"Classic" Australian Children's and YA Novels: #1 Tomorrow, When the War Began
Perhaps the most popular and successful Australian young adult novel series is an invasion narrative. John Marsden’s "The Tomorrow Series" (1993-1999), which began with Tomorrow, When the War Began, has been reprinted more than thirty times with sales of more than three million copies, translated into various languages, and adapted into a film in 2010 and a television series in 2016. The sequel series, "The Ellie Chronicles", reveals that the force that has invaded Australia is a coalition of South Asian countries seeking the space and natural resources that are limited in their populous region.
Given the origins and evolution of Australian children’s literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is unsurprising that an invasion narrative is one of the most notable Australian young adult novels. The history of Australian children’s literature evidences an enduring preoccupation with ideas of nation and belonging. The sense of what it is to be young in a ‘young’ nation — at least in the sense of Australian Federation in 1901 — embodies the tenuous nature of Australian identity, which was first shaped in relation to Britain and reframed with the embrace of multicultural and Indigenous identities in the final decades of the twentieth century.
Tomorrow, When the War Began focuses on a group of ‘rurals’ in the fictional location of Wirawee, who are practiced in drenching sheep and driving tractors. Although the landscape is understood as threatening in some respects, such as the annual danger posed by bushfires, the country is framed as a place of comparative freedom and safety by narrator Ellie Linton:
Out here in the country, where most of us lived, where the air was free and the paddocks wide and empty, we had still been moving fairly confidently. Danger just didn’t seem real. We know that if there was trouble, if there was danger, it would be in town.The fires that are visible as the novel opens are eventually revealed to be the first sign of the invasion of a foreign force, with the area chosen as the base for a full-scale takeover of Australia. Many houses and businesses in the predominantly Anglo-Australian community are soon destroyed, while most of the Wirawee residents have been imprisoned at the local showground. A group of young people, including Ellie, who had been camping in remote bush manage to evade capture by the occupiers and eventually wage guerrilla war against them.
What is never specified within the first novel of what would become a series is the identity of the invaders. During a radio transmission, a General specifies that the invasion ‘was aimed at “reducing imbalances within the region”’. Moreover, Robyn refers to Australia’s plentiful land and natural resources ‘and yet there’s countries a crow’s spit away that have people packed in like battery hens’. The references to the ‘region’ and populous nations in close proximity insinuates an Asian neighbour, an assumption that is confirmed in subsequent books in the series. There are also unusual references within the novel that allude to historic and racist generalisations about Chinese people; for instance, when the teens discuss trapping animals to survive, Lee suggests he ‘can do a nice sweet and sour possum’ or make dim sims from ‘a feral cat’.
As Catriona Ross proposes, Australian novels about Asian invasion ‘are alarmist, didactic texts’ that show the potential ease of invasion and outline ‘the gruesome horrors the populace would suffer’. Theodore Sheckels reads the ‘bush literacy’ of Marsden’s teen characters as ‘represent[ative of] the continent’s aboriginal (sic) inhabitants’, which thereby means the Asian invasion mirrors the process of white settler invasion for Indigenous Australians. The ‘coded signal’ about indigeneity that Sheckels identifies in Marsden’s novel is especially fascinating given Marsden’s authorship of the controversial picture book The Rabbits (1998, illustrated by Shaun Tan), in which boatloads of rabbits serve as metaphoric white settlers displacing Indigenous people.
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| Illustration from The Rabbits by John Marsden; illustrated by Shaun Tan. |
The novel repeatedly evokes animal imagery in ways that speak to its rural setting, but which also serve as metaphors for human behaviour. For instance, when Ellie’s romantic feelings for Homer Yannos flare while the group of teens hide out, she recalls the sight of animals she had seen at the slaughterhouse: ‘What I’d never forgotten was the sight of two steers half way up the ramp, just a couple of minutes away from death, but one still trying to mount the other.’ This quotation is significant because it aligns human behaviour with the crude natural drives of animals, an association that Marsden draws on in his ultimate metaphor for the invasion of Australia. As Ellie watches a dragonfly eating a mosquito, she suggests that acts of killing can be better understood through the lens of the survival behaviour exhibited by animals:
The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. He didn’t have the imagination to put himself in the mosquito’s place. He just enjoyed his meal. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insect’s suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitos too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like ‘evil’ and ‘vicious’, they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.
While much has rightly been said of the inherent racism of invasion narratives such as Tomorrow, this passage departs from associating the invaders with a unique brutality and can be extrapolated to consider humans as locked in a similar ‘survival of the fittest’ battle. Indeed, Robyn remarks that the invaders cannot be blamed for resenting imbalances in resources in the region, while Australians ‘sat on our fat backsides, enjoyed our money and felt smug’.
Though Australian children’s literature from the 1970s largely shifted to city settings, Marsden’s series returns to the once ubiquitous depiction of Australian young people in the bush. Tomorrow, When the War Began reorients the historical threats posed by the bush in colonial children’s literature by highlighting an imported danger — that of the foreign invader — that could destroy the nostalgic pleasures of a white rural Australian childhood.
