{"id":579333,"date":"2026-04-01T21:31:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T21:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/579333\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T21:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T21:31:13","slug":"from-childrens-laureate-to-treehouse-on-tv-how-andy-griffiths-quirky-kids-books-captured-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/579333\/","title":{"rendered":"From Children’s Laureate to Treehouse on TV, how Andy Griffiths’ quirky kids books captured the country"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the Brothers Grimm or Lewis Carroll had an ideal reader in mind for their bleak, strange books, it must have been a young Andy Griffiths.<\/p>\n

Raised in a house of literature, with a sense of the mischievous and the ghastly, he fell upon these writers’ books at a dangerously impressionable age and immediately found his calling.<\/p>\n

Along with his copies of the Brothers Grimm and Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss, the young Andy treasured books of a darker cast.<\/p>\n

A particular favourite was the gothic German children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter, and its horrifying moral tales of severely punished children, including the Red Legged Scissor Man \u2014 who did to thumb-sucking children just what you imagine he might \u2014 and the awful fate of Little Johnny Head In Air.<\/p>\n

\"Andy<\/p>\n

Der Struwwelpeter is a German’s children’s book, written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1845, offering 10 cautionary tales to children. (Supplied: ABC TV)<\/p>\n

And so, the author of total children’s anarchy was born.<\/p>\n

“I do remember at this stage when I was a child, getting up to this story and thinking, ‘if you are looking down at your feet your parents would tell you off. And if you’re looking up in the air, your parents would tell you off \u2014 so how do you win? How do you get out from underneath the constant criticism?'”<\/p>\n

Andy Griffiths is one of Australia’s most successful authors, with international and local sales of his 43 books reaching beyond 20 million copies.<\/p>\n

And with that success he has used his hilarious, wickedly funny and transgressive humour to teach generations of children \u2014 particularly book-resistant boys \u2014 to read and love reading.<\/p>\n

It’s a calling he takes enormously seriously, and for a new episode of Creative Types, he takes me into the kooky laboratory where his imagination grows like one of the weirder outcrops on his many-storied Treehouses.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Andy Griffiths’s studio, filled with his collection of toys and puppets. (Supplied: Andy Griffiths)<\/p>\n

In that place, a playhouse of his own where he thinks and writes, all those original books hold a privileged place.<\/p>\n

“That’s where I came in as a writer,” Andy tells me, “Thinking books are getting too safe and nice, and we’re trying not to scare the children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“But for me, being scared was the point. You can’t have genuine heroism, genuine heroics, unless there’s a suitable villain or a suitable, horrific thing to overcome. And that’s what made me want to write.”<\/p>\n

Before Andy was a writer, he was a curious and adventurous kid, then a young punk musician in Melbourne, then a teacher in the country, then a budding writer with a steely determination to get it right.<\/p>\n

Watch Creative Types with Virginia Trioli on ABC iview<\/a><\/p>\n

At the age of 30 he made an astonishing gamble: he banked half his teaching wage for two years until he had saved $10,000, taking evening courses in fiction writing and editing. He then took leave without pay to become a writer.<\/p>\n

He rented a room for $50 a week, where he wrote 12 hours a day, leveraging his teaching experience to create stories that would engage reluctant readers \u2014 vignettes based on his, and his students’, memories and fantasies.<\/p>\n

His work was a success from the start, with depictions of bad kids and bad parents, embodying the absurd sensibility of all the children’s authors that came before him, but with an Australian quality that bounces off a child’s instinct to break free of parental boundaries.<\/p>\n

But it was his creation of the Treehouse series, with illustrator and collaborator Terry Denton, that sent him supernova.<\/p>\n

\"Andy<\/p>\n

Andy Griffiths has been working with illustrator Bill Hope on the You & Me series, and his new book Lost Things. \u00a0 (Supplied: Pan Macmillan Australia\/Andy Roberts)<\/p>\n

Following best friends Andy and Terry as they embark on absurd adventures inside their ever-expanding treehouse, the series now has 13 books, culminating with 2023’s The 169-Storey Treehouse.<\/p>\n

It has also just been announced that the series will be adapted for screen by ABC, in partnership with Werner Film Productions.<\/p>\n

“Up until [we hit upon the Treehouse], there’d been no safe places in any of our books,” Andy recalls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“And even though the Treehouse is dangerous, it’s also a place of safety. And friendship is safety as well.”\"An<\/p>\n

A model of The 52-Storey Treehouse. (Supplied: Andy Griffiths)<\/p>\n

I note that the Treehouse is a place where no adults are allowed and, perversely, that makes it safe too.<\/p>\n

“That’s where the freedom is,” Andy adds “because there’s no one laying down the rules.”<\/p>\n

Now Andy occupies a very authoritative role in Australian literary life, as the anointed Children’s Laureate for 2026 \u2014 a role in the establishment the still-tattooed punk rocker might roll his eyes at.<\/p>\n

But the anarchist is still very much in control: “We have a free expression part of ourselves, and we have an editor part of ourselves that’s trying to protect us from the world.”<\/p>\n

“But writing relies on being honest, and you need to disable the editor for long enough to get the thoughts on the page. And you need to, as a writer: you are taking your readers on a sometimes scary, terrifying journey, and you’ve got to be able to stand that to lead them in there.”<\/p>\n

Watch Creative Types with Virginia Trioli at 8:30pm Thursdays on ABC TV or stream anytime on ABC iview<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the Brothers Grimm or Lewis Carroll had an ideal reader in mind for their bleak, strange books,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[83386,248914,64,63,248916,272828,134,284059,284058,284056,284055,284057,174500],"class_list":{"0":"post-579333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-andy-griffiths","9":"tag-andy-griffiths-books","10":"tag-au","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-childrens-laureate","13":"tag-creative-types","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-terry-denton","16":"tag-treehouse-abc","17":"tag-treehouse-books","18":"tag-treehouse-series","19":"tag-treehouse-series-tv","20":"tag-virginia-trioli"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}