Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

• Ellie Linton: Farm girl from the outback. The tough chick. She is the main character in this book.The main character is Ellie. Ellie lives in Australia in the countryside. Ellie’s dad works on a farm and Ellie is a typical farm girl. Ellie is average height has brown hair. She is a good student and a well behaved girl. Ellie is about 16 years old at the beginning of the book. Ellie closest friends include Corrie her best friend, Robyn, homer. Some of her other friends are Kevin (corries boy friend) lee and Fi a rich girl.
• Homer Yannos: Ellie's next door neighbour. Wild, outrageous, rebellious with little regard for rules or what people think of him. Always in trouble. Just experienced a growth spurt and is now the biggest and strongest of all the kids. Loves hunting, swimming and music.
• Fiona Maxwell: Ellie's role model. She looks like she has never done a hard's day work in her life, never been in the sun, never got her hands dirty. She lives in town and spends her time playing the piano & riding horses rather than farm work. Her parents are both solicitors & are quite wealthy. she is a rich posh girl just looking out for an adventure.
• Robyn Mathers: Quiet and serious and heavily into church. But, she also likes to win and is super competitive when playing netball. Strong, nuggety and beautifully balanced. She skims lightly across the ground.
• Corrie Mackenzie: Kevin's girlfriend and has been Ellie's best friend since they were very young. Very romantic and is a great friend.
• ellie, lee, homer, fionia, robyn, chris, corrie, kevin: Dark, black crewcut and deep brown intelligent eyes with a soft voice that clips the ends off words. Thai Mother and Vietnamese Father who run the town's Asian restaurant. Good at music, art and most things. Can be very annoying when things go against him. Will go into sulks for days at a time. has 3 younger siblings.
• Kevin: Has a wide mouth, huge hands and a massive ego. Always takes the credit for everything that goes right. Going out with Corrie and has had a good influence on her, making her come out of her shell.
• Chris Lang: Described as a 'Stoner', his one true wish is to live with a big bag of weed and no parents. He is also a regular drinker. Not part of the original seven who went camping as his parents went overseas and he had keep an eye on the farm.
• Bertram Hubert Sexton Christie: The Hermit from Hell who is never found, but was rumored to have killed his wife and child and then ran away to live in Hell for the rest of his life. He lived in a hut he made by himself.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Humans do such terrible things to each other that sometimes my brain tells me they must be evil. But my heart still isn't convinced.”

  Ellie Linton

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• In this life of froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own.

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• No, Hell wasn't anything to do with places, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.

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• Even life and death weren't opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.

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• Loyalty, courage, goodness. I wonder if they're human inventions too, or if they just are.

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• All I could think of to do was to trust to instinct. That was all I had really. Human laws, moral laws, religious laws, they seemed artificial and basic, almost childlike. I had a sense within me—often not much more than a striving—to find the right thing to do, and I had to have faith in that sense. Call it anything—instinct, conscience, imagination—but what it felt like was a constant testing of everything I did against some kind of boundaries within me; checking, checking, all the time.

  Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers

• No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It's the people calling it Hell, that's the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying 'Housing Commission' or 'private school' or 'church' or 'mosque' or 'synagogue'. They stopped looking once they saw those signs.

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• He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight.

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• So, that was Nature's way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. He didn't have the imagination to put himself in the mosquito's place. He just enjoyed his meal. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insect's suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitos too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.

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• The Bible just said 'Thou shalt not kill', then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath. That didn't help me much.

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• We'd thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn't have to walk into a place to invade it.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Hospital
• Hell
• Wombegonoo

Organizations edit see section history

• Wirawee High School: Add a description of this organization.
• Wirawee Agricultural and Padstoral Association

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• clodbuster: A piece of farm equipment used to break up tough soil, like clay, before sowing crops.
• cockie: An Australian and New Zealand colloquial term for farmer. Derived from the word "cocatoo".
• billy: A round metal container used by campers over a fire for boiling water or cooking.
• blokes: Men
• budgie: A small species of parrot native to Australia. Kept as cage birds in many parts of the world but found wild in Australia.
• bush: In Australia and New Zealand any expanse of uncultivated land.
• carpark: Parking lot.
• charolais: Breed of cattle. The term is French
• chooks: Chickens
• coolroom: A walk-in refrigerator.
• dinking: Carrying a passenger on a bike.
• dunny: Australian and New Zealand term for a toilet, sometimes restricted to pit or long drop toilets as uses in rural areas without sewerage.
• footy: Australian rules football, as administered by the Australian Football League. Played extensively in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania but a minority sport in New South Wales and Queensland. Footie may also be used to describe Rugby League and even Rugby Union, which are quite different sports.
• dinking: Any method of carrying a passenger on a bicycle other than a child in a child's seat.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by The Dead of Night.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. John Marsden (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Though they are gentle and loving, there are references to having sex as teenagers--a sort of primeval needs persists even during catastrophes. The kids have to use violence to survive.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Children's Books › People & Places › Social Situations › Friendship › Fiction
• Books › Children's Books › People & Places › Explore the World › Fiction › Australia & Oceania
• Books › Teens › Authors, A-Z › ( M ) › Marsden, John
• Books › Teens › Literature & Fiction › Adventure & Thrillers
• Books › Children's Books › Literature › Action & Adventure
• Books › Teens › Social Issues

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• John Marsden's official website: Site maintained by John Marsden himself.

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Tomorrow, When the War Began (IMDb): 2010. Based on the first of seven books by acclaimed Australian author, John Marsden, Tomorrow When The War Began is the story of seven teenagers who return from a week-long camping trip to find that Australia has been invaded by a foreign power.Banding together to fight gurellia-style agaist the enemy, this is not a typical heroic war movie - it is a terrifying situation where they must sometimes use little more than a knife or a belt to murder a soldier in cold blood. It's a graphic tale of the violence, the blood, the fear, and the insanity of war.These kids are underdogs, they're not going to win the war, they're more likely to end up dead in a ditch than send the enemy retreating, but it's their land, their parents and friends in prison camps. They give a damn and they'd rather die fighting than give up.

More Books Like This edit see section history