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ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 40 | August 1999


The collections

Collecting the cuddlies

Australia’s native fauna has always been a popular topic for authors and illustrators of books for juvenile readers. They can be the cute and cuddly variety such as koalas, or the athletic kind such as kangaroos. The fascination with these unusual marsupials is even stronger for young readers in overseas countries, as demonstrated by recent retrospective acquisitions.

One of the earliest descriptions of kangaroos for the American juvenile market occurred in a miniature book The Sailor Boy and Other Stories published in New York in 1855. A potpourri of very short stories, ‘The kangaroo’ is one of those dealing with exotic sights, along with ‘Snake charmers’ and ‘Indians fishing’.

Paul Kaloda's cover of Kankie Kangaroo

Nearly a century later, the young reader was being enticed by a book in the shape of a kangaroo complete with a joey popping out of the pouch. Kankie Kangaroo…Who Couldn’t Hop is a story by Roselle Ross, with illustrations by Charles E. Bracker that owe a considerable debt to the Disney style of cartoons. Published in New York in 1945, the book has an interesting cutout cover of a kangaroo and her joey by Paul Kaloda. This book was not previously recorded in the standard Australian bibliographies. A sensitive, educational approach is taken by Margaret Wise Brown in Young Kangaroo, describing the animal’s young life cycle. Illustrated by Symeon Shimin, the copy is a variant edition published in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1955.

Koalas feature in no less than four overseas imprints recently acquired. Expatriate Australian author and illustrator Sheila Hawkins published Little Gray ‘Colo’: The Adventures of a Koala Bear in 1939 in New York. The Library previously held only a reprint of this work but recently acquired a copy of the first edition.

The Adventures of Wonk, by British author Muriel Levy (tenth edition, London, 1951), features a koala called Wonk who is involved in two adventures with a young boy, Peter. In Koala Bear Twins (New York, 1955) American author and illustrator Inez Hogan has her marsupial family meet a whole range of Australian animals in a book noted for its sensitive drawings. The same could not be said for Kirby Koala (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1983), a ‘shape’ book in which the koala is transmogrified into an anonymous bear-like apparition with a lollipop.

Such a variety of representations of native Australian fauna enriches further the large collection of Australian juvenile literature in the National Library.

Above: Paul Kaloda's cover of Kankie Kangaroo—Who Couldn't Hop, written by Roselle Ross ( New York: Maxton Publishers, c.1945)


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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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