Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Dec. 15th, 2013 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12One of my friends on Tumblr asked me to talk about why John Marsden's Tomorrow series had such a profound impact on me as a child and teenager, and why I continue to care deeply about the series to this day. Because I don't like writing long posts on Tumblr, I'm answering him here.
Content note: It is impossible to discuss this series without talking about war, violence and rape.
1. The first thing you need to know is that I read Tomorrow, When the War Began for the first time when I was ten years old. Same goes for The Dead of the Night. I read The Third Day, the Frost when I was eleven, and the rest of the books as they were published (so between the ages of twelve and fourteen). I continued to reread them throughout high school and into adulthood. I think the age you first encounter particular stories affects how they resonate with you, and I think the ages I was when I read the Tomorrow series were pretty much perfect in ensuring the series had maximum impact.
2. This next point is kind of hard to articulate, but I will try. The Tomorrow series was the first thing I ever encountered that made me really think about injustice, dispossession, my own privilege as a white Australian, and how that privilege was actually harmful to other people in the world. I was ten years old, so I didn't phrase it in those terms, but look. I knew about terra nullius, I knew about the Stolen Generations and the land rights movement, and both my mother and my teachers had tried to explain the terrible things that had been done to Indigenous people by European settlers, but it all seemed kind of abstract. Seeing teenagers roughly my own age, of my own time, experiencing a hostile invading force taking over their land, threatening their lives, and making everything they'd previously considered normal dangerous and impossible, finally made me understand.
The same goes for war itself. Those books were published against the backdrop of Rwanda, East Timor, the Balkans conflict, escalating violence in the Middle East, the continued rumblings of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and a whole litany of other conflicts. But as an Australian child, although people had explained about those wars to me, I found them hard to comprehend or visualize. By bringing the war to my own doorstep, John Marsden showed me the realities faced by millions of children and teenagers all around the world. This links in to my next point, which is that
3. By depicting an invasion of Australia, the Tomorrow series shows how real-world injustice leads to conflict. The series hinges on an invasion of Australia by an unspecified foreign nation. The books never outright state it, but it's implied this nation is Indonesia. They remain shadowy and ill-defined, and the teenage Australian characters' right to fight back against them is never seriously challenged, but Marsden goes out of his way to point out that Australia's real-world actions have lead it to this point. There's lots of talk about how for a country with 'boundless plains to share' (a line in the Australian national anthem), Australia isn't exactly welcoming to the dispossessed outside its borders, that its great wealth lead to resentment from its impoverished near neighbours, and that the moral cowardice of its politicians and their choice of allies is what got it into this predicament. (There's a scene in which the teenage characters listen in a state of rage to its politicians, who have all been evacuated to the United States, and call for Australian citizens to fight back while doing nothing to help. The US alliance does nothing beyond evacuating the politicians, whereas New Zealand and Papua New Guinea send help.)
I think if the books achieved only point 2, they would be problematic. Depicting groups who enjoy real-world privilege in a reversed situation is generally not the best way to educate those groups (see: Saving the Pearls). However, because point 2 is tied so strongly with point 3 (that is, Australian teenagers living in a war-zone is shown to be connected to real-world inequalities) that they work together as a powerful educational tool. I honestly think that it was these books that made me get it: I'm not saying that I could then walk in the shoes of an Indigenous person or a person who lived in a war-zone, but I understood, as I had never understood except in a sort of abstract way, the profound injustice of what these people had experienced and were experiencing.
4. Teenagers achieve what adults cannot precisely because of the things that teenagers value and do well. The narrator Ellie Linton and her group of friends are able to mount such an effective resistance because they are flexible and adaptable - like all teenagers, they are good at challenging their own assumptions and reacting quickly to change. They are good at what they do because they are self-absorbed and feel things deeply, by which I mean they are self-reflective, they spend a lot of time debating internally and as a group how their actions will affect them individually and as a whole, what they feel about the ethics of guerrilla warfare and so on. And they are good at what they do because of the strength of their friendship, and because of how deeply they care about one another - rather than being cold-blooded killers whose only thoughts are on the mission, they care more about the lives of their friends, and this actually makes them take greater care when undertaking acts of war. So the things for which adults normally scorn teenagers: 'fickleness', 'self-absorption' and 'caring too much about their friends' are shown to be heroic and effective. This is such a powerful message.
5. Each character brings a different set of skills and weaknesses to the table, and each has his or her own moral limits, which everyone in the group respects. This also serves to illuminate how authority figures often misinterpret or underestimate the abilities of the teenagers around them. Homer Yannos, for example, was viewed by his teachers in peacetime as a 'troublemaker' who was never going to achieve anything. However, in wartime he is the group's de facto leader, a brilliant tactician, and a person of deep emotional reserves, capable of extraordinary love and gentleness. Similarly, Lee was in peacetime a gentle, quiet boy who played the piano and violin, whereas as a guerrilla he's the least morally conflicted about killing other human beings. Robyn is the only one who refuses outright to kill people (she's okay with sabotage and providing distractions while the other members of the group do actual killing), and the rest of the group accept this without question. (Robyn also mentions that it was a real struggle for her to refuse to kill, that she would rather do so, but that it has to be her own particular moral line in the sand.) Marsden does a great job in showing the depths of these characters, their multifaceted nature, and how the faces people show in everyday life aren't necessarily the true ones.
6. In the character of Major Harvey, Marsden makes it clear how harmful the attitudes of those in authority can be towards teenagers. Major Harvey is a bit of a strawman - a former school principal, he winds up running 'Harvey's Heroes', a resistance group that achieves precisely nothing, and then he ends up collaborating with the enemy and sentencing Homer and Ellie to death in the third book ('you are children, but you committed the crimes of adults and will be tried as adults' is a particularly chilling paraphrase of how that goes down). As a principal he was dogmatic, inflexible and unable to empathize with the teenagers in his charge. As a resistance fighter, he insists on military discipline and strict enforcement of gender roles, and refuses to believe Ellie and her friends when they tell him that they've been successfully waging a guerrilla war on their own and achieved results - because he doesn't believe teenagers are capable of anything without rigid discipline and stern, authoritarian adult leadership. As a collaborator, he hypocritically changes his tune, believing that his teenage prisoners are capable of everything he denied them as a resistance leader. John Marsden was a teacher for many years, and I'm sure he observed other teachers who shared these views of adolescents. As a student myself, although I had many excellent teachers, there were a few like this, and teenagers knew them when they saw them. By showing up the hypocrisy of authority figures of this type, Marsden demonstrated that he saw what we saw. And he gave us the tools to question authority itself. He showed us that respect for authority has to be earned.
7. The books contains the healthiest depiction of (albeit straight) teenage sexuality I've ever seen. Robyn doesn't want to have sex before marriage - and that's fine. Lee wants to have sex with Ellie in the first book, they talk about it, she isn't ready - and that's fine. Ellie wants to have sex with Lee in the second book, they talk about it, find condoms - and that's fine. She stops wanting to have sex with him in the third book - and that's fine. Fi and Homer want to have sex in the seventh book - and that's fine. Ellie gets back together with Lee in the sequel trilogy - and that's fine. A boy at a party in New Zealand gets Ellie drunk and in a position where she feels she can't say no, but doesn't say yes either - that's rape. The point is that all the sixteen-year-old characters, male and female, feel sexual desire at one point or another, and the degree to which they act on it is the result of personal choice, discussion with their chosen partners, the respecting of boundaries, and, if sex does happen, it involves contraception. Ellie's consensual relationship with Lee is contrasted with her experience with the boy in New Zealand, which is clearly depicted as rape, 'even though' the boy involved doesn't physically or verbally threaten Ellie in any way (that is, it shows that her consent was never asked for nor was she in a position to give it, in a situation in which society often blames the victim). These books were so eye-opening for me, because they told me that sexual desire was okay, that establishing boundaries was okay, that talking to potential partners was okay, and that everyone had their own particular limits that needed to be respected. (Considering what happened to me later in life, I'm not sure how much I took this on...)
This is why the current debates about what is 'appropriate' in stories for teenagers always make me laugh. This was in John Marsden books in the mid-'90s! Why are we still having this debate?
8. I love the way the series depicts the Australian landscape, particularly the bush. Marsden tapped into a rich seam in Australian culture: there is a trend to depict the outback (in stories about white Australians in any case) as a place of hostility and danger, where weird stuff goes on. Think Picnic At Hanging Rock. Think Walkabout. Think Wolf Creek. I believe this strand of stories taps into the unease a lot of Australians feel in the outback, or anywhere away from the major cities. We cling to the coastlines - the bush is where backpackers get murdered.
And yet for the teenage guerrillas of the Tomorrow series, the bush is what saves them. There they can melt into the landscape, hidden from the fighter jets and helicopters by a canopy of trees, their actions unheeded. Marsden's choice to name the area in which they hide 'Hell' is very deliberate. Their own homes have become hostile to them. Their world has become hellish, and Hell becomes a haven.
9. Finally, and most importantly to me in many ways, is the fact that the books were a cultural phenomenon. I was not allowed as a child or teenager to watch most TV (in fact, my viewing was pretty much limited to a couple of shows on ABC Kids, the ABC News, David Attenborough documentaries and Media Watch). Most of the conversations my friends had began, 'Did you watch Lois and Clark?', 'Did you watch Party of Five?', 'Did you watch The Simpsons?' and so on. Can you imagine being a kid in the '90s who didn't watch The Simpsons? For the most part, I didn't care so much, because I had pretty much zero interest in watching TV, and because I more meaningful friendships outside school with family friends from similar backgrounds (my closest family friend didn't even have a TV in her house until she was eleven years old), and with kids at gymnastics, piano or Kumon where our shared activity left little time to talk about TV. But it was frustrating not to be able to participate in these kinds of conversations, because they were how the kids at my school related to one another, and thus a lot of my later childhood and early adolescence involved me sitting around silently and being ignored while conversations about TV went on over my head. One year, I even pretended, with disastrous results, that I had watched all the stuff my friends watched, only to have to admit I'd been lying the whole time when my mother offered to have my best friend stay with us for a couple of weeks while her father and stepmother were in Europe. It was mortifying.
While I wasn't allowed to watch TV, I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. And although my other friends read, they weren't fannish about books and barely ever talked about them. The Tomorrow series, however, was different. Everyone read them, and in the weeks leading up to the publication of a new book, there'd be feverish schoolyard speculation about what would happen, who would die, who would get together and so on. So this was a piece of media about which I could talk with my friends, with my acquaintances - indeed with every teenager I knew. I don't know a single person who wasn't reading the series at the time. I don't know anyone who didn't have an opinion about them. The Tomorrow series was one of the few pieces of common Australian '90s-kid culture in which I was able to participate. For that reason alone, they are profound importance to me.
I hope that answers any questions about what the Tomorrow series meant and means to me!
Content note: It is impossible to discuss this series without talking about war, violence and rape.
1. The first thing you need to know is that I read Tomorrow, When the War Began for the first time when I was ten years old. Same goes for The Dead of the Night. I read The Third Day, the Frost when I was eleven, and the rest of the books as they were published (so between the ages of twelve and fourteen). I continued to reread them throughout high school and into adulthood. I think the age you first encounter particular stories affects how they resonate with you, and I think the ages I was when I read the Tomorrow series were pretty much perfect in ensuring the series had maximum impact.
2. This next point is kind of hard to articulate, but I will try. The Tomorrow series was the first thing I ever encountered that made me really think about injustice, dispossession, my own privilege as a white Australian, and how that privilege was actually harmful to other people in the world. I was ten years old, so I didn't phrase it in those terms, but look. I knew about terra nullius, I knew about the Stolen Generations and the land rights movement, and both my mother and my teachers had tried to explain the terrible things that had been done to Indigenous people by European settlers, but it all seemed kind of abstract. Seeing teenagers roughly my own age, of my own time, experiencing a hostile invading force taking over their land, threatening their lives, and making everything they'd previously considered normal dangerous and impossible, finally made me understand.
The same goes for war itself. Those books were published against the backdrop of Rwanda, East Timor, the Balkans conflict, escalating violence in the Middle East, the continued rumblings of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and a whole litany of other conflicts. But as an Australian child, although people had explained about those wars to me, I found them hard to comprehend or visualize. By bringing the war to my own doorstep, John Marsden showed me the realities faced by millions of children and teenagers all around the world. This links in to my next point, which is that
3. By depicting an invasion of Australia, the Tomorrow series shows how real-world injustice leads to conflict. The series hinges on an invasion of Australia by an unspecified foreign nation. The books never outright state it, but it's implied this nation is Indonesia. They remain shadowy and ill-defined, and the teenage Australian characters' right to fight back against them is never seriously challenged, but Marsden goes out of his way to point out that Australia's real-world actions have lead it to this point. There's lots of talk about how for a country with 'boundless plains to share' (a line in the Australian national anthem), Australia isn't exactly welcoming to the dispossessed outside its borders, that its great wealth lead to resentment from its impoverished near neighbours, and that the moral cowardice of its politicians and their choice of allies is what got it into this predicament. (There's a scene in which the teenage characters listen in a state of rage to its politicians, who have all been evacuated to the United States, and call for Australian citizens to fight back while doing nothing to help. The US alliance does nothing beyond evacuating the politicians, whereas New Zealand and Papua New Guinea send help.)
I think if the books achieved only point 2, they would be problematic. Depicting groups who enjoy real-world privilege in a reversed situation is generally not the best way to educate those groups (see: Saving the Pearls). However, because point 2 is tied so strongly with point 3 (that is, Australian teenagers living in a war-zone is shown to be connected to real-world inequalities) that they work together as a powerful educational tool. I honestly think that it was these books that made me get it: I'm not saying that I could then walk in the shoes of an Indigenous person or a person who lived in a war-zone, but I understood, as I had never understood except in a sort of abstract way, the profound injustice of what these people had experienced and were experiencing.
4. Teenagers achieve what adults cannot precisely because of the things that teenagers value and do well. The narrator Ellie Linton and her group of friends are able to mount such an effective resistance because they are flexible and adaptable - like all teenagers, they are good at challenging their own assumptions and reacting quickly to change. They are good at what they do because they are self-absorbed and feel things deeply, by which I mean they are self-reflective, they spend a lot of time debating internally and as a group how their actions will affect them individually and as a whole, what they feel about the ethics of guerrilla warfare and so on. And they are good at what they do because of the strength of their friendship, and because of how deeply they care about one another - rather than being cold-blooded killers whose only thoughts are on the mission, they care more about the lives of their friends, and this actually makes them take greater care when undertaking acts of war. So the things for which adults normally scorn teenagers: 'fickleness', 'self-absorption' and 'caring too much about their friends' are shown to be heroic and effective. This is such a powerful message.
5. Each character brings a different set of skills and weaknesses to the table, and each has his or her own moral limits, which everyone in the group respects. This also serves to illuminate how authority figures often misinterpret or underestimate the abilities of the teenagers around them. Homer Yannos, for example, was viewed by his teachers in peacetime as a 'troublemaker' who was never going to achieve anything. However, in wartime he is the group's de facto leader, a brilliant tactician, and a person of deep emotional reserves, capable of extraordinary love and gentleness. Similarly, Lee was in peacetime a gentle, quiet boy who played the piano and violin, whereas as a guerrilla he's the least morally conflicted about killing other human beings. Robyn is the only one who refuses outright to kill people (she's okay with sabotage and providing distractions while the other members of the group do actual killing), and the rest of the group accept this without question. (Robyn also mentions that it was a real struggle for her to refuse to kill, that she would rather do so, but that it has to be her own particular moral line in the sand.) Marsden does a great job in showing the depths of these characters, their multifaceted nature, and how the faces people show in everyday life aren't necessarily the true ones.
6. In the character of Major Harvey, Marsden makes it clear how harmful the attitudes of those in authority can be towards teenagers. Major Harvey is a bit of a strawman - a former school principal, he winds up running 'Harvey's Heroes', a resistance group that achieves precisely nothing, and then he ends up collaborating with the enemy and sentencing Homer and Ellie to death in the third book ('you are children, but you committed the crimes of adults and will be tried as adults' is a particularly chilling paraphrase of how that goes down). As a principal he was dogmatic, inflexible and unable to empathize with the teenagers in his charge. As a resistance fighter, he insists on military discipline and strict enforcement of gender roles, and refuses to believe Ellie and her friends when they tell him that they've been successfully waging a guerrilla war on their own and achieved results - because he doesn't believe teenagers are capable of anything without rigid discipline and stern, authoritarian adult leadership. As a collaborator, he hypocritically changes his tune, believing that his teenage prisoners are capable of everything he denied them as a resistance leader. John Marsden was a teacher for many years, and I'm sure he observed other teachers who shared these views of adolescents. As a student myself, although I had many excellent teachers, there were a few like this, and teenagers knew them when they saw them. By showing up the hypocrisy of authority figures of this type, Marsden demonstrated that he saw what we saw. And he gave us the tools to question authority itself. He showed us that respect for authority has to be earned.
7. The books contains the healthiest depiction of (albeit straight) teenage sexuality I've ever seen. Robyn doesn't want to have sex before marriage - and that's fine. Lee wants to have sex with Ellie in the first book, they talk about it, she isn't ready - and that's fine. Ellie wants to have sex with Lee in the second book, they talk about it, find condoms - and that's fine. She stops wanting to have sex with him in the third book - and that's fine. Fi and Homer want to have sex in the seventh book - and that's fine. Ellie gets back together with Lee in the sequel trilogy - and that's fine. A boy at a party in New Zealand gets Ellie drunk and in a position where she feels she can't say no, but doesn't say yes either - that's rape. The point is that all the sixteen-year-old characters, male and female, feel sexual desire at one point or another, and the degree to which they act on it is the result of personal choice, discussion with their chosen partners, the respecting of boundaries, and, if sex does happen, it involves contraception. Ellie's consensual relationship with Lee is contrasted with her experience with the boy in New Zealand, which is clearly depicted as rape, 'even though' the boy involved doesn't physically or verbally threaten Ellie in any way (that is, it shows that her consent was never asked for nor was she in a position to give it, in a situation in which society often blames the victim). These books were so eye-opening for me, because they told me that sexual desire was okay, that establishing boundaries was okay, that talking to potential partners was okay, and that everyone had their own particular limits that needed to be respected. (Considering what happened to me later in life, I'm not sure how much I took this on...)
This is why the current debates about what is 'appropriate' in stories for teenagers always make me laugh. This was in John Marsden books in the mid-'90s! Why are we still having this debate?
8. I love the way the series depicts the Australian landscape, particularly the bush. Marsden tapped into a rich seam in Australian culture: there is a trend to depict the outback (in stories about white Australians in any case) as a place of hostility and danger, where weird stuff goes on. Think Picnic At Hanging Rock. Think Walkabout. Think Wolf Creek. I believe this strand of stories taps into the unease a lot of Australians feel in the outback, or anywhere away from the major cities. We cling to the coastlines - the bush is where backpackers get murdered.
And yet for the teenage guerrillas of the Tomorrow series, the bush is what saves them. There they can melt into the landscape, hidden from the fighter jets and helicopters by a canopy of trees, their actions unheeded. Marsden's choice to name the area in which they hide 'Hell' is very deliberate. Their own homes have become hostile to them. Their world has become hellish, and Hell becomes a haven.
9. Finally, and most importantly to me in many ways, is the fact that the books were a cultural phenomenon. I was not allowed as a child or teenager to watch most TV (in fact, my viewing was pretty much limited to a couple of shows on ABC Kids, the ABC News, David Attenborough documentaries and Media Watch). Most of the conversations my friends had began, 'Did you watch Lois and Clark?', 'Did you watch Party of Five?', 'Did you watch The Simpsons?' and so on. Can you imagine being a kid in the '90s who didn't watch The Simpsons? For the most part, I didn't care so much, because I had pretty much zero interest in watching TV, and because I more meaningful friendships outside school with family friends from similar backgrounds (my closest family friend didn't even have a TV in her house until she was eleven years old), and with kids at gymnastics, piano or Kumon where our shared activity left little time to talk about TV. But it was frustrating not to be able to participate in these kinds of conversations, because they were how the kids at my school related to one another, and thus a lot of my later childhood and early adolescence involved me sitting around silently and being ignored while conversations about TV went on over my head. One year, I even pretended, with disastrous results, that I had watched all the stuff my friends watched, only to have to admit I'd been lying the whole time when my mother offered to have my best friend stay with us for a couple of weeks while her father and stepmother were in Europe. It was mortifying.
While I wasn't allowed to watch TV, I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. And although my other friends read, they weren't fannish about books and barely ever talked about them. The Tomorrow series, however, was different. Everyone read them, and in the weeks leading up to the publication of a new book, there'd be feverish schoolyard speculation about what would happen, who would die, who would get together and so on. So this was a piece of media about which I could talk with my friends, with my acquaintances - indeed with every teenager I knew. I don't know a single person who wasn't reading the series at the time. I don't know anyone who didn't have an opinion about them. The Tomorrow series was one of the few pieces of common Australian '90s-kid culture in which I was able to participate. For that reason alone, they are profound importance to me.
I hope that answers any questions about what the Tomorrow series meant and means to me!
