There was a little girl in there who was in the burns unit. She'd been badly burned.
She sat there every day.
In pain, and not smiling or laughing or interacting with the other children.
Her father sat with her every day, holding her hand.
And the teacher said I read your story to the ward.
And this little girl laughed, and her father cried.
I thought,
my God.
bugger the awards.
I've said almost from the beginning, the boy in the story is always me.
I do feel I write loners, and shy boys and girls.
I think it resonates, even with the extrovert children. Everybody feels lonely and frightened as a child.
You're basically a pygmy in a world of giants.
So, long before the 80s when your writing became really popular and took off,
You wrote a short story and you sent it in to the Australian Women's Weekly.
Yes.
And it was rejected...
Yes, I guess I would have been about 11 or 12 at the time.
I wrote the story, and I sent it into Women's Weekly in an exercise book in pencil.
An envelope came back and it said,
Dear Mr. Jennings, sorry we don't want your story.
I thought, oh!
I was mortified. I didn't write again until I was almost 40.
Jeez, that's a big impact.
Yes!
People don't realise, I think, that when you write it's like sending out your love.
If you don't get it back, it really hurts.
The origin of you writing books begins with your son, Andrew.
You wanted to help him read, is that correct?
I was a single parent for a long time. I had four children on my own, living in a house on the edge of the cliff around here.
This sounds familiar, I think I've seen this one.
I was looking at the books that were available at the time, and they were boring.
I thought, I think I could write a better story than that.
I actually sent it to six publishers, the first four turned them down.
Do you want to name and shame them now?
I definitely will!
The first four turned me down, but the fifth one said well, we quite like these.
I've still got a photocopy of the cheque, on my wall in my study over there.
$400.
The first cover, you get what they give you.
I was sent a polaroid of this.
This cover was done by the work experience student who was at Penguin at the time.
When it first came out, it was a skinny little book printed on what they called the toilet paper.
Which was the cheapest paper you can get.
Then it started to appear in a few places. My kids would go and turn it face out.
About a year later I started getting letters.
I'd get a whole heap from Perth, and then some from a country town somewhere. I realised something was going on.
Then it just went on the bestseller list, and I was quite amazed.
I carried it around with me for about a year, take it out and have a look at it and say, I wrote that.
So, there is a generation of Australians for whom your work that is best known is not a book but a T.V. series: Round the Twist.
That family at the centre of it, is very much based on you and your family.
You have a Bronson, you have a Linda, you were a single dad.
Tell me about the decision to sort of imprint your family and turn them into a T.V. show.
Because that's not neccesarily an easy choice to make.
Yes, well it was certainly a learning curve.
When I learned that they wanted to make a TV show out of my books, the first thing I said was, I want to write the script.
And then they said, have you ever written a script before? And I said no.
This can only end well.
It was frenetic.
It was draft, after draft, after draft, after draft for thirteen episodes.
I'm up all night, write, write, write.
And it was just like that the whole way through. But it was so much fun.
Unlike many authors, you had a ready-make focus group in your kids.
And I understand that when you used to write stories, you'd put it in front of your kids.
And would you spy on them? Is that correct?
Yeah well, I'd give them my manuscripts to read.
And we had a glass door between the kitchen and the lounge with a tiny little hole in it.
So while they were sitting in there, I'd be peeping through to see if they laughed.
They got to know I was there and they'd go, go on! Get off dad!
You've had some medical incidences. You've had a quadruple bi-pass.
What did that do to you?
I basically had an event in the hospital.
A near death experience.
I was on a hospital trolley, heading towards the tunnel on this trolley.
And I just had this feeling of peace, of this is wonderful.
Suddenly, I had the experience that I wanted to wake up. My eyes sprung open and I was in the little ward.
All on my own.
Did your parents live long enough to see the success you had as an author?
No, unfortunately they'd been dead for quite a while. My mother would have loved it.
Because she was a great reader, and she loved funny short stories. Which is what I ended up writing.
I know I told jokes a lot. I always had a heap of jokes.
Maybe I was still pleasing her.
Were you good at making dad laugh?
No.
I've read you say in an interview, that you didn't think he loved you.
Why do you think that?
Well, I don't think he wanted any competition.
For my mother.
I think he particularly didn't want a little boy.
I used to help him out in the garage.
Be his gopher.
It was a very unpleasant experience. He'd be barking out orders -
Get this! Get that!
And, um.
He once told me that I'd never be fit for anything except the workshop.
It was sort of like the lowest of the low, to him.
When he came to my graduation, and he said,
yeah but you didn't get honours.
You know, I think I was a disappointment to him.
Do you think if he'd seen...
The room that we're sitting in, the success that you had...
The generations, the hundred and thousands of books...
Do you think he would've been impressed?
No.
But my mother would have.
You can't patronise the children.
You've got to know how they feel on that.
To be able to remember what it's like for the child, and for it to be convincing, and for them to say:
Yes. That is my worry, that is me.
I would like to think that people would say...
Yes, that helped me through my childhood.
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you.