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........

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