Gentle larrikin Terry Denton, famous for his anarchy with Andy Griffiths, made reading fun

At the news Australian children’s illustrator Terry Denton died on September 21, aged 76, millions of readers around the world will feel like they have lost a friend.

Wickedly funny, a prolific winner of awards over 40 years, but unpretentious, Terry is best known for his collaboration with writer Andy Griffiths on a series of short-story collections. Their first, the Just series, began with Just Tricking! in 1997. A second series began with The 13-Storey Treehouse in 2011. They’ve sold millions.

Terry and Andy made reading fun and even naughty. That was the secret. All the academic talk about finding the right books for “reluctant readers” in the 1970s was well-intentioned, but basically labelled them “for medicinal purposes only”.

Andy’s idea was that Terry should draw a parallel narrative in the margins of their books together, with subversive jokes and running gags in flick-book style. It would send young readers hurtling forward 50 pages on the hunt for some joke, and then back 20, to make the act of reading dynamic and playful.

Kids were having fun, engaged in learning without even noticing it. And the process was cleverly aligned with Australia’s new philosophical interest in postmodernism’s language about language. The adults who wanted The Bad Book banned in 2004 (people felt it was violent and depressing, and Sydney-based doyenne of children’s booksellers, Kate Colley, refused to stock it) missed the clever subtext. It wasn’t a guidebook filled with ideas about how to be a bad kid; it was a book about irresponsible bad parenting.

A bit of a larrikin, ready for a party on Saturday night but not sure where the action was, Terry had studied architecture for seven years – and tried anthropology, sociology, fine arts, animation, etching and oil painting – before finally hitting on his career as an illustrator.

Checklists of career options like this are familiar from biographical notes on Australian artists as different as Henry Lawson, Elizabeth Jolley, poet Bruce Dawe, children’s author Robin Klein and Holden Sheppard. They reflect the challenge of making a living from the arts in this country. And we like our artists to be good blokes, too – regardless of gender – and to know a lot more than they appear to. Educators in 2026 might also see a hint of neurodiversity in their vibrating attraction to very diverse aspects of their talent.

Andy and Terry: kids getting away with stuff

Recalling their collaboration in an interview with ABC News Radio yesterday, Andy Griffiths says he and Terry egged each other on, continually outdoing each other with the most recent story idea, almost like street rappers in bro culture, duelling with “Yo mama” gags.

Andy would come up with an idea, Terry would go off at a tangent and draw something funnier, which in turn would inspire Andy to up the ante. Put the kid on a playground swing, demanding to go higher and higher. Have the parents keep pushing and pushing until eventually he flies off the swing into space. And then make it that the parents say limply: “Oops!”

Here they were as narrators, Andy and Terry, using their real names, making up stories set in a treehouse that started with 13 storeys. (Get it? Even the “story/Storey” homophone is an unobtrusive learning moment.) Thirteen books later, the treehouse got to 169 storeys, and included a bowling alley, a man-eating shark tank and a machine that fired marshmallows into their mouths whenever they needed a sugar high.

Terry’s machines are reminiscent of those from cartoonist Heath Robinson: infinitely complex and yet finally absurd. In a way, just like the human imagination, or even language itself. “It felt like we were kids back in Year 7 or 8, down the back of the class, getting away with stuff,” Andy said.

Readers as naughty agents of chaos. Children’s literature had stopped playing ladies.

Clever quietness and anarchy

The long-running show with Andy was a perfect double act, but that wasn’t how Terry’s career as an illustrator started. The back cover blurb of Max Dann’s Going Bananas in 1983 says “Terry Denton is a Melbourne artist and illustrator. In 1960 he won a kettle at a school fete.” There’s that good bloke again.

Just three years later, though, Terry won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year Award for Felix and Alexander, a dark and touching story of blond boy Alexander, who lives in a Melbourne flat with a dog called Felix who can be relied on to laugh at his jokes.

When Alexander wanders off and gets lost, Felix searches for him, tears his coat as he squeezes through a metal fence and loses some of his stuffing along the way. Oh – so Felix is a toy dog? Once Felix too gets lost, the trail of stuffing leads him back home, like Hansel and Gretel’s white pebbles. There’s always a clever intertextual conversation going on, often with a belly laugh, sometimes a quiet giggle.

Although Terry was to become known for the apparent anarchy of his black and white line drawings, you can see his real passion for colour and beauty in the satirical Mr Plunkett’s Pool, which won him and writer Gillian Rubinstein the Multicultural Award in 1993, and in their brilliant Ducky’s Nest in 1999.

When Mum goes to hospital to have the new baby, Nana comes to stay with Claudie, who’s not at all sure about this new baby thing. She takes her toy duck down to the pond and accidentally leaves it there.

Ducky can’t remember where he lives, and a flock of ducks heading home before dark promise to find his nest for him. A picture of this toy duck safe in the wings of the duck squadron flying across Melbourne is poetic genius. And the lyrical shading of the sky just above the horizon is Terry’s secret superpower.

This is the quiet, reflective Terry Denton. The ultimate performer, who was always genuinely and deeply human.

On my lounge-room wall is a gift from Terry: the cover art he did for me for Margaret Clark’s funny teen novel Hold My Hand – Or Else (1993). I didn’t have to brief Terry on this job. Like his great friend, the illustrator Craig Smith, Terry always came up with the image I didn’t realise I wanted. A teenage girl is surfing the breakers triumphantly, with a trail of hands reaching up out of the swell behind her: waving, drowning? Waving.

Loving memories of a great man

The community who love Terry so much are gathering up their stories now for comfort – and holding them close.

Fellow illustrator Donna Rawlins remembers a long line of kids at a writers’ festival, waiting for her and Terry to sign their books. One girl handed Terry a pencil and the festival program and asked him to sign it, because she had left her autograph book at home.

Terry grabbed his pen, but she asked him please to use the pencil instead. When she got back home, she was planning to trace his autograph into her book with ink and then rub his pencilled signature off the souvenir program to leave it unspoiled. She wouldn’t be able to do that if he signed with a pen.

There’s another memory on Facebook from Emma Chandler, who, like the young reader in Donna’s story, remembers waiting with a friend for Terry’s autograph. Terry signed a book for the friend, then grabbed Emma’s book ready to sign it. She apologised and said it wasn’t one of Terry’s own books. He gave her a comic deadpan look and said, “Do you think I care?”

So the storytelling goes on. Terry will never leave us, if we’ve got any say in it. As Andy observes, the world loved – loves – Terry Denton because he was a true clown. As a boy he was conscious of his big nose and a mop of curls that made him almost an avatar of the riddling ABC artist, Mr Squiggle.

Unfailingly generous and kind, Terry was, as fellow artist Leigh Hobbs says, a gentleman and a gentle man, who encouraged kids wherever he went to use pictures to express the stories they couldn’t quite find the words for.

And after the show was over, and all the books had been signed and taken home to keep his young readers company, he was never too tired for a quiet chat with his friends. They are missing Terry dreadfully but feel so blessed to have spent time with this uniquely great man of Australian children’s literature.