Copyright Kelly Sturgiss

Jackie French’s writing career spans twenty-five years, thirty-six languages, more than 140 books and more than sixty awards in Australia and overseas. Her books include Diary of a Wombat and Hitler’s Daughter. She was the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2014–2015 and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year.

Dear Jackie,

I can’t tell you what comes next. If you fail to squish a caterpillar tomorrow on the oleanders its resultant butterfly may change the world by the flap of its wings and I might not be sitting here writing you this. (This is part of an exciting theory involving Mandelbrot sets but it hasn’t been formulated yet in your time. But you’ll have fun later with its implications.)

I can tell you that nearly all your dreams will come true. Not all of them – you must admit that starring in La Traviata at La Scala is not compatible with writing books on a headland surrounded by bush and owning a hundred dogs. Nor do your dreams come true in exactly the way you envisage. But then, you know extraordinarily little of the vast complexity of possibilities that is life. But if today you could choose where you’d be at 61, which is how old I am as I write this to you, I think you’d choose it all – every second of the life that has led you to here.

Which is not to say it has been easy. There will be bumps and some great slashes. But they will pass. They are also minuscule compared to all the good.

The years you are in now are the worst in your life: the most isolated, socially and intellectually, with no family comfort and your experiences too foreign to your friends for them to even accept what is happening to you, much less support you. Besides, you will learn, many, many decades later, your school friends too have hard walls to climb just now, and you too will have failed to support them.

But you must believe this: IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. Nothing of the past few years or now or the few years to come – is your fault. Despite what you now think and feel, you are still a child and it is the duty of others to protect you. Do not feel guilty, because for many years guilt tore or nibbled you. No matter how long our life will be, it will be too short to waste on guilt that you did not deserve.

Believe this too: you are lovable and will be loved, even if there is no one to love you now. Once you get to university you will find a growing network of people with minds that match your own. You will also find that similar minds were with you at school, all the time, but partly because you were focused, mostly, on surviving, but also because of the low intellectual expectations of girls back when you were thirteen, you won’t see them.

Believe this, most of all: that no matter what hard things happen in your life, at the same time there will be happiness and beauty around you too. Mostly, you will find these yourself, but it’s worth advising you to look a little harder for the glorious bits and enjoy them all the more, knowing that, yes, it’s all okay. It works out. Time and again, all your life – until today, at least, and I hope for a long while still to come – it all works out.

What else? Forget those diagrams for that perpetual motion machine. It won’t succeed. But don’t narrow the breadth of your thinking either: you will have some major insights, though you will give them to specialists in the appropriate fields, which will not be yours, to refine and publish.

And maybe I need to tell you this too: the best that is yet to come is far beyond your daydreams, with a richness you could never have imagined. But the deepest joys have come from the mundane things that you are slightly scornful of now – as wife, mother, friend, part of the bush around you and a few other everyday fulfilments I won’t spoil for you by foretelling them.

I wish I could comfort you now. I can’t. But there is comfort and joy around you, even now, if you look.

Do look.

Love (even if it took me decades to be able to say this),

Jackie