I was born in Singapore but moved to
Warwick, Queensland in the early 1970s where my
dad was the town G.P. On an application form for a
driver‟s licence, I believe, Dad wrote in the box
where it said „Skin colour‟ “medium” because a
question like that is always going to be confusing.
But the officer who took the form from him struck
out the word and wrote “dark”. Moments like that
— in your family history and in your own life —
will stick and have an impact on the kind of person
you become, and the work you do as an adult.
Which is why — after a diet pendulous with
Trixie Belden, Enid Blyton, The Three
Investigators, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and
abridged English literary classics — reading The
Neverending Story, by German author Michael
Ende, was a revelation. What that book brought
home — as an eleven-year-old Australian-Chinese
girl on holiday in Singapore — was that skin colour
is completely irrelevant. It‟s what you do inside that
skin that counts.
Not to be confused with the execrable movie of
1984, The Neverending Story (Allen Lane, 1983)
has as its central heroic triumvirate: a “fat little boy
of ten or twelve”, a small boy from a nomadic
hunting tribe with blue-black hair and green skin,
and a ruling empress who resembles a beautiful
child with snow-white hair and golden eyes. Among
other things, the novel is populated by blackskinned centaurs, talking werewolves, sentient
insect swarms, ghouls, giant guardian snakes and a
wingless, magic luck dragon with ruby-red eyes.
Briefly, Bastian Balthazar Bux (the pastyskinned kid) is the daily target of school bullies. He
is completely ignored by his father, who is still
grief-stricken after the death of Bastian‟s mother.
Instead of attending class one day, Bastian —
heeding some impulse he can‟t name — steals a
strange old hardback from a second-hand book
dealer called “The Neverending Story”. Bastian
then hides away in his school attic to read it all
through that day and into the dawn of the next. But
inside those hours, an entire world — Fantastica —
is destroyed and born again. And Bastian is witness
to all of it.
The Neverending Story was ground-breaking
for me on many levels. It‟s a story within a story:
the book itself is inside the book. How many times
as a child have you wished to enter and be a part of
the story you were reading? Well, Bastian is the
reader physically drawn into the story, becoming a
god-like player in it — capable both of creation and
destruction. Before I even knew what “breaking the
fourth wall” meant, here was a book that made me,
the reader, complicit in that. “The Neverending
Story” that Bastian reads begins to speak directly to
him. When he cries out in his world, he is heard by
the characters inside the book he holds. They beg