Alan Marshall (Australian writer)

Alan Marshall Reserve, Eltham is located on the corner of Main Road and Leane Drive, and has been there since at least 2007.

In 1985 the Shire of Eltham, where Marshall had lived for many years, established the annual Alan Marshall Short Story Competition for emergent writers. In 1937, he completed his first novel, How Beautiful Are Thy Feet, which remained unpublished until 1949.

Marshall died on 21 January 1984 in a nursing home in Brighton East Victoria where he had been a resident for the last two years. His remains are interred at Nillumbik Cemetery, Diamond Creek, Victoria.

In 1981 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced a nine-part mini-series of Marshall’s autobiographical stories. The actor, Adam Garnett, won the 1982 Logie Awards for Best Performance by a Juvenile, for his role as Alan Marshall in the series.

Marshall was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the 1981 Australia Day Honours.

In 1979 Alan Marshall unveiled a plaque on a monument to himself at his birthplace in Noorat.

Marshall was born in Noorat, Victoria. At six years old he contracted polio, which left him with a physical disability that grew worse as he grew older. From an early age, he resolved to be a writer, and in I Can Jump Puddles he demonstrated an almost total recall of his childhood in Noorat. The characters and places of his book are thinly disguised from real life: Mount Turalla is Mount Noorat, Lake Turalla is Lake Keilambete, the Curruthers are the Blacks, Mrs. Conlon is Mary Conlon of Dixie, Terang, and his best friend, Joe from the books, is Leo Carmody. Australian poet and contemporary, Hal Porter wrote in 1965 that Marshall was:

He married Olive Dulcie Dixon in May 1941 and they had 2 daughters, Katherine and Jennifer. The couple divorced in 1957. For many years he lived in Sandringham

He received the Australian Literature Society Short Story Award three times, the first in 1933. His best known book, I Can Jump Puddles (1955) is the first of a three-part autobiography. The other two volumes are This is the Grass (1962) and In Mine Own Heart (1963).

During the early 1930s Marshall worked as an accountant at the Trueform Boot and Shoe Company, Clifton Hill and later wrote about life in the factory in his novel How beautiful are Thy Feet, 1949.

Alan Marshall AM, (2 May 1902 – 21 January 1984) was an Australian writer, story teller, humanist and social documenter.