Morris Gleitzman will walk the quiet 135-metre stretch of footpath and bitumen on the appropriately named Abbott Street back and forth, back and forth some days, for hours on end.
“The locals must think I’m mad,” he says.
The inner-city suburban Brisbane street is lined with majestic old camphor laurels whose branches – adorned with staghorns and other epiphytes – harbour oases of cool in even the most scorching of Queensland summers. The trees create the kind of dazzling interplay of light and shade that so characterises the celebrated children’s author’s immense body of work – an oeuvre that can deal in themes such as the Holocaust or the death of a loved one while deftly sprinkling in a bum joke or two.
It is here, along this well-trod path, that I meet the author of bestselling books Misery Guts and, along with Paul Jennings, Wicked! – both 1990s classics turned into TV series – and the more recent Once series of seven books which follow the life story of a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Beside the muddy Maiwar, Gleitzman cuts a discreet figure in dark blue jeans and sneakers and a grey jumper, but for the colourful, striped scarf and the chequered bucket hat he wears to hide the wounds from recent mole removals on his bald head.
“I celebrate the wonderful imaginations of the kids I write for, and half of them are gonna say: ‘Bloody hell, Morris Gleitzman goes down to the pub and head-butts blokes,” he says, explaining the hat.
As we walk, Gleitzman speaks of the fine Chinese tea that has fuelled his 44 published books and that combats sedentariness by prompting frequent trips to the loo, of his cloistered and cluttered study in the New Farm flat he shares with his partner, fashion designer Pamela Easton.
“Pam would kill me if she knew I was getting photographed in clashing stripes and chequers,” he says.
Gleitzman’s eyes twinkle, and his quips – most often at his own expense – are liberally sprinkled throughout the conversation, his responses offering a journey into the seemingly boundless scope of his intellectual curiosity. So immersed does the writer become in the world of ideas that he often seems oblivious to the one around him, content to meander any which way and only offering a solitary directional suggestion when his bladder starts to feel those litres of tea he drank that morning and requires a pit stop at the Brisbane Powerhouse arts centre.
Not that he is entirely monk-like in his habits. Yes, he gave up coffee and cigarettes aged about 22, “has never been a boozer” and doesn’t do social media. But Gleitzman, who long wrote humorous columns for the recently defunct Gourmet Traveller Wine, has always been partial to a drop and he struggles with at least one vice: “I’m in a constant battle against Netflix.”
Nor is the screen diet of a man who got his start writing for The Norman Gunston Show necessarily what one might expect of a children’s writer. His favourite film is Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heat, which tells the classic story of the “troubled cop and the complicated crim who see how similar they are” and he has just finished bingeing Baby Reindeer.
“It’s about dark and troubled people and I wanted to walk away from episode three,” he says of the Netflix show. “But it was fascinating as well.”
Gleitzman’s books have not shied away from darkness either. That which launched his career, Two Weeks with the Queen, is a rollicking adventure story about childhood terminal cancer, the Aids crisis and discrimination against homosexual love, which sparked some controversy when it came out in 1990.
These themes, almost taboo in children’s literature at the time, obviously struck a chord – Gleitzman has since sold more than 4m books in Australia alone. But they didn’t come from his lived experience. The book, the legend goes, formed in his brain in an instant, almost fully formed. How did he do that?
“I hold that mystery absolutely sacred,” Gleitzman responds. “I had to learn a long time ago that, in trying to front-of-mind control every aspect of the development of the story, you sell yourself, and the story, short.”
Yes, the writer has an idea of what his unformed story should be and where it should go, he says, and will sit down at his desk to methodically thump out a few hundred words every day. Sometimes, though, he has to get up and walk backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, or go to sleep on a plot problem to allow free rein to the mysterious inner workings of the mind.
“I plan and structure my stories to a degree,” he says. “But also leave them open to other possibilities.”
In Gleitzman’s new novel, Tweet, his first in five years, the birds of the planet band together against humanity’s destruction of the natural world. They begin – in trademark Gleitzman fashion of blending the silly with the serious – by blocking leaf blowers.
How would the amiable grandfather of letters react when we walk past that most egregious of back yard buzzings? Would a vein bulge? An eye twitch? A crack appear in his erudite exterior, revealing some darkness lurking within the soul of Australia’s children’s laureate for 2018–19?
Alas, I will never know, for today is no day for leaf blowing. Overcast and drizzly, it is more reminiscent of the country Gleitzman left behind as a teenage 10-pound Pom or of his beloved Melbourne, where the writer spent 15 happy years in between long stints in Sydney, than of the subtropical metropolis he has called home for the past nine.
Forever upbeat, it seems, Gleitzman refuses the invitation to moan – not about the jackhammers that seem to endlessly intrude upon the silence of his workroom (“jackhammers can be justified a little more than leaf blowers”), not about screens, the internet or young people today.
This, of course, is the secret behind Gleitzman’s success in reaching generation after generation of young readers. He trusts them. Gleitzman has always placed great faith in his young readers, in their ability to make sense of story without exposition, to engage with weighty subjects and difficult emotions.
These days, though, he does worry for them.
As well as his readings on the climate crisis that fuelled Tweet, Gleitzman has been delving of late into the dizzying onrush of artificial intelligence. Both topics, he believes, pose imminent and existential threats to humanity. He has tackled one as a writer, would he consider tackling the other?
“The approach I took with Tweet was not to hector or blame, it was just to introduce one simple, but I think very important, idea for their [readers’] consideration: that they could participate in some way in some of the solutions that we need to stabilise the climate.
“But that is all predicated on time … we still have time to do the things we need to do, but very little time, and it will take a massive attitudinal change of our decision-makers.”
As for AI, he believes we are close to a point “where we will never be able to contain it … we will just have to hope – and there is no reason to – that it will end up keeping us around or doing good things for us, but without our participation that seems unlikely”.
“At this very late stage in my writing career, I’m actually not sure, exactly, what to make of that,” he says quietly.
Gleitzman understands the uncertain nature of life – we’ve always lived with it, he says. “But never this uncertainty.”
“I’ve always been a total optimist, though I hope not a woolly minded one,” Gleitzman says. “But just in the last couple of years, I’ve found it is getting a lot harder to be optimistic.”
There it is. Right at the end of our conversation. Standing on that gloomy crossroad. A change in Gleitzman’s unflappable demeanour.
Then, with an “on that happy note” and “see you ‘round the ‘hood’”, the twinkle returns to his eye and, barely a beat missed, we each take our separate roads home. I’m left believing that if anyone can write a book for young readers that deals, with honesty, about this existential threat to their future – and still leave them feeling better than when they first picked it up – it might just be Gleitzman.
Tweet by Morris Gleitzman is out now through Penguin in Australia, $17.99
