Bunyip Bluegum

Bunyip Bluegum was a fine, round, splendid, well-bred young fellow. Compelled to leave home by the size of his uncle’s whiskers, he set off to see the world. In his rush to leave, he overlooked the issue of lunch. Fortunately, just as the pangs of hunger struck, he came upon two people – one a sailor, the other a penguin – in the act of eating a pudding. But this was no ordinary pudding. It was a cut-an’-come-again pudding, a pudding that positively cried out to be eaten. “Call him Albert when addressing him,” advised Sam Sawnoff, the penguin, for the pudding had a cranky temperament and a tendency to run away on its spindly legs. So begins Norman Lindsay’sThe Magic Pudding, published in December 1918. It was a critical success but a slow seller. A guinea was a lot to ask for a children’s book, however lavishly bound. But for Lindsay, then 38, the task of writing and illustrating a children’s storybook might well have served to distract him from a deep and recent personal grief.

For almost 20 years, Norman Lindsay had been the resident cartoonist and illustrator for the Bulletin, providing the editorial visuals for its race-based nationalism. And, when fresh cannon fodder was required during World War I, Lindsay provided the recruiters with a powerful propaganda tool in the form of virulent pro-conscription posters.