Morris Gleitzman will walk the quiet 135-metre stretch of footpath and bitumen on the appropriately named Abbott Street back and forth, back and forth some days, for hours on end.The inner-city suburban Brisbane street is lined with majestic old camphor laurels whose branches – adorned with staghorns and other epiphytes – harbour oases of cool in even the most scorching of Queensland summers.
“I celebrate the wonderful imaginations of the kids I write for, and half of them are gonna say: ‘Bloody hell, Morris Gleitzman goes down to the pub and head-butts blokes,” he says, explaining the hat.speaks of the fine Chinese tea that has fuelled his 44 published books and that combats sedentariness by prompting frequent trips to the loo, of his cloistered and cluttered study in the New Farm flat he shares with his partner, fashion designer Pamela Easton.
Nor is the screen diet of a man who got his start writing for The Norman Gunston Show necessarily what one might expect of a children’s writer. His favourite film is Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heatwhich tells the classic story of the “troubled cop and the complicated crim who see how similar they are” and he has just finished bingeing“It’s about dark and troubled people and I wanted to walk away from episode three,” he says of the Netflix show. “But it was fascinating as well.
“I plan and structure my stories to a degree,” he says. “But also leave them open to other possibilities.” Alas, I will never know, for today is no day for leaf blowing. Overcast and drizzly, it is more reminiscent of the country Gleitzman left behind as a teenage 10-pound Pom or of his beloved Melbourne, where the writer spent 15 happy years in between long stints in Sydney, than of the subtropical metropolis he has called home for the past nine.