You can thank nostalgia for my choice of book this time. It
is an Australian classic, though not one I recall from my childhood. My
nostalgia was not for The Bunyip of
Berkeley’s Creek, but for another Australian icon: Play School. The show is celebrating its 50th anniversary this
year. What memories: John Hamblin, Benita Collings, Noni Hazelhurst, Don
Spencer, John Waters. My favourite was Alister Smart, a moustachioed Aussie
bloke who reminded me of my Dad.
I don’t know what five-year-old me would have made of Tim
Minchin. We didn’t get many men who looked like him in a dairy-farming town in
the 1980s. Then again, I was obsessed with Carlton and he has long hair like
Tommy Alvin and the beard of Robert Walls, so I’d probably have liked him. What
I can say with certainty is that Heidi and I enjoyed having Tim read us The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek on Play School Celebrity Covers recently.
Just a few weeks earlier I had read the story to Heidi,
and found myself rather indifferent to it. I got the message, but felt detached
from it. But sometimes it’s in the way you tell them, and Tim told it perfectly:
a little brooding, a lot of empathy, a certain amount of gravitas. That is one
of the delights of Play School’s
story time: every storyteller has their own unique style. The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek is a story of self-discovery, of not
being confined by the perceptions of others. In other words, perfect for Tim
Minchin.
To summarise: a creature emerges from the black mud of a
creek. As it scrapes off the mud it asks itself: “What am I?” As quick as Cary
Young buzzing in to answer the same question of Tony Barber, a platypus answers:
“You are a bunyip”. The bunyip goes around asking other animals what he looks
like. “Horrible,” says a wallaby. “Horrible,” says an emu.
The bunyip finds a man, a scientist of sorts, who tells
him that bunyips don’t look like anything because bunyips simply don’t exist. At
first the man doesn’t even look up from his notebook, where a bunyip is existing
right there in front of him. But like a typical stubborn human being, the man
knows what he knows, and won’t be told otherwise.
But the bunyip remains cheerfully optimistic. He goes off
someplace quiet where he can be as handsome as he likes, on his own, away from those
who will only bring him down. He looks at himself with a little mirror – an obvious
metaphor for finding oneself instead of relying on the opinions of others – and
seems happy enough. He’s even happier when a lady bunyip emerges from the swamp,
and he shares his mirror with her.
Though it wasn’t familiar to me, The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek was a collaboration between the same
author and illustrator who created one of my childhood favourites: John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. Author
Jenny Wagner wrote the story, with all its existential angst, and illustrator Ron
Brooks added his earthy style, creating an atmosphere distinctly Australian but
not clichéd. As a result, the book feels timeless.
And yet it was very much of a time. Published in 1973, Bunyip came out shortly after the
progressive Gough Whitlam was elected Australia’s new prime minister, ending 23
years of conservative rule. The bunyip’s “What am I?” refrain struck a chord
with Brooks, who sensed the entire country collectively asking a similar
question. As a result, the tall and imposing Whitlam was one of the models
Brooks used to design his bunyip.
The other was a fascinating individual named Haworth
Bartram. You’re unlikely to have heard of Haworth Bartram, so let me fill you
in. His name was familiar to me from researching an upcoming blog entry on a
curious Australian book called Monty Mouse Looks for
Adventure. What makes it so peculiar is that the illustrations are
not drawings but photographs – photographs of a taxidermied mouse posed in
various ways to fit the story.
Haworth Bartram was the photographer. Not only that, he
was the publisher. A very wealthy former importer who never married and lived
with his elderly mother in Heidelberg, Bartram was a keen photographer who
believed that illustrating books with drawings was old-fashioned, and photos
were the way of the future. So he started a photography studio/publishing
company called Childerset, more or less to produce his own work.
And Jenny Wagner worked for him as project director. So
when Wagner wrote The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek and took it
to Bartram, he realised photographs wouldn’t work. Bunyips, despite the message
of Wagner’s text, do not exist. So Brooks was brought in, but struggled at
first to work out how his bunyip should look. Eventually he modelled it on
Bartram. And here is how Brooks, in his fascinating memoir Drawn from
the Heart, described Bartram:
Well over six feet tall, with a large
equatorial circumference, he resembled nothing so much as a balloon, one of
those pear-shaped water balloons you drop from the verandah roof onto some
unsuspecting little brother or sister ... Not much neck to speak of ... And
because he had no waist, he wore braces – over the shoulders, crossed at the
back and clipped to his pants to hold them up.
Haworth Bartram sounds like a very odd individual indeed –
Brooks describes the way he rarely saw Bartram consume anything other than
Arnott’s Scotch Finger biscuits and bottles of orange Fanta. And much as I
would like to see a photo of him, the only one I can find online is a grainy digitised newspaper picture of him as a young boy. Further googling reveals
that he died in 1985 at the age of 62.
But Brooks’ description of him sounds very much like the
bunyip star of our book – although because Brooks was nervous about making his
bunyip too much like Bartram, he threw in a little bit of
Whitlam as well. In any case, the end result was a character that has charmed
generations of Australian children.
As an illustrator, Brooks certainly has a characteristic
style, featuring lots of cross-hatching and linework to create the appearance
of texture. And as an author, Wagner too is distinctive, dealing with questions
of existence, identity and prejudice, and layering her work with symbolism that
adults might understand, while children will just enjoy a good story.
Symbolism features heavily in John Brown, Rose
and the Midnight Cat, which will also appear on DadReads in the future.
It remains a childhood favourite of mine – like Play School.
For me, The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek is in a different
category, but I can understand why those who read it as children may love it. And
I’m prepared to have it on medium rotation for Heidi’s story time.
A personal post-script to finish: my mother-in-law (Heidi’s
grandmother Margaret) knew Ron Brooks back in the 1970s, when they lived near
each other in Warrandyte in Melbourne’s outer north-east. Margaret was a Prep
teacher at Warrandyte Primary School and had in her class Ron’s step-daughter Miche;
Ron would often come in for story-time with the children. Here is the inscription
from a copy of The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek gifted to
Margaret by Ron, 41 years ago.
