Changing Australia: Andy Griffiths and making reading an adventure

0:00If you would have mentioned the name Andy Griffiths to many Australian kids out there, chances are there eyes are going to light up at that name because many of his books, including Treehouse series, The Justice, you and me series, have sold millions of copies and have really captivated children and adults in Australia and around the world. Andy and along with his off-site, the late illustrator Terry Denton, set out on a decades-long mission to try and engage young minds and make reading a bit of an adventure. Now, that's definitely a never-ending challenge as the temptation of screens and phones and now artificial intelligence into the picture. Andy Griffiths is an award-winning author, the current Australian Children's Lorry at and an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. And as part of Radio National's top 100 books campaign, he's also my guest today on changing Australia. Andy Griffiths, thanks so much for being with me this morning. Thanks, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

1:00First of all, I want to offer my condolences for the passing of the great Terry Denton. He's had a long battle with ill health and your long relationship with him as an illustrator of your books. It goes back such a long way. But back to the 1990s, tell me about this special relationship and creative spark that the two of you had. Yes, I became a high school English teacher in the late 80s and I noticed lots of kids hated reading and dismissed it as an old-fashioned hobby that has no relevance to them. And I started writing short, funny pieces, absurd pieces based on Monty Python and the young ones. And it was published as a creative writing textbook for teachers how to in live in the creative writing process in the classroom. And they assigned me with this guy, Terry Denton, who they said, he's got a good sense of humour. And that was absolutely the case. He just took what I did and ran with it, magnified the chaos and the funniness.

2:05And then I was inspired by him and we became a partnership at that point. It's, I can imagine just how that happened because I have a very small connection to Terry Denton as a young child. I used to play Netball with his daughter. And he was the dad dropping off and picking up on the sidelines. And he was just the happy, cheeky dad that you would exactly imagine that the illustrator would be. He was what you see come through in his artwork was exactly what he was like in life. That's, yeah, there was no hiding, Terry. He was a dedicated family man to the point where if there was ever a promotional activity, I'd say, you know, there's 400 people down at the bookstore on the school holidays. Do you want to come down and help me entertain them? No, it's school holidays. That's my family time. Always the priority. I was, yeah, I was like, but what about the 400 children and his own, my family? But we were different in that respect. And that's what makes a dynamic collaboration is that two very different viewpoints in some

3:12ways are coming to the table. My wife and editor and co-writer, Jill Griffiths is kind of in the middle there. She was the bringing together of it all. So Treehouse was really a collaboration between three minds. Yeah, tell me more about the Treehouse series. I mean, they've sold millions, probably more copies here and around the world. It's been enormously successful, translated into so many different languages. Why do you think they've resonated with so many kids and so many kids from different countries and cultures? There's a variety of reasons in our early series, like the Just Books and the Bad Books. We had, we really pushed the humour to gratuitously violence and silly and every way we could. We found where the limits were, where the gatekeepers were going to go. No, we were not going there. But we had a long time to develop an experiment with an appreciative audience for every single

4:16book. And then we got to the Treehouse and I said, I think what we need to do is do a long form narrative, a fake biography of ourselves because kids were all wondering about me and Terry. They said, did you know he drew a picture of you being squashed by a piano in the margin of Just Stupid? I said, no, did he? They go, yes, yes. And they'd excitedly show it to me. Look what he did. And I'd say, right, when I get home, I'm going to smash him with a piano. And they said, do you live together? And I said, yes, yes, he's so annoying. And so that was the basis. And I said to Terry, can you draw me a Treehouse that you would imagine the kids would imagine and we would live in, like with a tank full of sharks and a bowling alley and off he went and drew 13, I wonderland Treehouse, 13 amazing stories. And I said, right, that's our story. We live in this Treehouse. We can't get our book done because there's so many distractions, mostly and problems,

5:17mostly caused by Terry, not concentrating on doing his work, which was actually a reflection of real life. I think there's probably some other authors who wonder, how do you stay in the mind of children? Is it a case of you and Terry, perhaps, never quite growing up and still having the mind of a child or how much do you have to really plot and plan to try and think about how to engage kids in a book? It's a bit of all of that. The window stays open for many children's writers. It's not an effort. It's just you can, you're still there in some ways. You still got all your adult ability to function in the world, but it's not hard to remember when I was 10 and I had an in a blight and book in my hand and the thrill and the escapism and the unpredictability of what was going to happen next. That's what I'm striving for in anything that I write for modern children and I want them to fall in love with that process.

6:19Getting together with Terry is like getting together with your best friend from grade four and instead of doing your work, you're just messing around at the back of the class, playing with words, playing with ideas. For the pure joy of it and that's where imagination grows and is what you can convey to kids through the medium of a book. I should say the other thing that happened with Trey House was I got Terry to do 50% of the work illustrating that Trey House. I could use very few words. I didn't have to describe the Trey House to say, hey, check it out. Then me and Jill would bring a lot of structure and complexity to the plots. Kids still need a complex story and the difficulty is when you start dumbing, down the words or simplifying the words, often the plot gets simplified. So a kid can read the book but there's nothing in it for them. We managed to do this kind of magic trick where those stories are quite complex.

7:23There's back stories and subplots and the kids are just immersed in it and can reread it over and over again. It's really interesting to think about what kids need and maybe there's an interesting comparison here with some of your other books. I know one, The Bad Book, published in 2004, perhaps has had a bit of a different reception from the Trey House. A bit rude, a bit gross, maybe a bit violent. Certainly there were some shops who didn't want to stock it but it was very popular. It did fly off the shelf. It's an important time to have things that challenge kids or that might attract them with something that is a little bit offbeat or perhaps pushes the boundaries a little bit. The kids need some level of exposure to that if they're to be engaged in reading. Absolutely. You've got to have an original voice. You've got to have engaged them. If you look at kids, most kids enjoy laughing and playfulness, particularly if an adult can play with them.

8:24That's an invitation to a lot of fun and a close relationship with that adult. That's where reading a bedtime comes in. You're not only reading a book together, you're sharing an experience. To answer your question, I think it's important to note that all readers are different. Not all readers want the mayhem. What we found with Trey House when we dialed that back quite a lot, we discovered the audience grew exponentially. It was a combination of adventure, fantasy and slapstick humour that I think really appeals to kids in these books because they're sort of something for everyone. And also a friendship between Andy, Terry and Jill, the fictional namesakes. So there is a sort of safety and comfort in it at the same time, wild danger and chaos.

9:25You're listening to Changing Australia on Radio National Breakfast. I'm Melissa Clark and my guest today is award winning children's author Andy Griffiths. Andy or the Australian children's laureate for 2026 to 2027. Tell me your thoughts about how we as a society go about the challenge of trying to make sure kids do keep engaging with books. Obviously there's a role for you as an author in how you write books. But what about the rest of us? What about parents? What about the community? And the community engaged with the written word? I think it's to realise the importance of imagination in our lives and the prime importance of imagination. And that's often downplayed in our educational system as we concentrate on career readiness. I think what an employer actually wants and what anyone wants in their life is a healthy imagination, a curiosity to find out more, a good command of language, an increased vocabulary.

10:29That's one of the things that regular reading does for you effortlessly. Empathy is built through imagination, being able to imagine other people's lives. And that is what a book does for you, all sorts of lives. And also the long form concentration is what is under attack from social media more than ever. These are all precious commodities. And I think there's an inkling that we're beginning to realise that these are the qualities we are losing when we lose ourselves in an endless scroll of fragments. And I don't underestimate that reading has always been a challenge. It does require a little bit of extra work on the part of the reader to enter a collaboration with the writer to bring those black marks alive together. But the rewards are just endlessly valuable.

11:30You fall in love with a book as a child. That can be with you for your entire life. And I'm meeting a number of treehouse readers now who are in their mid-20s, late-20s, who come to me and tell me how much the books meant to them. And often it's really emotional. And I just think that is fantastic. You've experienced the power of imagination and curiosity and you must be better off for that. And I'm sure imagination and curiosity are just the things we need as the world is rapidly changing around us. Andy Griffiths, thank you so much for talking to us this morning. We look forward to future endeavors that we see from you. But thanks for taking some time out to talk to Radio Nationalists. My pleasure, thank you very much. That's Andy Griffiths, the award-winning author and Australian children's laureate for this year and next year. He's also an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.