Growing up on the outskirts of Melbourne Andy Griffiths could roam by day and write by night.
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Surrounded by dense bushland on the fringe of the urban sprawl, Griffiths was encouraged to explore his own backyard by his family who shared an appetite for adventure and an offbeat sense of humour.
Makeshift performances were common; his dad was not quite a magician but he had a "magic box".
"I had a free childhood with lots of adventures by day," Griffiths said.
"Then my reading and writing was an extension of that by night.
"I had some journals that included collages, cartoons and bursts of writing.
"It was purely for my own amusement; I didn't think I was going to be a writer back then."
By the time he turned 12, Griffiths started a school magazine called Popcorn.
He sold it for three cents a copy to his fellow students.
"I had a typewriter and I loved words but I mostly loved the idea of making people laugh," he said.
Now one of Australia's most popular and prolific children's authors, Griffiths will share work from his childhood in Wodonga on Sunday, February 11.
He will be among authors and illustrators to feature their artwork in the Juvenilia exhibition at Hyphen - Wodonga Library Gallery.
In conjunction with Terry Denton, Griffiths has sold more than 10 million books and won 80 children's choice awards.
Their much-loved Treehouse series has been embraced by children in more than 35 nations worldwide.
A former school teacher, Griffiths gravitated to writing in the early 1990s when he noticed a gap in the children's book market for funny and adventurous content.
He said he felt something was missing after listening to his students.
"Kids were telling me they hated reading," Griffiths said.
"Adventure, fantasy and fun were lacking in children's books in the late 1980s and early 1990s."
The Treehouse series - which only ended in September 2023 with the 13th instalment - tapped into that adventure, fun and fantasy that Griffiths so loved in books from his childhood by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl.
Griffiths encountered resistance from librarians, teachers and parents to his style of writing early in his career.
He said some people believed it was irresponsible to represent children misbehaving.
"In a book anything goes; normal life is turned upside down," he said.
"There's a fundamental misunderstanding that children reading about doing bad things will make them do bad things.
"Children are intelligent and I treat them with respect.
"I might have had a sceptical librarian rolling their eyes at the beginning of a school talk but by the end they observed the kids rolling around on the floor, laughing. They got it."
Having been a singer with alternative rock bands Gothic Farmyard and Ivory Coast in the late 1980s, Griffiths said he only recently pulled out the tapes again.
"It was like listening to a whole other person," Griffiths said.
"It wasn't that I was a bad singer but it was the songwriting that I enjoyed.
"At the end I concluded it's the writing I'm good at and I traded the mic for pen and paper."
Griffiths will speak at The Cube Wodonga Courtyard on Sunday, February 11, from 10.30am until 11am before heading into the Playspace Gallery from 11am.
Books will be available for sale.
Juvenilia runs at Hyphen from Friday, February 9, to Sunday, May 5, 10am to 6pm weekdays and 10am to 3pm weekends.
