In 1968, Mem Fox was in London, in the final month of a three-year drama course, when she made a note in her journal: “I don’t want to be an actress, I want to be a writer.”
“I was 22 then, and Possum Magic came out when I was 37,” the bestselling children’s author now recalls, at her home in Adelaide. “So I knew a long time before that that I would like to be a writer.”
Much like Hush, the picture book’s marsupial protagonist, Fox took the long way round. By the mid-1970s she had traded London for Adelaide, South Australia, lecturing in drama at a teacher’s college and raising her young daughter, Chloë, who loved books.
“When she was little, there were no Australian picture books,” Fox says. “There were a lot of English books, there were a lot of American books, but they were not Australian books.”
Reading to Chloë gave Fox a “subliminal” introduction to the world of kids’ books, before she enrolled in a children’s literature course at Flinders University. One early assignment was writing a book of her own, a task the 31-year-old mature age student initially balked at.
“Actually, at the time I thought it was beneath me,” she says, “because I thought it was so easy.”
Fox soon learned writing a book was harder than it looked. But she persisted, and even enlisted Sydney-based illustrator Julie Vivas to punch up her manuscript, then titled Hush the Invisible Mouse. (“Literally, to blind the lecturer to my words,” Fox says.)
Fox scored a high distinction for their efforts, which told the story of a globetrotting mouse who samples the foods of the world before settling in Australia. The publishing industry took some convincing, however, with nine publishers rejecting the book before a 10th took her on – provided Fox slash the length and change the species of its central character to something more distinctly Australian.
That book became Possum Magic. Upon publication in 1983 it became an instant classic, winning Australia’s children’s book of the year in 1984 and going on to sell 5m copies.
“It sold out its first printing before it was launched – just word of mouth,” Fox recalls. “People were starving for it. They just wanted an Australian book. They wanted to be able to read about themselves. And suddenly it was all there, all the foods, all the animals, all the capital cities. And then a major reason for its success was the illustrations – I mean, they’re from heaven!”
More picture books followed, from 1984’s Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge – Fox again teaming up with Vivas – to more recent classics like 2004’s Where Is the Green Sheep, illustrated by Judy Horacek, and 2008’s Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. All have become bestsellers, treasured by successive generations of children and the adults in their lives.
All three appear alongside Possum Magic in the Top 50 Australian children’s picture books as nominated by Guardian readers. Fox says she is proud to see so many other Australian authors alongside her on the shortlist when there were once so few.
“You don’t realise it at the time at all, but looking back, you think, ‘God, there was nothing’,” she says. “Then there was something … and then there was a lot.”
Even after publishing more than 50 books, Fox says writing for children is still harder than it looks.
“You can see the rubbish that you have written, and you say to yourself, I couldn’t have written that, my name is Mem Fox,” she says with a laugh.
Part of the challenge lies in the genre’s brevity, where every word and syllable counts; Where is the Green Sheep? is just 191 words long.
“One of the things that wasn’t mentioned [at university] was the essential need for the most beautiful, rhythmic, lyrical, musical use of words, with every phrase rhythmically contained – so that you were never reading with a jerk, you were never fumbling over the words,” she says.
As a daughter of Christian missionaries who spent much of her childhood living on a mission in present-day Zimbabwe, Fox’s love of language was fostered in part by the King James Bible, “which is sonorous and perfect, and there isn’t a beat out of place”.
Like any good children’s book, the 15th-century text was written to be read aloud, at a time when many churchgoers couldn’t read themselves. And while it has been “1,000 years” since Fox last went to church, she can still recite many lines off the top of her head. (“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,” she says with a flourish.)
All the same, Fox tries to avoid being too heavy-handed or preachy in her books, something she learned early on while reading to her daughter Chloë.
“She didn’t like being taught a lesson. I remember a book about feminism … Oh, my Lord, [she] just pushed it aside, said, ‘I don’t want to do that again.’ It was so obvious, it was so in your face.
“Now, I have written books which people might say, ‘Well, that’s an anti-racist book’,” she says, holding up a copy of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. “But I’m not telling people how to think. I’m just stating facts – you know, your heart is the same, your hopes are the same, love is the same, blood is the same. I’m just stating facts.”
Fox is circumspect about other ways Australian publishing has changed since she began writing – like the “slight problem” of children’s books written by celebrities.
“Because people buy it because of the writer, not the writing – it doesn’t last,” she says, adding, “What they do bring is a lot of money to the publisher, which means that the publisher can publish the people like me who don’t have 50,000 followers on Instagram or whatever.”
Whether it’s an influencer’s name on the cover or her own, Fox says children will vote with their ears if the writing doesn’t grab them. This is why, when Fox writes, she keeps two children in mind:
“One is a child that’s on a couch next to me or in a bed, very close to me,” she says. “And the other one is a group of kids sitting on a mat in a school and the teacher’s reading to them.
“Because it’s very tempting to write things that adults like – to write a ‘beautiful’ book. I’ve written beautiful books, and adults have loved them, and they’ve been published and they haven’t sold. There’s a lesson in that.’”
Fox turns 80 in March, and four decades after Possum Magic finally made her writerly dream come true, she has no plans to stop.
“I’ve got some books in the pipeline,” she says, explaining how the illustration process can sometimes take two years.
“And I’m thinking, ‘I might be dead before they come out!” she adds.
You can vote once a day in Guardian Australia’s poll to decide the best Australian children’s picture book. The winner will be announced at 6am on 6 February
