The Tomorrow Series

Your source for the Tomorrow When The War Began Series and The Ellie Chronicles by John Marsden, its movie adaptation and the TV series.

[animalsociale]

[animalsociale]

[nalle]

After a few minutes Homer came out of the darkness and reached for my hand. I gave him the wet cold heavy thing. It must have been like picking up a dead fish. ‘Come on, Ellie, old mate,’ he said wearily. I let myself be led like a helpless child.

[postcardsfromidris]

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It’s like the stories of our lives make us the people we are.

[gaylecleven]

ships that i just think are neat ⤑  ellie linton and homer yannos

I wanted to spend more time with this new Homer, this interesting and clever boy whom I’d known but not known for so many years.

[thetomorrowseries]

Eventually I was the one who got everyone moving again. It was because of those dumb comments about my being so strong – I wanted to live up to them now. Plus there was another reason. I never liked it when Homer took command too much or for too long. I always had to assert myself when that happened. It’s always been that way, even when we were little kids.

[phoebstonkin]

[thasorns-moved]

[thetomorrowseries]

Real life places that inspired John Marsden for The Tomorrow Series: Mt Howitt, Victoria

The views are fantastic. You can drive almost up on to it at one point, near Mt Martin, on an old logging track that’s hard to find now, it’s so overgrown. Hell is what’s on the other side of Tailor’s, a cauldron of boulders and trees and blackberries and feral dogs and wombats and undergrowth. It’s a wild place, and I didn’t know anyone who’d been there, though I’d stood on the edge and looked down at it quite often. For one thing I couldn’t see how you’d get in there. The cliffs all around it are spectacular, hundreds of metres high in places. [...] It was about half past two when we got to the top. Fi had ridden the last couple of k’s, but we were all relieved to get out of the Landie and stretch our bones. We came out on the south side of a knoll near Mt Martin. That was the end of the vehicle track: from then on it was shanks’s pony. But for the time being we wandered around and admired the view. - Tomorrow, When The War Began | Chapter 1

[thetomorrowseries]

But that night we did sit up late, and talk and talk. I think we were excited to be there, in that strange and beautiful place, where so few humans had ever been. There aren’t many wild places left on Earth, yet we’d fluked it into the middle of this little wild kingdom. – Tomorrow, When The War Began

[aussieexgirl]

[the-walking-red-blog]

i’m on book four of the tomorrow series and they are all so far as brilliant as i remember them being when i read them between the ages of twelve to fifteen. it’s hard to recall any other books for teens i read at the time that were this gritty, honest and… feminist.

here we have a white, middle-aged, presumably straight australian man penning some serious observations about society. they’re reflected in the main character, the narrator, Ellie who is brave and complicated. she couldn’t be less of a two-dimensional character if you tried. male characters are shown being sexist and she calls them out of it. she talks about feminism straight up and she gives as good as she gets, refusing to back down to men who feel they should be leaders due to their penises.

and it’s not “alienating”. it’s not “for girls”. these books are about war. the morality of war, the sacrifice of war. fighting and death, guerilla tactics and hiding, danger and boredom. it’s not a love story between a girl and a boy (heck, the relationships don’t make it past the second book, which is probably the most realistic outcome and doesn’t pander to the whimsical). if anything it’s a love story between Elllie and her home, her country and her relationship to it.

anyway, i wish i could force everyone i know to read these novels but it’s a bit of a gruelling task to say, “read these seven or eight books and get back to me!”. so i’m going to settle for sporadically writing out my thoughts here. my god i love these books!

purchase tomorrow when the war began for cheaps (and talk to me about it!) here

[thetomorrowseries]

The Dead Of The Night

It’s very dark tonight. Autumn’s creeping through the bush, dropping a few leaves here and there, colouring the blackberries, giving the breeze a sharp touch. It’s cold, and I’m finding it hard to write and keep warm at the same time. I’m crouched inside my sleeping bag like a hunchback, trying to balance the torch, my pen, and the paper without exposing too much skin to the night air. ‘My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.

[thasorns-moved]

[maurawrites]

Madeleine Madden + Andrew Creer in ‘Tomorrow When the War Began’

[maurawrites]

Madeleine Madden + Andrew Creer in ‘Tomorrow When the War Began’

[thetomorrowseries]

While I Live - The Ellie Chronicles | Ellie and Fi watching Grease

The last night Fi and I watched a video. Not a rented one, just Grease that I’d taped off TV ages ago. Fi sat on the floor. I was behind her, doing her hair, Gavin was sound asleep. Sandy, the Olivia Newton-John character in the movie, reminded me a bit of Fi. I’d never have said that to her though. She hated people saying she was ‘sweet’ or ‘innocent’. But knowing she was leaving the next morning was getting to me. When Sandy sang ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’ I was struggling not to cry. Not that I was hopelessly devoted to Fi, but I felt hopelessly shattered by all the stuff that had happened, and hopelessly lonely at the thought of her going back to the city. And then ‘Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ started and we were suddenly doing a dance number in front of the TV, and even though we hadn’t done anything like that for more than a year we synchronised perfectly. We didn’t need a choreographer. Our friendship was our choreographer.