The king of literary silliness becomes Australia’s Children’s Laureate

So, Your Honour? Your Highness? What do we call you now?

‘Andy’ is my preferred title, and it’s quite deliberate because – well, here’s a scoop for you: my real name is Andrew. But early on in my writing career, I found I could only tell the stories as if I was in them, and when I tell a story, it’s completely made up, but as if it’s happening to me. If I manage to fool myself and make myself believe in it, it’s much easier to make the reader believe that it actually happened. I figured the character Andrew sounded a bit formal, so I went with Andy as a bit more friendly, and so that’s now how many hundreds of thousands of kids know me, as their pal Andy.

What about at Christmas? Are you still Andrew to your family?

Still Andrew to my family, to anyone who knew me pre-1997, which was when the first book, Just Tricking, came out. I’m still Andrew, and if I was to say Andy, they’d go, come on, you tosser, that’s not your real name. If you were at my school, you would have known me as Griff, and Griff was quite a wild card. I was the one who got all the parties started and often wrecked parties because there was this kind of wild, drunken energy, which I managed creatively to channel into my fiction.

That energy certainly lands in your books.

I had to get a grip on that type of energy, and I went, yeah, let’s make the fiction where the parties happen and the excitement. That was my stated aim to begin with: to make children’s literature a little more “punk rock” than it was back in those days.

You started putting out little zines for your class when you were a teacher, then came the books, from 1997. Was your point always to try and push kids’ literature away from what we might call, I guess, “worthy” literature?

Yeah, yeah. Because obviously, by the mid-nineties, you had The Simpsons, I think. We’d had The Young Ones. Humour and popular culture was going full bore ahead and there was no expectation on those things that there would be a worthy message. Yet books were just being left behind and kids were leaving them behind, and I was like, this is a real pity because there’s a particular pleasure to books, which is where you’re doing a bit more of the work. You’re collaborating with the author to bring these stories alive. It’s that slight bit of effort that makes reading so profound and gives you such a personal relationship with a book that you’ve loved and that’s hopefully changed your life. I was watching literature almost deal itself out of the game, and I was like, no, I’m not gonna stand for this! I loved anarchic literature and literature that was just written for the pure pleasure of humour, for the pure pleasure of reading it. I wanted to emulate that and then pass it on to the next generation.

The world feels like a darker place lately. Do you feel that makes your job more important, to give kids an outlet?

As important as ever, yeah, because that’s what it did for me. It was escapism. It was sometimes an escape from the rule-bound world of the school or your home. I know through reader correspondence that it can play a very important role if the kid is going through some sort of trauma, whatever that might be.

The books are a safe place. They’re a home that the kid can come back to and experience joy and wonder and silliness. It’s not perfect, because in the Treehouse series, Terry and I are writing the book that you’re reading, but we’re fighting, you know, and sometimes … well, once, on one regrettable occasion, we had an intergalactic space battle, and I pushed him into a black hole, and the kids often respond very strongly to that. They say, oh, this is just like my brother and me. You know, we fight, but ultimately, we’re friends. You have to reflect the reality of being a child in what you write, and it can have all sorts of unpredictable benefits, not the least growing your imagination, allowing you to see life from different points of view and also imagine your life differently to perhaps what your parents or your school teachers are telling you. Imagination is crucial in all areas of our life to increasing the possibilities and your potential for making a positive impact.

What’s your message as Children’s Laureate?

I hope I can bring more and more prominence and recognition of the importance of children’s books to a well-balanced child and the importance of school libraries and dedicated librarians. I think that’s a real danger: that we’ve got a number of schools now that regard librarians as an optional luxury rather than an essential plank. Underlying every aspect of a child’s academic, social and emotional development, literacy is right there. This idea that schools might not need a librarian, and kids don’t need books anymore, they can just read off the screen – very, very dangerous.

Then there’s imagination. When I became a high school English teacher, I met a lot of kids who were telling me books are for losers and the most boring things in the world. I immediately just started writing stuff that I knew would provoke and interest them and they got really interested, and they wanted to write their own stories, and their own pictures, because I gave them permission to say yes, your imagination is vast. It’s like a vast playground and most people don’t even know it’s there. You can go on adventures in it and that’s why my Laureate mission is: reading is an adventure. It’s not a passive activity. It’s not a boring thing. You can go places.

I’ve released a book for the Laureateship called Let’s Go, which is dedicated to that purpose, giving kids lots of models for short storytelling; things like comic strips and poems and very, very short stories, and then leaving space in the book for them to have a go themselves. So they’re exploring their imaginations, both by reading material that’s hopefully going to entertain them, but also exploring by writing and drawing, getting it out of themselves.

It must mean a lot to be the Laureate. This feels like a mission you were made for.

It's really great, yes. I was made for it and have been fighting this fight, spreading the good news, for 25 years. But it’s a slightly raised, higher platform to do it from, and I get to go to every state and territory in Australia over the next two years to meet the kids and entertain them and their families. So that's really great.

And to be taken seriously. As silly and nonsensical as my stories are, there’s a very deeply serious purpose underneath them, which is exactly what we’ve been talking about, so this helps people who may be sceptical take it a little more seriously.

I do realise the author of The Day My Bum Went Psycho is standing on thin ice when he’s like, this is really, really serious. I don’t want the kids to know that!

More information

Andy launched his official Laureate program at a special ceremony at the State Library of NSW yesterday.

Australian Children's Laureate official site here.

And kids' hub here.

Andy Griffiths' site here.