spectrum of childhood emotions through their books. Although they all came to Sendak’s writing as adults, they agree that his books opened up the way we thought about children’s literature and what it was possible to write. Morris Gleitzman spoke about his treatment of adults in his book, which is based on a recognition that in every child there is an adult and in every adult there is a child. He likes to portray his adults through the …