The 130-storey treehouse has a level where your legs grow super long, and a soft grassy hill that's just perfect to roll down. But watch out for the GRABINATOR, which can grab anything from anywhere in time.
It's a great place for those who love weird and wacky things, but it's not ideal for Andy and Terry, who are just trying to finish writing and illustrating their latest book.
Thankfully, their IRL counterparts, author Andy Griffiths and illustrator Terry Denton, did finish their book — and released it to the world in 2020 as The 130-Storey Treehouse.
Their latest treehouse has far more storeys than Andy and Terry's first treehouse (the subject of 2011's The 13-Storey Treehouse) but despite the original's comparatively diminutive size, it was still filled with many fantastical distractions — including a marshmallow machine and a tank full of ravenous sharks.
Andy and Terry have more than 33 bestselling books under their belts, beginning in 1997 with Just Tricking!
Andy is also behind the Bum trilogy, whose memorable first title The Day My Bum Went Psycho was tickling funny bones back in 2001. Needless to say, his work begs many questions.
Ahead of RN's Big Weekend of Books (August 28-29), we asked kids to send in their biggest questions for Andy. Here are his answers (edited for clarity and length).
Jasper: When you were a kid, did you have a treehouse?
Andy: When I was a kid, I didn't have a treehouse — we didn't have a tree in our backyard that was big enough. But my cousin David had a treehouse — well, it was just one single platform in a tree down the bottom of his garden — and we loved going up there and spending whole afternoons just playing imaginary games …
I hope you have a treehouse. But if you don't, you can drop into ours anytime: we're open eight days a week, 366 days a year, 25 hours a day. See you there!
James and Isaac: Do you actually have a treehouse [now]?
Andy: Look, I've got to confess that I don't actually have a 130-storey treehouse, but I certainly do in my imagination, it feels very real to me …
About 10 years ago, when we started the Treehouse [series], I was up in my studio here, which looks out over trees and across to the beach and Terry was here and [my wife] Jill would be here sometimes, and we'd all be making up this imaginary story, like an imaginary game, and it felt like I was back in the treehouse with [my cousin] David. So that's kind of where that idea started from.
I do have a model of it [the treehouse] made by a very clever bookshop manager in Perth … It has many of the features: it's got sharks, it's got penguins, it's got a skateboard ramp with a crocodile-pit hazard down there, a room full of pillows. It's even got some solar panels on the top … There is a rocking horse race track, dinosaurs, so it's got a lot of stuff. So that is definitely real.
Max: If you really did have one [a treehouse], what would be your favourite level?
Andy: My favourite level would easily be Andyland, that's the land that I made to put all the Andy clones that were created by a cloning machine. It's such a lovely, well-ordered, fantastic place to be — not like that terrible Terrytown which is just full of crazy Terrys.
Although Jillville is very nice — that's where lots of Jills have animal adventures. In fact, I'm going to try to change my answer: I think Jillville is my favourite level.
Sierra: What inspired you to write the Treehouse series?
Andy: There are many things that lead you to be inspired to write a book. But one of them in the case of the Treehouse series was a book that I grew up with as a child, which was The Magic Faraway Tree [by Enid Blyton] about three children who discover a magic tree that they climb up and it's full of all sorts of odd and amusing and sometimes frightening characters.
And at the top, there's a different land each time … It might be The Land of Do-As-You-Please or The Land of Spells … Some of it was pleasurable, some of it was scary, but you never knew what was going to happen next.
When I write books, I want that combination of fun, danger and not knowing what's going to happen.
Oliver: Who is your favourite character [in the Treehouse series]?
Andy: That's easy: it's Professor Stupido, the un-inventing UN-inventor [in The 39-Storey Treehouse] who can just point his finger at someone or something — anything he doesn't like — and just make it disappear and un-invent it on the spot.
I really regret that we tricked him into un-inventing himself because he was my favourite character, but I've just finished a little book of stories for next year called Tales from the Treehouse where Professor Stupido, the greatest UN-inventor in the world, un-invents his own un-invention. Stay tuned.
James: Are you a collector?
Andy: I am a collector … Books are a big part of my collecting, and also puppets. I love all sorts of puppets and puppet theatres, and then just anything that makes me laugh, that intrigues me for some reason, that might be really ugly or just odd.
That's a zombie horse there [in my collection], this skeleton that looks a bit like Terry Denton … monkeys, cats, a Humpty Dumpty, gorilla, Godzillas, robot dogs, more books, my favourite little scary typewriter.
But one of the things that I collect the most are ideas, and you can see that in endless little notebooks that I keep, where I'm just writing down ideas for names, stories, levels.
Georgia and Lucinda: Where do you come up with your ideas?
Andy: One of the things I use to help me is my large collection of toys … the toys will trigger ideas, [but also] books, movies, real life.
When Terry is here, he's often distracted so there's a lot of ideas that go from there and we're making each other laugh, and in that process you will generate a lot of nonsense — but you'll also occasionally hit on something that's really good and worth turning into a much larger story.
So that's why I love writing. I love laughing and I love passing on that to other people.
Alfie: Are you going to have another book? Also, who's your real publisher?
Andy: We are going to have another book that will come out on October the 19th this year, and it's going to be called The 143-Storey Treehouse.
We have a new camping level and we're going to have a nice relaxing holiday. Well, we will as long as Terry remembers to pack the food, the tent and doesn't chop me in half with an axe while he's cutting the wood. It's going to be a lot of fun, I hope you can come along with us.
I'm also very happy to tell you that our real publisher in real life is nothing like Mr Big Nose [from the Treehouse series]. She is a lovely woman called Claire [Craig] and she never loses her temper and never yells at us and it's actually a very happy relationship.
But Mr Big Nose is more like the big bad wolf. He huffs and puffs and makes Andy and Terry really scared.
ABC Radio National's second annual Big Weekend of Books festival is taking place from August 28-29.
