Hi, I’m John Marsden and I’m going Back to School with Student Edge.
Hi, I’m Simon Miraudo and today I’m chatting with author and principal, John Marsden.
Thanks so much for chatting with us. Pleasure.
What were you like as a teenager? It was a really bad time of my life.
I had a really miserable few years. I think I was very lost, very confused. I didn’t feel
safe; that was one of the dominant feelings I had looking back. And I was trying to somehow
negotiate my way through a world that felt very confusing and quite unfathomable, and
that led me further and further a down a kind of pretty depressing path into quite an alientated
and unappy place. Did that have to do with going to military
school? Was that a part of it? That type of education? Or was it more kind of your teenage
experiences? Oh no, I think there are lots of teenagers
who get through their teenager years cheerfully and gracefully without any significant problems.
And that’s often overlooked. But I don’t think it’s anything to do with that time
of life uniquely; it was more about the context in which I found myself and the school was
certainly part of that. It was very authoritarian, very strict, very regimented, very obsessed
with unimportant details, like whether you had a button done up, or whether your tie
was done up properly. And that seemed to matter more than anything, which didn’t suit my
style I have to say. Was it hard for someone with, say, creative
aspirations in a military school setting? Is that something that maybe is not nurtured as
much, that you felt? Yeah the idea of creativity wasn’t really
recognised. We were expected to turn up on time, behave well and get the marks to pass
the exams, so there were a few people who played musical instruments, and I wasn’t
one of them. But outside that… there was an art room which was often abused.
Vanadlised even, which I think says something about the respect for art in the school. But all in
all, it was not seen as a creative hub of activity.
What were then the subjects that you were able to find solace in? Were there any classes
where you… Just English.
And what were the ones you could just not abide by?
Well, Science I came last every term for three years, except one term where I came second
last and my parents got quite excited. You know, “You’re going well now.”
That is improvement. Yeah, yeah that’s right, you’re building
up momentum. But by next term I’d slipped to last place so their hopes were dashed.
Sure. Well some people may not know that you’ve founded your own school, Candlebark School.
Are these some of the things you wanted to challenge about the structures of education?
Is that what you think you were responding to?
At 15 or 16, I was already thinking, “This is wrong, these guys don’t understand how
a school should operate.” I was completely baffled as to why they could possibly think
that the way they were running a school was the best way to do it because it was so obviously
defective in all kinds of vital areas. So I would sit in class thinking, “If I ran
the school, this is what I’d be doing.” And finally got the opporutnity many years
later. Few students actually get to execute that
feeling of, “Here’s how I would do it.” Going back a little bit, I understand you
studied law, at the University of Sydney. Was that your plan, to become a lawyer?
It just seemed like a nice thing to do; a high status profession that involved a lot
of reading and talking, which I enjoyed. I didn’t really understand much about it,
but it seemed like, if I wasn’t going to do something associated with science and maths,
then there weren’t many choices left, and that seemed to be the most respectable or
desirable of the choices remaining. Okay. How did you come to the decision that
it wasn’t for you? That maybe teaching or writing…
Just one of those moments, like an epiphany, where I was sitting in the cafeteria at the
law school, and it was about six o’clock at night, and the final year students were
coming down the stairs for their evening classes. There was an army of them; they just poured
into this cafeteria all in their pinstripe suits and I sat there thinking,
"I cannot join this army.” I’d already been in one army long enough and I thought,
"I can’t do this. This is just wrong for me.” You’re obviously a very accomplished author.
Was it difficult to conceive of a world where that could be your sole career, because you
went into teaching, or did you want to do both things? Do your passions lie in both?
No I didn’t discover teaching until I was about 28, and from the first day of the university
course that I did, I thought, “This is great, this is like… wow. I can’t believe that
we’re allowed to do such interesting things,” because it was a very subversive course.
They taught us to go out and subvert the schools of New South Wales and to change the system,
which I loved. But being an author, that was just a daydream. That was like daydreaming
that I’d be captain of the Australian cricket team.
One of those little ways you occupy yourself when you’re sitting on a train and bored,
but I never seriously expected that would happen. It was just a nice little fluffy picture
that I could dream up to pass the time away. Well, from going to school and then becoming a teacher
to now founding your own school, do you find the issues concerning young people have
changed all that much? I think their concerns are still the same.
I think this is a really good generation of teenagers. Much more enlightened than we were
and much more compassionate and much more aware of global issues and wanting to do stuff
about them. There’s a real idealism about today’s teenagers which I admire greatly.
There’s still a percentage of them who find great difficulty in navigating adolescence,
but then there’s a percentage of 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds who find
difficulty navigating that stage of their lives, so I think this demonisation of teenagers
is completely unwarranted and doesn’t do them any favours, that’s for sure.
Are these the kind of issues that interested you and inspired you to write so often and
so well about teenagers? Yeah I think so, it was such an intense time
of my life, my teenage years, and in writing about teenage experiences, I think I was trying
to find my way to some sort of understanding of what it was really like for me, but at
the same time, there was a little bit of missionary zeal about wanting to give teenagers a sense
of the potential of life and how you can manage when things go badly.
What were your coping mechanisms? How did you pull through? How did you get to the other side of it,
because sometimes, when you’re a teenager, it’s so hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I read. I read compulsively and obsessively. I read up to three books a day some days.
It was like I was living in a fantasy world a lot of the time, and I don’t think that
was terribly healthy, but if I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I would have survived. So that was my lifeline.
I think it would have been much better if I had a strong group of supportive friends
and a different sort of family network, but I didn’t have those things, so books were
my salvation. When I got older, I was about 19 when I ended
up in a psychiatric ward and I was there for some time, that became my salvation. I know
some people have negative experiences with psychiatry, but that wasn’t my situation.
I would say that, though that time in the hospital and the years that followed, where
I saw a psychotherapist every day for many years, saved my life and gave me a different
understanding and a different perspective and ability to cope much more successfully
with adversity. I guess it’s hard when you kind of look
back and you think about how hard those times may have been, and to go, “Well, do I have
regrets from that period? Or, did it work out?”
I definitely have regrets. I feel I treated some people badly myself, and I was treated
badly, but I felt like a cork in the ocean being washed along, having no control over
anything. That’s not a healthy position to be in, but that’s what it felt like.
I think one of the little mantras that made a difference to me was realising, eventually,
moods do change and no matter how depressed or angry or frustrated or alienated I might
be, that wouldn’t last forever. That maybe in five minutes' time, or an hour’s time,
or a day’s time or a week’s time, I would have different feelings, and I kind of clung
to that for some years as a way of getting through those darkened periods.
Is that the advice you give to your students, when they come to you perhaps with similar issues,
or just similar difficulties. What do you say to them to help them get through?
I don’t give advice, I just listen and respond to what they say. But I think one of the things
that many teenagers need to know perhaps is that they may find themselves eventually in
a kind of confrontation, usually with a father, that can be quite a critical moment in their
lives; for boys and sometimes girls, that’s almost a universal experience I think. And when that
moment comes you have to win that battle, or else you live in your father’s shadow
for the rest of your life. So, whether it’s over a game of chess or in a game of tennis
or racing along the beach, I do think that pretty much all young men and many young women
have these pivotal moments where they are poised to defeat their father for the first
time in a significant way and some people crumple at that moment and can’t carry through,
and other people find the strength to go ahead and win that battle and that can be a life-changing
experience.
Did you have that moment? Yeah I did. I think if you fail at that moment,
you do risk not becoming the complete adult we all should aspire to be. But if you find
the strength to defeat your father at that moment, then you are more likely to go on
and have a successful adult life. Excellent. I’ve got to find my dad and get
the chessboard out. Absolutely, yep.
Appreciate it. Thanks very much.
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