Table Of ContentJohn Marsden is a lover of language (‘my parents used it skilfully and
attractively’), of stories (‘as a child I’d often read two or three books in a day’),
and of the bush (‘I used the money from writing to protect 1100 acres of native
forest on the edge of Melbourne’).
His writing courses at his forest property, the Tye Estate, are well-known.
Schools from all over Australia, Singapore and Indonesia regularly send groups
of students to him, and he travels to different countries each year to teach
writing.
John is currently attached to quite a few humans, as well as five cattle, one
sheep, two donkeys, two goats, one goose, four guineafowl, a variety of hens and
ducks, one horse, and two dogs, Trevor (‘my Zen dog’) and Coco (‘she makes a
great hot-water bottle’).
Also by John Marsden
So Much to Tell You
The Journey
The Great Gatenby
Staying Alive in Year 5
Out of Time
Letters from the Inside
Take My Word for It
Looking for Trouble
Tomorrow . . . (Ed.)
Cool School
Creep Street
Checkers
For Weddings and a Funeral (Ed.)
This I Believe (Ed.)
Dear Miffy
Prayer for the 21st Century
Everything I Know About Writing
Secret Men’s Business
The Tomorrow Series 1999 Diary
The Rabbits
Norton’s Hut
Marsden on Marsden
Winter
The Head Book
The Boy You Brought Home
The Magie Rainforest
Millie
A Roomful of Magie
The Tomorrow Series
Tomorrow, When the War Began
The Dead of the Night
The Third Day, the Frost
Darkness, Be My Friend
Burning for Revenge
The Night is for Hunting
The Other Side of Dawn
The Ellie Chronicles
While I Live
Incurable
Circle of Flight
WHILE i LIVE
THE ELLIE CHRONICLES
‘While I live, I’ll grow . . .’
JOHN MARSDEN
John Marsden’s website can be visited at:
www.macmillan.com.au/pma/marsden
or johnmarsden.com
First published 2003 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
This edition published in 2004 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Reprinted 2006 (three times)
Copyright © Jomden Pty Ltd 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
cataloguing-in-publication data:
Marsden, John, 1950-.
While I live.
For young adults.
ISBN 0 330 36484 7.
I. Title (Series: Marsden, John, 1950-The Ellie chronicles).
A823.3
Set in 12/14.5 pt Legacy Serif by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Poems and songs appearing in the text:
p. 5 ‘The Man from Snowy River’ by Banjo Paterson; pp. 24 and 30
by John Marsden; p. 25 ‘The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart’
by W.B. Yeats; p. 26 ‘Daisy Bell’ by Harry Dacre.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental.
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in
sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country
of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored,
distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar
organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying,
recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
While I Live: The Ellie Chronicles
John Marsden
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Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks
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For Sam Harper,
just because . . .
Thanks to Sarah Alexander,
Michelle Mitchell, Warwick Kirk, Susan Kirk,
Charlotte Lindsay, Anna Higgins, Ronda Gawley,
Rachel James, Des James, Maureen Wiltshire.
CHAPTER 1
WE WERE HALFWAY up the spur when we heard it. Homer and Gavin and I, just
the three of us. The spur was steep and the rocks were loose; we slid back two
metres for every three we climbed.
It was about 1.15 p.m. A warm afternoon in May. It had been a hot autumn.
Surrounding us was the bush, an army of twisted trees standing to attention.
They wore grey-green uniforms and waved their bunches of leaves in endless
useless motion. They were the army that never went anywhere, never did
anything. They were the army who cared about nothing.
Sometimes the bush is quite silent. Not often. But sometimes, around noon on
a January day, when the temperature is in the high thirties and the gumtree
leaves are hanging tired and limp, and the birds stop flying and the insects hide
in shade, then all you hear is the cracking of stones and the grizzle of a lost fly
and, if you’re in a paddock, the shuffle of a steer as he moves slowly to a better
patch of grass.
But on this May afternoon there were the usual background noises, none of
them loud, just humming away. Bees and wasps and beetles; tree branches
rubbing against each other; magpies and rosellas, wagtails and wrens. Mum had
a friend from the city come to stay once; I think she’d had a nervous breakdown
or something, and on the third day she ran into the house with her hands over her
ears crying, ‘I came here for peace and quiet and it’s nothing but noise noise
noise.’
This particular day we were making so much noise ourselves that I hardly
noticed the sounds of the bush. The clicking and rattling and clatter of sliding
stones blocked out nearly everything else. And then there was the puffing and
panting, from Homer especially. He was getting pretty unfit lately.
He stopped and leaned against a tree; half a tree really, because it had lost
most of its upper branches. He grinned at me. His face sparkled with sweat. I
stopped and grinned back. Ahead of us Gavin, head down, relentless as ever,
ploughed on.
‘You’re getting slack,’ I said to Homer.
‘Race you,’ he said. But he didn’t move.
I walked on a dozen steps. Now I was just ahead of him.
‘I win,’ I said.
‘Remind me again why we’re doing this?’ he asked, wriggling his shoulders
to make his pack more comfortable.
‘Fun,’ I said, as firmly as I could. ‘Fun, pleasure, recreation, sightseeing,
enjoyment.’
He sighed. ‘Some people swallow a dictionary,’ he said. ‘You have to
swallow a bloody thesaurus.’
It was on the word ‘thesaurus’ that the shots began.
They came from the bottom of the valley, echoing up the hillside, then around
the valley. To be mathematical about it, I’d say there were fifteen shots in the
first volley, evenly spaced, lasting about twenty-five seconds. Then there was a
pause of maybe ten seconds before three ragged groups of shots that went for a
minute. After that there were occasional random ones, probably thirty in all, for
about five or six minutes.
Five or six minutes. By the end of five or six minutes we were halfway home
again. It seems incredible when I think about it. After all, we’d taken about two
and a bit hours to get that far. Of course that was uphill and this was nearly all
downhill, but even so, considering I lost at least half a minute going back for
Gavin . . .
Gavin’s profoundly deaf, which doesn’t mean totally deaf, but then according
to his teacher, hardly anyone’s totally deaf. All I know is that Gavin’s very deaf.
He can hear loud yells, semitrailers going past, explosions, and helicopters at
close range. He can’t hear TV or music or conversation. He definitely can’t hear
anyone telling him to clean his room or do his homework or set the table. He
can’t hear me telling him he needs to get a move-on or he’ll miss the bus, but he
can hear me saying, ‘Gavin, get your ass in gear right now or I’ll kick you all the
way to the bus-stop,’ which I tend to say fairly often.
He can’t hear shots that are a couple of kilometres away. I’d forgotten that. I
remembered it after I’d turned and run down the spur a hundred metres. When I
remembered I stopped, irresolute. I’ve always liked that word. I’ve just never
had a chance to use it before.
I had a flash in my mind of the scene in The Silver Sword where Jan abandons
his dog Ludwig in order to help the girls save the little boy Edek. The author
says that this is the point at which Jan begins to grow up. When I was a kid and I
came to that moment in the book I hated Jan, I hated him for leaving his dog to
