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Stories of Wonder platforms and celebrates the real impact Deakin students, alumni, researchers and staff are making in the world, right now.
Beloved children's author, Andy Griffiths
is a Deakin alum,
with a passion for humor and imagination.
In this episode, we explore his journey
from punk-rocker and English teacher
to world renowned author.
And how stories can spark
joy, build literacy
and create lifelong connections
between kids and adults.
From the lands of the
Wurundjeri people,
this is Stories of Wonder.
Andy Griffiths, welcome
to Stories of Wonder.
- Thank you very much.
Great to be here.
- It's very good to have you.
I think you are single-handedly
gonna be responsible
for reducing the demographic
age of our audience today,
so thanks for that.
Look, let's get started.
You've had a very long
and successful career
writing for young people.
Take us back to the start.
What got you into writing
children's literature?
- You wanna go right back to the start?
- Yeah, let's go.
- Probably-
- Just give us a little
smidge of the beginning.
- Well, my first encounters with books
at the age of four or
five that I can remember
were Dr. Seuss' books,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
And immediately these were
like a playground for me
and I wanted to sort of write
my own responses to them.
- Ah.
- 'Cause I knew how much
pleasure I got from them,
the places of appropriately wonder,
stories of wonder.
- Did we get that?
- That-
- We've gotta grab that, yeah, great.
- Stories of wonder that, you know,
would make me wonder and give me pleasure
and slightly disturb
me with certain things
that I couldn't understand.
- Yeah.
- But that's good.
And so I was immediately sort of,
as soon as I could pick up a pen,
writing and drawing little things.
- Wow.
- Number one, to amuse myself.
Then I found I could get
a rise out of my parents
by writing something outlandish.
- What's an example of
something that you wrote
that was outlandish when
you were that young?
- Oh, famously in the family lore,
I wrote a get well card
for my dad and I said,
"Dear Daddy, get well soon."
And he turned the page and it said,
"Oh, you are doomed".
And shading being buried in the backyard
with an icy pole stick cross.
And, you know, we did it, right?
- Well, how, and he
appreciated that, obviously?
- He's still alive.
Yeah, he's too scared to die.
But I,
I instinctively,
I knew to do the opposite
to what the reader expected
from a very young age,
and you could get laughter out of that.
You could get shock.
You could get shock laughter.
And that's what I used to do
at school with my friends,
was draw little cartoons
and we'd just be killing ourselves,
laughing down the back.
And it's a very pure
form of communication.
So I was always writing
in some form or another.
- And it sounds like even from that age,
you were very much writing for yourself.
- Myself was very,
yeah, there's no point writing something
that I wasn't amused by
or involved in some way.
But the audience reaction
was also very much part of that equation.
- Yeah.
- So, yeah,
I was writing something,
producing a joke magazine with fake news
for my Year 7 cohort,
you know, typing it all up,
running it off on a photographic machine,
selling copies to the other
students for three cents a copy.
- Wow.
- So that was in Year 7.
- Yeah.
- And always just,
it was a very natural
thing for me to write.
- Yeah.
- And then I,
I discovered rock and roll.
David Bowie, Alice Cooper, very much.
And I saw them being creative with words
and theatrically in both their cases.
And I thought, that's what
I want to do, you know?
- Yeah.
- Be on a stage,
spinning out this kind of,
ooh, terrible shock,
shock horror stories about nightmares
and black widow spiders.
- Yeah.
- And so that's what I kind
of did creatively once again.
- Yeah.
- All throughout school
we had an imaginary rock band,
and I wrote all the lyrics,
designed all the album covers.
- Wow.
You were so creative and
entrepreneurial as well
from the early age.
- Yeah, but not entrepreneurial enough
to actually learn an instrument
or learn how to sing.
It was all pure entertainment.
- Yeah.
- But we put on
a joke performance on
the last day of year 12
for the school.
- What do you mean by joke performance?
- Well, none of us could barely play.
I mean, the drummer could drum.
- Yeah.
- Everyone else was just making noise
with their instruments.
I was yelling the lyrics, tunelessly.
But we, you know, we're
a big success that day.
It was sort of punk rock.
- Yeah.
- But I discovered, oh my
goodness, I can entertain people.
I like being up here with a microphone.
- Yeah.
- I pursued that for a number of years.
By night after leaving school,
I was performing in
alternative bands in Melbourne,
in a thriving underground scene here.
- And so, while you
were going to school or?
- Well, I was studying an honours degree
in English literature at
Monash University by day.
And then at night, it was all
punk rock and all rehearsals.
But I was using words and
affecting people with the words.
- And I think that's, yeah.
It sounds like from very early on
you knew the effect that you
wanted to have on people.
But maybe you had a lot of
different options there,
creatively, as to how to-
- Yeah.
- kind of deliver that.
- Yeah, and with the band,
it was all wild energy.
It was this thrilling kind
of chance to really go crazy.
- Yeah.
- Sonically and physically on stage.
- And so how do you get from that then,
to then becoming a teacher for a while?
- Well, there was a period
where the first band,
Gothic Farmyard, achieved a
certain notoriety on the scene.
But that was after three or
four years of really hard work.
And then it all sort of broke up.
And I began to sort of get the hint.
I was like, I'm not that musical but-
- Okay.
- I'm not that musically
gifted, but I do love the words.
So I started,
I extracted myself from that scene,
started taking learn to write courses,
reading books on how to write better.
And I was like, oh yeah,
I can improve what I do.
There's techniques.
And so I took that raw
kind of instinctual talent,
started learning about it.
At the same time I did a DipEd
at what was Rusden College now Deakin.
And I was in front of kids in high school
who are trying to teach them English.
And they were like, ah,
books, that's so last century,
as if anyone had ever
pick up a book willingly.
And I was like,
ah, you're making a big mistake there.
Books are a lot of fun.
So I started writing little
punk rock stories for them.
- Oh man.
- I wrote,
yeah, what about, "The
Day my Bum went Psycho"?
And they were like-
- That sounds familiar.
- Yeah, wow.
You can write about this stuff?
I said, yes.
Writing is an infinite
playground for imagination.
There are no limits.
So, by example,
I was getting them to write
and I was self-publishing class books.
- So you were kind of, yeah,
so you were almost doing what
you were doing in school.
- When I was in year seven, yeah.
- Yeah.
- I was for, you know-
- A cohort of kids that you were teaching.
- Yeah, and they were having
fun, I was having fun,
and I was building up
my own little collection
of small, provocative, creative pieces.
- Mm.
- It might be how to annoy
your parents, you know,
like, this is how you
swing on the clothesline.
And if you really want to annoy them,
you break the clothesline.
And you all get on it.
So I was instructing them
how to be really annoying.
- Did any of the kids try
these tips or stories?
- Very rarely.
Although there was one in "Just
Annoying!", my second book,
which was how to fill
the shower up with water
by sealing it off with silicon glue.
So it was just my character,
my fictional character
has licence to explore
any ill-advised, sort of thing
that he gets in his head.
- Yeah.
- And I knew from being a
visiting writer in schools,
that kids loved this idea of
filling up the shower cubicle
with water.
So I went, what if you
had someone dumb enough
to glue it all up?
And then what's the worst
thing that could happen?
He can't turn the taps off.
And so this story was
an exploration of that.
And kids really loved it,
'cause eventually he has
to climb into the roof
to get out of the-
- Yeah, yeah.
- Stop himself from drowning.
And then he falls
through one of the rooms.
He gone to the dining table
where his parents are
having a dinner party.
And I used to defend that story to,
people who were concerned
that if you let kids read
this type of material,
the child won't have a well
enough established boundaries
to know what's real and what's not real,
or what's appropriate and
what's not appropriate.
And I would defend that
those kids to the death,
I would say, no, they know the difference.
That's why they wanna read this story.
That's why it's funny.
They know this kid is
working way out of the bounds
of common sense and safety.
And if they didn't, it wouldn't be funny.
- Yeah.
- So I did,
that was my case for about 10 years.
Well, I settled people
down and said, it's okay.
- Yeah.
- To have stories where people
don't do the right thing.
Just like you adults love
your murder mysteries,
but you don't all go out
murdering as a result of,
oh, that seems like a good idea.
My character always suffered the most
whenever he did anything awful.
So there was that,
but they weren't trying to instruct.
They were for the pure
exhilaration of an imaginative-
- Yeah.
- Journey.
- Yeah, to almost experience
what that would be like
without having to do it.
- Without having to do it.
- And just checking, no kids actually did-
- I have met subsequently
a handful of kids who said,
I actually tried that and my parents,
and I flooded the bathroom
and damaged the shower,
and my parents made me pay
it back with pocket money.
- Well, that's why we
brought you here today, Andy,
'cause all those parents are here.
Bring 'em in, guys.
- There was a handful of
like, maybe half a dozen.
Well, there's five on a hand, isn't there?
Maybe five kids out of millions?
- Well, that's a good ratio I think.
- Yeah.
- So how long were you a teacher for?
- All up about four years.
- Okay.
- And all the while I was building up
little self-published
collections of my pieces
that's on a photocopier
and stapled together.
And I was, you know, giving them away,
selling them in shops.
- Right.
And what was the,
like, what were you finding?
Were they selling well?
Was there a good response to it?
And what made you,
what was the tipping
point for you to be like,
well, hold on, I think this
might actually be, you know,
something that I should be doing
as a more significant part of my life.
- Yeah, over two or three years,
I was, a lot of people
were going, this is great,
you know, I've thought about these things,
but I thought it was just me, you know?
- Right.
- And a writer is someone who comes out
and says what they're honestly thinking.
- Yeah.
- And then everyone else
goes, I was thinking that,
but I thought I was weird, you know?
I remember, after one
collection of stories,
I had written about a childhood fantasy
'cause I loved whipped
cream and strawberries.
That was the ultimate dessert.
And I used to think,
what if you filled the entire
kitchen with whipped cream
and strawberries
and then you could just swim around in it,
you know, with your mouth open.
It was just an idle fantasy.
I was never gonna do it as if you could.
But I wrote about this and then I wrote,
oh gee, what happens after a while
when you're sick of whipped
cream and strawberries?
So you need to go to the bathroom.
Will you have to be swimming
around in that as well?
So heaven turns into hell.
And it's like you take
a little silly fantasy
and you treat it really seriously.
And people respond because
it's both funny and weird
but it triggers things.
Oh yeah, I didn't have,
that one, maybe, but I had
this thought, you know?
- Yeah.
- So that's what good writing is I think.
Once again, it's the equation.
It's completed when you get a reaction.
But I just thought,
yeah, I would love to
do this for my living.
So I took leave without pay.
I saved up my pay, half my pay.
I just banked automatically
knowing I would probably do this one day.
Came back to Melbourne,
did a Graduate Diploma of Fiction
and a Graduate Diploma of Editing
at Deakin College in Toorak.
And wrote 12 hours a day on my own time
with my own little stock of
money, which was not a lot.
And just broke through to
find what my voice was,
which was not obvious to me.
I thought, you know,
I've gotta learn to write
properly now, you know?
- Yeah.
- Proper stories,
not this silly stuff.
But the only stuff I was doing
throughout that two years
was it came alive when I just
gave into the silly voice
and the comedic voice.
- But that's so interesting.
And I guess that probably
happens to a lot of artists
when you go to learn something
at an institution as well,
you feel like,
you can't possibly just
be doing this already.
But it just sounds like from
this end, even as a kid,
you had such an authentic
voice and imagination
that is so sort of, I don't know,
it seems like it was formed very early.
- Yeah, it was very early and
it was very natural to me.
So natural I couldn't even
see that it was anything that-
- Yeah.
- That everyone didn't have.
You know?
- Yeah.
- And my teacher at
Deakin was Carmel Bird,
who was a wonderful teacher,
is a wonderful teacher of writing.
She always refused to tell
me how to do anything.
She just said,
here's some principles of good writing,
you know, take 'em or leave them.
And by the end of the year I went,
right, I know roughly what good,
what techniques are and what rules are.
And I knew confidently then
that I could break them if I needed to.
And the essence of
comedy is breaking rules.
- Yeah.
- So I would write a story that
was all build but no climax
and then just walk away and
leave the reader hanging.
- Yeah.
I think that's really interesting,
'cause I think a lot of
artists and, you know,
journalists that I know
and actors that I know
find a similar thing where
it's a natural instinct
that they already have,
but it is that kind of
classic thing of like,
it's good to know the rules eventually,
so that you can at
least be more deliberate
with where you break them.
- Exactly, yeah.
You can get a lot of comic effects
out of breaking normal
rules of storytelling.
- And it sounds like
you've learned a bit about
editing as well.
- Oh, absolutely.
That was the other
crucial part of that year.
And that course was showing
me how cheap words are,
how you can just slash and burn
and still have the meaning
conveyed in 10% of the words
that you thought were so brilliant.
- It's probably a hard one
for most writers to learn,
'cause you must, at some point,
think a lot of your value is in-
- As a beginning writer,
you think everything that you write
is deathless wonderful prose.
And it's quite a common thing
that they see the editor as an enemy
who's trying to simplify
and that, you know,
turn the brilliance into
just another sausage.
- Yeah.
- Whereas, I always, as
a result of the course,
the editor is trying to help you,
trying to save you from
yourself because you can't,
it's hard to get outside of yourself
and see your writing objectively.
But that's what editing teaches you.
And you have to, there's two
parts of writing, I think.
There's the initial wild
creation, the pleasure, the joy,
that kid in the classroom is just writing
for sheer hell of it.
And you want that.
But then if you're going to do anything
further with the piece,
you need to come back with
a very cold objective.
- Yeah.
- Clinical and go, yeah,
nah, that's not working.
No.
There's one good idea in here.
I need to slash the whole piece.
Start again.
And that's where the other
part of being a writer
is sheer dogged persistence.
The willingness to rewrite
over and over and over again.
- Yeah.
- Until you're getting a piece
that will give you the effect
that you are hoping in for the reader.
- And a bit of resilience
by the sounds of it as well.
- Resilience, yep.
Persistence.
Psychological insight.
You know, if you do read
a lot of self-help books,
that's really helpful.
So that, you know,
when someone reacts to a story,
they're not attacking you,
they're attacking the story.
And, well, they're attacking,
they're reacting to the story.
You've triggered something in them,
which may or may not have
anything to do with you.
So you can get that distance
from what you create
so that when you get those bad
reviews, which everyone does,
it's not a crushing thing,
it's, oh, they didn't like it.
Or I would look at a bad review and go,
is there anything in this
that is actually legitimate?
You know, have they got a point?
Yes, maybe they have.
Maybe I am relying on the toilet
humour just a bit too much
and it's time to move on.
And that can be a very valuable
part of negative feedback.
But there'll be other value judgements
that that person's making
that are not really relevant to you.
- So you've spent a year
at this point studying.
You've saved up a bit of money
while you've been working,
writing, editing at Deakin.
What happens after the course is done?
Do you know straight away, right,
I'm ready to fully step into this.
This is my new career.
Or is there a, you know, is
it more complicated than that?
- Yeah, as a result of that,
that was two years that I
managed to save and then I,
well, spend the money that I'd saved.
Then I went back to teach for a year.
But I had connected with an
educational publisher who said,
I'd like to publish some
of your provocative pieces
as a creative writing
textbook for teachers.
And I was like, yeah, okay.
It's not quite the trade
paperback bestseller
that I was hoping for, but it's something.
I can learn something from this process.
And her name was Rina
Leeuwenberg, Longman Cheshire.
And she and I remember having a meeting
and she said, I'm gonna
get this guy, Terry Denton.
He's a freelance illustrator.
Very funny.
I think you'd be a good
kind of blend for your,
good match for your humour.
And she was so on the money there.
- Fateful.
- Absolutely.
And that first book was called,
"Swinging on the Clothesline."
And it showed a bunch
of kids in the backyard
swinging off their
clothesline towards the sky
and they were heading to outer space.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
And there was also a cow
upside down and a crab.
- He likes a cow, doesn't he? Terry?
- He loves,
yeah, right from the start.
For no apparent reason.
But there was the exhilaration
and freedom of creative play
in that image.
And I started getting invitations
while I was going to teacher
education conferences
to promote my book.
And I was inviting the teachers to play
and to create little pocket books
and to write labels for jars
'cause that was part of
the thing I was doing.
It was writing that
doesn't seem like writing.
They loved it.
They would invite me into their schools.
And now I was starting to make a living
as a creative writing teacher in schools.
And there was another four years
before I nailed down
what became the first
book, "Just Tricking!"
- Wow.
- And that was with Terry's help,
because most of the
publishers in Australia
were very nervous, didn't quite
understand what I was about,
because this kind of
crazy punk rock literature
that didn't appear to
have any moral purpose
or teach anyone anything.
- Mm.
- We don't know what to
do with it, basically.
It's all very entertaining.
But we can't see a market for this.
But I could,
because I was self-publishing
these tiny little books
for very little money and
selling them at markets,
and I knew people enjoyed them so.
- Just on that,
so you've obviously
talked a little bit about
your punk rock background, really.
And it also seems to be there's
an entrepreneurial spirit.
There's almost like a, not a gonzo spirit,
but just sort of like a, not
gorilla marketing either,
but just a sort of like,
do it, wrap it, sell it,
sit and get on the ground to sort of see
what the response is.
- Yeah, well, that's punk rock.
Because it said we don't
need a record company.
- Yeah, no middleman.
- No middleman. We'll go direct.
We made cassettes.
We would put them in the shops ourselves.
We'd make the posters.
We'd organise a launch.
So, you know, we were just having a ball
without any of the nonsense
of whether this is a career
or anyone owing a record company money.
- Yeah.
- It's just,
you just do it yourself.
And that's the whole purpose of it.
- Was it hard?
- So-
- Sorry, please.
- Well then,
I just applied that to books.
I said, I don't need a publisher.
- Yeah.
Was that pretty kind of at
that stage, in like the '90s,
was there a lot of that happening
with children's publishing?
- Probably very little.
But the Zine Scene, what
I was doing without,
it didn't even have a name at that point,
but it was the early Zine Scene
where you can just make your own things,
find an audience,
and that's,
you are an illustrator or a writer.
- Yeah.
- And that's a wonderful training ground,
because you are seeing
the effect of your stuff.
If you're sitting in a market
like I was, creative market,
you'd see people pick up the books,
laugh at them, or frown at them.
And that was telling me, again,
the funny books were the ones
that they would buy for
a dollar or $2 sometimes.
- So how did this kind of inform you
when you had to start
dealing with, you know,
publishers, bigger institutions
that are now helping you
get your work out there as you move along?
Where I imagine there
would've been a more layers,
more people, a little more
resistance potentially
to some of the really
authentic voice and direction
of the creative and your ideas for kids.
- Well, they understood,
number one, that they are a business
and it's gonna cost them
money to make this book.
And it's a gamble.
Will they get their money back?
So how can I help the publisher,
you know, ensure that
they get their money back?
And Terry had already
agreed to come on board
with anything that I did.
So that was a big part of
calming the first publisher down,
going, well, it's got
the great Terry Denton,
so we won't lose all our money on this.
- Yeah.
- Crazy young kid.
- And what had he done by that point?
- He'd won a Children's Book
of the Year for a picture book.
So he was much loved, and,
far more established than I was.
- Yeah.
- And he enjoyed illustrating my stuff
because I let him go to,
sort of more anarchistic,
crazy places than the other
material he was being offered.
- Yeah.
- And that was,
the other big part of what I wanted to do,
was to fire up the next
generation with modern literature.
That reflected The
Simpsons, The Young Ones,
Monty Python style humour
that I didn't feel was being
reflected in the written books.
Subsequently, they were not reading them.
So I just went,
no, we just need to update.
So to answer your question
of which I've forgotten,
I was looking after the publishers.
And also the other crucial part
of being a writer for children
is that you are writing
for three audiences.
Yourself.
You want be totally involved
and proud of what you're doing.
The kids.
You want them to be equally excited by it.
But you have to go
through the gatekeepers,
which are the publishers, the adults,
the parents, the booksellers.
And adults,
very often, have a whole different idea
of what a book should be.
They've got sophisticated literary tastes.
They don't want the kids just
wasting their time on rubbish.
You know, they want them
reading proper books.
But there is a stepping
stones and you need pleasure
and books that are just there
for the pure pleasure of reading,
to even get to that next
level of sophistication.
- Yeah.
There's a place, there's a place
for all of it.
- Yeah.
And I had that growing up.
I had the Dr. Seuss picture
books here, the Blyton books.
I'd resolutely steer away from anything
that looked worthy or instructional,
reach for the horror comics
on the newspaper stands.
And so I was raised on lowbrow, highbrow.
- Yeah.
- Middle brow.
- Yeah.
- I made no distinction.
You'll see the books today
are a sort of hybrid graphic novel.
Lots of pictures, but
also plenty of words.
- Just on this as well, you've said,
you've kind of described your work
as child-centered fiction.
Explain what you mean by that.
- I'm trying to recreate the
world as it appears to a child.
And the world is often confusing
and full of adults laying
down arbitrary rules
and things going wrong.
And not everything is
lovely and wonderful.
There's jealousies with your friends.
There's fears of what's
hiding under the bed
or other things going on.
So that's why in my books,
I didn't shy away from the darkness,
you know, the books like just shocking,
just disgusting,
just revelled in the
dark side of, you know.
It's often with a comic effect
and the laughter helps leaven
the horror and the disgust.
So you can go to interesting places
if you're giving the reader
a bit of a safety valve.
But yeah, I just wanted to,
it's not what the adult wants.
I want what you want as a child.
And my characters are often childlike
in their singular fixation on something.
It might be chips.
You know, Andy, my alter ego
Andy in the Treehouse series
has a high security chip storage facility
surrounded by laser beams and mouse traps
and 10-ton weight hanging over it.
So if anyone tries to steal his chips,
they're gonna, they're gonna die.
So that's ridiculous,
'cause he's taken it to
way exaggerated streams.
But the truth there is that,
a bag of chips is a very
precious object to a child.
- Yeah, that's how a child probably feels.
- Yeah, yeah.
That's how I felt.
Someone steals my chips
and that's what happens.
He comes to his storage
facility, the safe's open,
someone has stolen his
chips and he blames Terry
and they have an
intergalactic space battle,
which ends with Andy shoving
Terry into a black hole and...
- Justified.
- Yeah.
And then Jill coming along,
going, what have you done to Terry?
And I said, "Well, I
shoved him in the back."
"That's terrible."
"Well, he stole my chip", and Jill says,
"It wasn't him who stole your chips.
It was me.
And I didn't steal them, I borrowed them."
(laughs)
Oh so-
- Perfect.
- You have blowups.
And kids often say they love
when me and Terry and/or Jill
are fighting in the books.
They go, that's just like
my brothers or my friends.
You know, we have these blowups,
but we're still, we still go on,
you know.
You don't need perfect
social relationships.
And I was reacting against this idea
that childhood should
be a perfect experience.
You know, the adults are
all very highly strung.
We've gotta make everything just right.
Everything just right.
And I think that you're
doing the child a disservice
by that, because even
if you were to succeed,
when they become 18 and get
out into the world themselves,
the world's gonna slap 'em down.
- Yeah.
- Certain things aren't gonna go right.
- Yeah.
- And I think children's literature,
good children's literature
prepares them with a
little bit of darkness
and a little bit of, oh,
things didn't go so well there.
- Yeah.
- So I think that it's an important
psychological safety valve
to read stories where
everything's not perfect.
The characters may or may not resolve it,
but they're probably gonna
give it a red hot go.
- Yeah.
- And then the other thing,
the feedback that I get is the laughter.
- Yeah.
- Is so important, not for
preparing you for anything,
but for just letting you
enjoy this moment as a child.
- Yeah.
Well, on that, I mean really like,
how did you figure out
what kids find funny?
Because that seems like,
probably for most adults,
it's probably quite a mystery.
- Well, this is gonna shock you,
but I was a child for the
first 12 years of my life.
- Here we go, breaking news banner.
Andy Griffiths was a child.
- And perhaps the difference,
and Morris Gleitzman I
owe for this insight,
he thinks with children's writers,
the window stays open at a certain age,
a certain level of development.
You're not arrested at that age.
Mine would be around nine or 10.
Everything's possible.
The world is just a playground
and things are exciting and new.
And you're experiencing a lot
of stuff for the first time
and it's exciting.
That period before the hormones kick in
and you start overthinking
or deep thinking-
- Or the golden period.
- Yeah, now that's some writers,
like Morris and John Marsden,
specialise in that part.
But Terry and I would always be revelling
in the pre-adolescent thing.
And that was the effect of,
that's what I wanted to celebrate.
So that would tell me if is that feeling
coming through the prose.
- Yeah.
- And interestingly enough,
it's really great for parents
to re-experience that too,
because as you grow up,
your to-do list becomes longer,
things get a little more serious.
And we're often,
we go too far down that track and we go,
oh, what am I doing, you know?
Why am I getting so worried
about this little thing?
And a good comedian, a good laugh,
can throw you back into perspective so.
- Yeah.
- So laughter is important
for all of us at any age.
- And how do you find the line?
Because I think with your books,
it seems that parents
and adults can enjoy them
just as much as kids sometimes.
But how do you kind of thread that needle
so that it's funny or
there's something to laugh at
or appreciate for both?
- Well, number one, I start with the kid.
My primary clientele is the child.
- Yeah.
- And I just go,
if I was nine years old,
would this passage or this idea amuse me?
It's answering your previous question.
So I just go look through the
window and I see myself going,
nah, that's too safe or boring.
- Mm-hmm.
- Oh yeah! I like that.
A room full of exploding eyeballs? Yes!
I don't understand it,
and neither does my adult self.
Why would anyone want room
full of exploding eyeballs?
But you ask that to a
bunch of kids, they go,
"Because they're cool!"
And of course nobody's
eyeballs are actually exploding
so we can entertain this chaotic idea.
So I'm negotiating between the children,
my adult self,
will this upset parents or teachers,
which I had to learn
through hard experience.
- Yeah, right.
- 'Cause Terry and I have had,
well, 25 years to experiment
with all sorts of humour.
The "Just" series was fairly out there,
fairly a lot of gratuitous
violence and gratuitous-
- Yeah, did a look get cut from that in
before it was kind of like
the published versions
that we know today?
- Not too much.
I'd done a lot of my
research by that stage,
but we did a book called "The Bad Book",
which did go too far.
- Hmm.
- That's where Terry and
I were learning to create
in the same room at
the same time together.
And some of that humour
just went a bit too far.
Where if an innocent victim suffers,
like a dog, a cat got set on
fire by a little psychopath,
horrible child.
But peoples were really upset
because the kid didn't suffer enough.
- Yeah, right.
- And so I went back-
- That's all a balance.
- Yeah, there's a sort of moral equation.
If someone does something
horrible in a story,
they should ultimately pay a price,
otherwise we're left kind of,
something's wrong with that story.
I don't know what, but-
- Yeah, interesting.
So you had to kind of bang
it around over the years
and break some rules you
didn't even know existed.
- I had that kid set fire to himself
and then everyone went fickle.
- Fantastic.
- Idiot.
(laughing)
You do it, you suffer.
And it was clear that this was
not an admirable thing to do.
So just trial and error we learnt.
And with the "Treehouse" series,
we really stumbled into it by accident.
We just had a perfect blend of chaos,
which was probably if the "Just"
series is 80% kind of edgy,
"Treehouse" is maybe 20% edgy.
And it's got a friendship
between the characters,
which gives the reader a safe place to be.
- Mm.
- The treehouse also is a safe place,
even though it's the most
dangerous treehouse in the world,
but there's a house and
there's a set of relationships,
and then you can have the chaos
and it all feels in the right proportion.
- Yeah.
- For what's turned out
to be millions of readers
around the world,
not just a few hardcore
kids in suburban Australia.
- Yeah, that's cool.
So you've got like a home
base, a stable environment,
and then once that's established,
anything around it can happen.
- Yeah, and in musical terms, again,
you can have hardcore thrash punk,
which is, you know, appealing
to a certain type of person,
but not everyone.
- Yeah.
- But when you bring a bit of melody
and you use that energy.
- It's like a gateway.
- Your audience grows.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- You've used more and more
illustrations in your books
over the years.
Obviously, your relationship
with Terry is so fundamental
to how your writing and
publishing career has grown.
But you're using more these days
compared to when you started.
Is that like a conscious decision
based on what you've
learned over the years?
- Yeah, I think it was
realising that many kids
were enjoying the "Just"
books through audio books.
- Oh, right.
- And also through having
them read to them by teachers.
- Yeah.
- But that the difficulty
level of the words
was actually quite difficult for them.
Because as an emerging
reader, words are hard work,
you know, that you've
just listened to a kid
learning to read.
The cat.
- Yeah.
- Sssaat, you know,
you're working.
And I did write a phonetic
reader many years ago,
just for fun, called "The
Cat on the Mat is Flat",
because it gets chased by a rat.
Oh no, it chases a rat.
And then the rat goes
and gets a baseball bat,
and the rat chases the cat.
And bringing that little
level of silliness in
and the simplicity with big pictures
made that a very accessible text.
And I was like,
oh, how could I apply
that to longer narratives?
And eventually, The Treehouse,
I realised I could say,
"Hey, this is me and my friend Terry,
and we live in a treehouse.
And it's not any
treehouse. It's 13 stories.
Check it out."
And I'd just say to Terry,
can you just draw a 13-storey treehouse
full of inappropriate
things like shark tanks
and bowling alleys.
And then the kid just inhales it instantly
and they've only had to read,
"Hi, I'm Andy, this is Terry.
We live in a treehouse."
And they're inside the book.
- And did Terry come up
with the 13, like levels,
or was that you, or is that, you know.
- I came up with three.
I said, I want a really
dangerous treehouse,
bowling alley, shark tank,
and a marshmallow machine
that fires marshmallows
whenever we're hungry.
Can you design kind of this
cool dangerous treehouse?
And then he did the 13 platforms in a tree
with catapults and bedrooms.
And that's the essence
of a good collaboration.
Because he gives me what I want,
but not in the way I expect.
And then I went, oh my goodness.
This is what the book should be called.
One, two, three, four,
13 levels here, The 13-Storey Treehouse.
- Yeah.
- And we'll be in it.
And our big problem will
be we can't write our book
because there's too much
distraction going on
in all the different levels.
And in fact, that was true life.
We were stuck at a deadline
and we didn't have,
we didn't know where to go.
- Yeah.
- So I said,
well, let's write a book.
Let's write a book about not
being able to write the book,
and yeah so.
- But I like, let's write a book.
He's not just an illustrator
and you're not just the,
you're true collaborators
and you influence each
other on the entire story.
- Yeah, that was very
much where I wanted to go
after the "Just" series because
that was written separate.
I would work on the stories,
he'd do the marginal stuff,
but I was just like, there's more here.
If we could do it together,
that'd be an X factor,
that'd be like a nuclear
bomb for the imagination.
And we have Jill, my
wife and first editor,
who is also an essential part of the team
reacting to everything that
we're doing in real time.
And she's read many thousands more books
than I've ever read.
And she has an inbuilt instinct,
for if is the story progressing?
- Mm.
- Or have we got waylaid
with a funny idea, but losing
all the drama, you know?
- Yeah.
- So she's absolutely
crucial to that process too.
- Yeah, just keeping you
folks in order a little bit.
- Yeah, and now Terry has retired,
but there's new young Bill on the block
who's slotted into the same
sort of method that we use.
So it's very difficult to tell
who's come up with an idea
or you can come up with a raw idea,
but then someone puts the icing on it.
- Yeah, that you didn't even see.
- You didn't even see,
it was funny enough.
But with this icing now it's compelling.
- Yeah.
Terry, Andy and Jill characters
in many of your books,
was that a conscious
thing from the beginning
to have kids sort of versions of you
and your friends in them?
- It was something that was
in me right from the beginning
that I always needed to write the story
as if it was happening to me.
- Yeah, right.
- The most outlandish thing, you know?
Did I ever tell you about the
day my bum detached itself?
Yeah, I was in bed, I woke up,
it was standing on the window ledge,
and I was like, "Come back!"
But it was too late,
it already jumped out.
So now I'm like, oh, great,
now I've gotta go find my bum.
But yeah, my legs aren't attached.
How am I gonna do this?
So I'm narrating it.
- So I was trying to work out
whether you are actually telling
me this story as you now.
- Perfect.
That's what I want.
I want the reader to not quite know.
They know because the
events are outlandish,
but I'm saying it so reasonably and-
- Yeah.
- begrudgingly rather than-
- And realistically like so-
- Yeah.
- So out of, you've attached emotion to it
as if like you're remembering it
rather than telling me a story.
- Yeah, so that way I convince myself
that this is happening, even
though I know it didn't,
and it's not.
- It didn't, everyone.
Just, again.
- That bums can be embarrassing.
And they have their own, you know, agenda.
They can release gas,
they can release noise,
and children get into trouble for that.
- They do, yeah.
- This is not appropriate.
And it was like, this is not me,
this is my bottom.
And so this is part of
the challenge of childhood
is fitting in with the adults.
And I took that idea that
it seems like sometimes
parts of your body are
independent of you and said,
what if they really were
and what would happen next?
So yeah, it always felt natural to me.
And I'm gonna contradict myself
'cause The Day my Bum Went
Psycho is told by Zach Freeman.
One of the few books I've
done in a third person.
- Right.
- But everything else,
Andy, is all through the "Just" books.
- And it sounds like even the way you
generally write the story
compass from a place as if it-
- Yeah.
- As if it's really happening to you.
- And the kids knew
Terry was the illustrator
for the "Just" series,
and they knew he would
tease me in the margins
and they'd show me, they'd go,
"Hey, do you know he's
drawn a picture of you
getting squashed by a piano?"
And I go, "Really?"
And they'd go, "Yeah, look,
page 56 of 'Just Stupid!'"
And I was like, "Right when I get home,
I'm gonna smash him with a piano."
And they go, "Do you live together?"
And I go, "Yes. He's so annoying.
He's always smashing me with
pianos and I'm sick of it."
- So obviously the kids must feel like
they know Andy Griffiths.
- Absolutely.
- They know Terry.
They know Jill.
- And that's, yeah.
So by the time we got to the Treehouse,
I said, this is our life,
writing the books that you like,
and this is what I go through,
this is what I have to put up with Terry.
He's never doing his work.
And one famous incident,
he washes his underpants in the shark tank
and the sharks eat his underpants.
And then we called Jill
'cause she lives in a
house full of animals
on the other side of the forest,
'cause she always wanted
to talk to animals
when she was a child.
So I said, I'm gonna give you your dream.
You live in a-
- Wow.
- You know all about animals.
And we call Jill who comes
and fixes the problem
of the sharks by diving into the tank
and doing open shark surgery on them.
So she's fixing their imaginary problem
the same way as she fixes our
real-life narrative problems.
- Yeah.
- And Terry is always,
apparently, wandering off topic,
but the random things he comes up with
are just pure grist for
my imagination mill and-
- Yeah.
- So you need those energies.
Yeah.
- Yeah.
What an amazing collaboration.
Why is it so important for kids
to have access to books and stories?
- Number one, to grow their imagination.
Because the more imaginative you are,
the more you can apply those skills
to every aspect of your life.
You give yourself options.
And also by reading,
you are picking up knowledge
of how the world works,
or in my case, how the world doesn't work,
or you're reading from
different points of view.
So you're getting a more nuanced
understanding of the world
just by simply reading books.
You're growing your imagination
and you're also improving
your reading skills,
so your literacy is
naturally getting better.
You can write that job application letter
so much more convincingly.
- Which for some does take
a lot of imagination to-
- Absolutely.
- fill out.
- Yeah, yeah.
So literacy makes a big
difference in people's lives.
And I'm passionate about
that as a side product
of having a really great time with books.
And I also meet kids and families
who are in crisis or have been in crisis
or have been through a pandemic
and they tell me how
important the books were
in being a bonding agent for the family.
Something where they could escape.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Whatever they're going through.
And the intrepid parents
who drive around Australia.
I can't tell you how
many people have said,
your audio books saved our sanity.
They kept the kids quiet
for those long stretches.
- Yeah.
- And we all enjoyed them.
So I'm reminding parents
of their childhood,
which is a pleasurable experience mostly.
The kids are just enjoying
having someone who understands
what it's like to be a kid.
So it's sort of win-win for everybody.
- Yeah.
- In every respect.
- You're a lifetime ambassador
for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
Can you tell us a little bit
more about your work there?
- Yeah, it's a publishing
industry initiative
that started in around 2006
to get books into remote
indigenous communities
where often the libraries
would be destroyed by floods
or there was just very few
books in the communities.
And many of those kids knew
two or three languages,
indigenous languages.
But their first encounter
with the printed word
would be the first day of school.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
Which is pretty late.
- Yeah.
- It is really great to expose
and immerse kids in literature
right from the womb.
There's plenty of, yeah,
plenty of research to show
they're picking up the rhythms of language
just from you reading them
before they're even born,
but certainly after
they're born to have books
as a regular thing to know
which way the pages turn,
to know that you can read
them over and over again
and it's a pleasurable bonding experience
between you and the child.
So that books and reading
are sort of natural part.
So yeah, we figured,
books you cannot learn to
read if there are no books.
And in some ways,
indigenous people in these communities
are very good readers of their landscape.
They are far more literate
than me or you in those areas.
- Yeah.
- But they also have to
deal with the outside world.
And not having literacy is a disadvantage.
So yeah, it started with little,
sort of exploratory trips
with a small group of us.
And I would talk to the kids
and make little books with them
and show them how they can
turn their amazing lives
into these little nine-page narratives,
floods,
close encounters with crocodiles,
snakes,
you know, wonderful family trips,
trips where the kids are just
out by themselves, you know,
fishing and building
fires and eating them.
And I was like, you kids
are living the dream.
But yeah, and so,
that's grown into a whole
publishing programme
plus where 150 such
books have been created
with different communities
where the kids can see their own lives
reflected back in the books.
- Well, yeah.
Like how important is that
for those communities to,
for those kids to see themselves
in this kind of writing?
- Well, it's all important.
Just as I recognised
my own sense of humour
in books I was reading,
we love seeing films from our,
take movies, when we can
recognise the places,
it just gives us that
extra bit of connection.
So having them be able to see
these are all the things
we eat in our community is,
yeah, these books are talking to me.
In their case, I had a
hand in creating it so.
- Yeah.
- Literature becomes less,
less alien and more something
a way of interacting
with the world.
- Yeah.
You've mentioned it
briefly there, you know,
family road trips, how kids
often experience the books
in some ways, audio books,
obviously, you know, a
massive thing these days.
- Yep.
- What's your opinion of them
and how have you, you know,
have you had to adapt some
of your books to that format?
- Yes, all of our books have
been made into audio books.
Poor old Stig Wemyss read most of them.
And he would, because some
of them were highly visual,
so he would improvise.
- Well, yeah, how do you do that?
Yeah.
- He would improvise
and bring a comedic talent to-
- Cool.
- Making it all work.
So that was really great.
But I'm happy for kids to
interact with imaginative stories
in whatever format is
available and what works.
So reading, you know,
arguably storytelling
began as an oral thing 'cause literature,
literacy is only a two
or 300-year old invention
for the masses.
So many people would've
just heard stories.
And this is where I would
connect back to music.
Literature is a form of song,
songs being an early way
of telling stories too.
But there's a rhythm,
there's a sort of musicality to language,
which Jill and I are very sensitive to
as we're revising the books.
Does it sound good?
You know, that's really important,
'cause that's what's gonna make it sing
in the reader's imagination.
So yeah, audio books,
eBooks,
if that's gonna work
for you, then do that.
Paper books still retain a huge popularity
because you can sort of
stop and go backwards
and reread and you can mark the pages.
- Yeah.
- You can with an eBook too,
but it's less, less,
it's not quite as easy.
Audio books,
movies have their plays.
We've had many plays made from our books.
And they can,
a good experience with any of those things
can send you back to the printed page.
- Yeah.
- Or the printed page
can leap off into these other places.
So it's all a sort of virtuous circle.
But I do see books,
print books and theatre are much closer
because they're sort of
a very direct engagement,
a conversation with the
audience that you are saying,
let's play make believe, okay?
We're in this theatre.
We know the characters are
not actually the characters,
but we're gonna,
you pretend and we'll do
our best to make this real.
And you enter into that
shared space of creativity.
And I think with a book also,
it's just black marks on a page.
- Yeah.
- I've gotta trick you
into believing this.
- You suspend your disbelief.
- Yeah.
- You fill in the gaps.
- And there's a lot of rewards for that.
Movie,
a movie has decided what
the characters look like.
They've decided how this is gonna go.
It's gotta work in an hour and a half.
We haven't got weeks to just
weave in and out of a book
and go digressing here and there,
so bam, bam, bam.
So that's less of an imaginative
experience than a book.
That's a terrible thing to say.
Movies are very important to me,
but books are a particular pleasure
and a very close one that
once you bond with a book,
it's with you for life.
- Yeah.
- And there's a couple
of movies that would,
be that for me too, but they're fewer.
Book is where I've had close
interaction with that author.
- And it's a singular version probably.
Your version of that book in your head.
- I've made it all up to suit myself.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- And what would your advice
to parents be on, you know,
putting together a media
diet for a kid these days?
Where do books sort of fit into that?
- I'd look for a balance between,
between books,
between television,
between movement outside,
between time away from the screens.
I think a parent can regulate that.
And it's too much of anything is not good.
I've learnt that sadly by the age of 64.
I've always been a fan of excess.
But with kids, they're
not maybe necessarily
gonna have book reading as
their top priority in a life,
'cause it does take a
little bit of effort.
The ability to sit in a
place and concentrate.
And even as adults,
well, adults very much
are busy doing stuff
and it's hard to find that time.
One thing I love to do myself
if I want to read a big book
is I get the audio book
as well as the print book.
- Yeah. I do that as well.
- I listen to swathes of
it while I'm in the car.
- Yeah.
- And then I get home and I go,
"Now where am I?"
I read a few chapters.
So I have that pleasurable
reading thing, which I love.
But then I'm not,
I'm not taking three
months to read the book.
- Yeah.
- I'm moving along in the car
and yeah, I find it a seamless experience.
- It's great to hear the actual
author does the same thing
as I do as well.
We're in the sort of last
part of the questions here.
What do you wish that
people talked about more
when it comes to literacy in young people?
- What do I wish they talked about more?
Good question.
- Maybe it's a terrible question.
Maybe there's no answer to that one.
- I'm always looking for
the child-centered text.
Is this appealing to me as an adult
or is it gonna really excite a kid?
- Yeah.
- That's my acid test.
- Is it really gonna be engaging?
- Yeah, yeah.
Or can it engage everybody
at the same time?
So,
yeah, I still think
books have an enormous,
enormously important part to
play in developing literacy,
giving kids a safe haven,
and a really enjoyable playground.
So anything we can do to keep that alive,
to keep our libraries as a
vital part of any school.
I find it incomprehensible that
some schools who are going,
oh, well, we don't really
need a library anymore
or a qualified librarian
who's keeping ahead of,
or who knows about what's available
and can connect the right
kid with the right book
or just show them what's out there.
Because you just don't know that stuff.
So yeah, I think that's what
we should be talking about.
Every school should have a library
and an enthusiastic qualified librarian.
That would be nice.
- Any tips for engaging
reluctant readers these days?
- Well, I'm doing my best to write books
that entice them in.
And there is, of course,
many more books available
now than there were.
When I was growing up and
also even 25 years ago,
there are many great books
that are taking sometimes
an irreverent approach
or an exciting approach,
blending the pictures and
the words and make and find,
creating a landscape where each reader
can find the type of
thing that turns them on.
Because each reader is different.
Even though many kids enjoy laughing,
some kids want something
non-fiction and serious
and we have to look after them as well,
otherwise they'll just go,
"Eh, reading's not for me."
- And any tips for educators, parents,
people that are trying to kind
of foster a love of reading?
- You know, obviously, expose
your child in whatever venues,
whether it's a bookshop or a library,
regular trips to the library.
Tolerance for what type
of books they wanna read.
It may not be the great
childhood book that you had.
Sorry, but time moves on.
And even Enid Blyton,
as much as I loved her,
there's a few cracks and it needs updating
as does Roald Dahl.
You know, what was okay 50 years ago
is not necessarily what we'd want today.
And I know I'll get a
lot of people upset there
because we must have
Roald Dahl as he did it.
But yeah, there's modern
versions of all of this.
And, so yeah, be tolerant
of your child's tastes.
They may not be yours,
but where you can find shared interests
make it a family thing, yeah.
- Final quick fire questions.
What's a book that changed your life?
- Ooh.
So many of them.
It was probably Cole's Funny Picture Book.
Professor Cole, E.W. Cole,
Edward Cole was a bookseller
around the late 1800s
turn of the century.
And he founded the world-famous
Cole's Book Arcade,
which is where Dymocks' Bookstore
is now in Bourke Street.
You can still see parts
of the arcade there.
But he believed reading
was going to be the saviour of mankind.
The more we can educate people,
the more we can appreciate
other people's points of view,
the more we can think
more interesting philosophical thoughts.
It was, you know, that's how we progress.
And he made his bookshops
places where people could come.
They didn't have to
buy, there were couches.
They could just sit and read.
And he had them full of
exotica, monkeys and parrots
and sort of circus performers.
- Wow.
- It's really extraordinary.
And he believed passionately
that to introduce a child to reading,
you needed to make it a
pleasurable experience.
- Hmm.
- So he made these little pamphlets
just full of funny
pictures and little poems
and things that he just collected.
And they became Cole's Funny
Picture Book Number One.
- Wow.
- And Number Two.
And they were vast
compilations of Victoriana.
And sudden, utterly terrifying
and inappropriate and awful,
but always funny,
always with the intention
of enticing a child in,
and they worked so well for me.
You could never exhaust these books.
There was always something to wonder at
or to be disturbed by or
to come back over and over.
And his nephew eventually
did Number Three,
and it showed Professor Cole
writing in his submarine
collecting images and ideas for his books.
So that went in very deep for me.
- Wow.
- I'm gonna be in my own books.
- Yeah.
- And write books
that will create pleasure for children.
- There you go, Professor Cole.
Yeah, nice one.
What's the funniest feedback
that you've ever received
from a young reader?
- From a young reader?
It was probably turning away
from the signing table saying,
"Mom!", you know,
"I thought he was a kid,
but he's like an old man!"
Which was a great compliment
that they had believed
I was their age and their friend,
and I still am their friend,
but I'm just not their age.
- Must be quite the shock.
What about from a publisher?
I feel like you were this
close to giving me something,
some funny tidbits.
- My favourite negative review is of
The Day my Butt went Psycho.
It was from an Amazon
review, and someone said,
"If the works of Shakespeare
could be typed by an
infinite amount of monkeys
in an infinite amount of time,
this book could surely have
been written by one monkey
with one typewriter in a couple of hours."
- Wow.
- And I went, respect.
That is brilliant.
- That review gets a good review.
- Yeah.
- From Andy Griffiths himself.
- What's next for you? What's on the boil?
- Well, we finished the
Treehouse series after 13 years.
- Wow.
- 13 books.
It takes a year to write each book.
Terry is taking a long
and well-earned rest.
And I've started a series with Bill Hope
called the "You and Me" series.
And it's written in
response to all the readers
who wrote to us and said,
can you put me in the book?
Or can you put our family in the book?
Can you write a story with us in it?
And I was like, how would I do that?
Wouldn't it be fun if I
just assumed the reader
was my friend and a fellow adventurer?
And we'd been on a lot
of adventures together.
And I go,
"Hey, do you remember that time
we were down the bottom of the ocean
and we fought a high voltage electropus?"
"And what about the time we
climbed Mount Quake-a-Lot
on roller skates?
That was cool."
And so with that tone,
and I put us both,
or with Bill's help,
put us both in adventure suits,
full body adventure suits, gloves,
face with a cardboard box helmet.
And that was also,
to make the reader able to relate
no matter who they are, what nationality,
what gender, what age.
So that we're completely kind
of mysterious characters.
And we go on,
and I recount the adventure
that you've forgotten.
In the first time,
it was when the time we went
to the Land of Lost Things.
And in the most recent book,
when we jumped down a hole
and discovered the terrifying
peanut butter beast
at the bottom of the hole.
And so that's been a lot of fun.
Just playing with that idea of identity,
of who's telling the story
and who you are as a reader,
and that we're both inhabiting
a shared imaginative space.
- Yeah.
An amazing device to bring
the audience with you as well.
- Yeah, well, it just felt
natural and I know is helping.
I was answering their desire
to be in the story with me
without having a cast of millions.
And finally, if you could
give one message to every kid
picking a book for the first
time, what would it be?
- Make it an Andy Griffiths book.
No.
- All right, thanks, everyone.
That's Andy Griffiths.
- One piece of advice?
- Yeah.
- I don't know.
What do you think? Do you like it?
- Yeah.
- And if they go, eh.
Then I'd say, put it down immediately.
Find something else.
- There you go.
Wise words to end on.
Well, Andy Griffiths, thank you so much
for joining us today on Stories of Wonder.
- My pleasure.
It's been an honour. Thank you.