John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began and its six sequel novels were published in the years 1993–99. They belong to the corpus of young adult reader adventure fiction, which has been part of the European writing tradition since the great novels of Alexandre Dumas, Sir Walter Scott and R. L. Stevenson. Young protagonists fight ruthless enemies against great odds, surviving by dint of their courage, resourcefulness and loyalty to family and comrades-in-arms.
John Buchan's five Richard Hannay novels, which I read as a teenager, refined and modernised the genre. Buchan is relevant here, because his patriotic adventure fantasies had a serious purpose: to entertain and inspire the British Empire soldiers in the trenches of the Great War. In exciting stories like The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916) Buchan's protagonist offers a reassuring vision of a noble British hero fighting bravely against dark forces.
Marsden's work is disturbing because of the way it blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Most adventure fiction takes place safely in remote past eras, as in Rosemary Sutcliff's brilliant Eagle of the Ninth series of adventure novels, which are set in Britain in the twilight years of the Roman Empire. But Marsden's heroes are contemporary Australian teenagers, forced to confront something which would be truly terrifying. Like The War of the Worlds, the Tomorrow series is scary because it begins in normal life.
Marsden himself has said he wanted to shake young Australians out of their complacency. The deliberately jumbled tenses of Marsden's brilliant first title convey an unsettling sense of dread. The novels are starkly savage, but believable: this is really how it could be, Marsden is telling us.
I wonder what young Australian readers take away from these novels — and now, the film? They are, clearly, something more than escapist fantasies. They convey value messages, calling on young Australians to cherish our country, not to take it for granted, and to be prepared if necessary to fight — to kill and die — for it.
My problem here has to do with context. What sort of Australian readership was Marsden aiming for? No one suggests (then or now) that Australia should put out a welcome mat to any armed invasion. But the underlying xenophobic flavour of the books — against an unspecified regional invader, and therefore potentially against any regional country or group of countries — is somehow morally disturbing in our generous and tolerant multicultural nation.
For 200 years, 'White Australia' and 'the yellow peril' had been defining ideas in the emergence of Australian nationalism. By the early 1990s, Australians were adjusting to a multicultural society at home and a new more benign vision of our engagement with our region. But many were still uneasy about Indonesia, and also unsettled by Indochinese boat people arrivals which peaked in the 1980s.
Malcolm Fraser stopped the Indochinese boats humanely, by supporting orderly flows of migrants from refugee holding camps in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. China still seemed a threatening neighbour: the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was a fresh memory.
The generation of boys who grew up reading the Tomorrow series in the 1990s were by 2001 young men manning Australian Defence Force border security vessels, deployed to deter and repel Middle Eastern boat people. I remember the widespread fear and loathing occasioned by this 'unarmed invasion' of boat people.
Adolescence is a time when values are being tested and consolidated. Books matter. I wonder how much the Tomorrow series might have had to do with the entrenchment of such attitudes in impressionable youths? Or did the books simply tap into a vein of xenophobia and invasion anxiety that has been present in mainstream Australia since European settlement?
What do I say to my children about Tomorrow? Do I commend this entertaining survival story of Australian teenagers going bush, guns and bombs in hand, to defend our country against armed invaders with whom there can be no dialogue or accommodation? Do I say — implausibly — that this is really just light entertainment, an escapist fantasy of teenage empowerment, not to be taken too seriously? Or do I attempt a serious evaluation, as I would evaluate Buchan's or Sutcliff's adventure fiction?
For me, Marsden's work definitely merits serious evaluation. And I enjoyed the movie, which vividly brings the first book to life in an entirely contemporary setting: my teenage daughters loved it and were inspired by it too.
As I admire Buchan's ideologically flawed but brilliantly conceived Hannay series, and Sutcliff's haunting evocations of Roman Britain's long rearguard struggle against barbarian invaders, I applaud Marsden's inspiring and believable vision of a brave band of young Australians who will not give up their country without a fight.
Let's take this movie (and the books) seriously, and talk with our kids about the complex questions they raise about war and peace: because our kids will certainly see the movie, and be affected by it.
Tony Kevin is the author of A Certain Maritime Incident, about the fate of the Indonesian fishing boat SIEV X.