It’s one of Australia’s most-loved and well-known children’s books, a true classic of wit, whimsy and extraordinary art work. It has subtle, sly digs at the mores of a newly-born Australia, and a ribald sense of humour. It’s also violent, subversive and overtly anti-Semitic.
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The Magic Pudding is 100-years-old. First published by the Creswick-born genius Norman Lindsay in 1918, it’s never been out of print. Made into a puppet show by the Marionette Theatre of Australia (1960, brilliant); an opera by the Victorian Opera (2013, not too bad); a film (2000, with John Cleese, Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neill, dreadful), it’s a staple of many a childhood reading odyssey.
And what an odyssey it is, replete with sailors, magic, villains and a perilous journey.
'Of course,' said Sam modestly, 'the song goes too far in sayin' as how I married the Hearl's niece, because, for one thing, I ain't a marryin' man, and for another thing, what she really sez to me when we got to land was, "You're a noble feller, an' here's five shillin's for you, and any time you happen to be round our way, just give a ring at the servants' bell, and there'll always be a feed waitin' for you."
- Sam Sawnoff, The Magic Pudding
The adventures of Bunyip Bluegum, a koala; the sailor Bill Barnacle; and Sam Sawnoff his offsider and a feisty penguin, in trying to protect their prized possession, an irascible, aggressive, rude and petulant never-ending Magic Pudding, from being stolen by nefarious ‘puddin thieves’ involves travel across the Australian countryside, much singing, bragging, doggerel and fighting.
And there is an enormous amount of fighting. Characters are beaten with a port bottle (by a bewigged judge, no less), there is the suggestion early that Bill and Sam have murdered the ship’s cook they are stuck on an ice floe with; another thief is blown to smithereens. There are fistfights aplenty, kidnappings and an amazing number of threats of physical violence, accompanied by some savage name-calling.
So where did this amazing, Rabelaisian, unashamedly Australian story spring from? The story goes that an argument between Norman Lindsay, already a rising and controversial star of the art and literature world in the newly-federated nation; and Bertram Stevens, the art critic, editor, and essentially conservative visionary who was responsible nevertheless for publishing much early Australian work, including Lindsay’s.
Disputing over what made a good children’s work, Stevens argued the status quo of fairy tales was what their imaginations sought, delivering children into a world of witches and evil stepsisters, the European darknesses already familiar to them.
Lindsay disagreed. Always the fervent nationalist, he believed children loved two things above anything else: food and fighting. And with the characteristic aplomb of a genius who believed in his own ability, he duly set out to write exactly that. The Magic Pudding was the result. A roman a clef of four chapters (called ‘slices’ by the author), it’s a simple tale. Gang of friends lose a magic pudding to thieves, regain it; lose it again; regain it; end up in court over custody. They triumph in the end, and retire to a tree house.
It’s purposefully, unashamedly, unmistakably Australian. Aside from the anthropomorphic wildlife, the language rejoices in the cadences of a new country. Cue this exchange between Barnacle Bill and a rather cranky kookaburra he’s accused of pudding stealing:
'Never mind,' said Bill. 'I'm starin' at you for a good an' sufficient reason.'
'Are yer?' said the Kookaburra. 'Well, all I can say is that if yer don't take yer dial outer the road I'll bloomin' well take an' bounce a gibber off yer crust,' and he followed them for quite a long way, singing out insulting things such as, 'You with the wire whiskers,' and 'Get onter the bloke with the face fringe.'
The voice is distinctly, precisely, clearly Antipodean, slang-ridden and unbridled of affectation. It’s the same of the entire book, even when it assumes the heights of mock affectation or the hilarious brilliance of Bill’s ballad about Sawnoff Sam, The Penguin Bride, wherein Sam rescues a drowning ‘Hearl’ and his niece when their ship The Saucy Soup Tureen sinks, and is rewarded for his bravery by marrying the aristocrat’s beautiful niece.
Above all, there’s much of Lindsay’s own childhood in the work. Born in Creswick in 1879, the son of a well-off doctor and one of a family of talented artists, he would have been acutely aware of the swagmen and former miners milling through the former mining town.
Bunyip Bluegum’s Uncle Wattleberry is a fine bewhiskered koala who bears a close resemblance to Lindsay’s own father Robert in his black frock coat and topper, as would befit a town’s surgeon. The pudding thieves, a ne’er-do-well possum and wombat, were regarded as pests in everyday life by the townsfolk, but they are also portrayed as vagabonds, insidiously sharpening their knives on a grinding wheel in preparation for their next crime.
This reveals some of the problematic aspects of Lindsay’s writing, brilliant and funny as it is. A line often cut from The Magic Pudding is the Judge’s caustic reference to his Usher as ‘an unmitigated Jew’ while he assaults him with the bottle of port he’s been imbibing from in court. The pudding-snatchers are barely hidden stereotypes of Gypsies, who were widely mistrusted in Australia.
Lindsay was a regular correspondent and artist for The Bulletin, a magazine widely influential in Australia at the turn of the 20th Century. It described its bias as ‘offensively Australian’ and its banner was ‘Australia for the white man’. And Lindsay was no left-wing darling. He had lost his beloved younger brother Reginald on the Western Front in 1917; he proudly advocated for conscription and drew posters depicting Australia’s enemies in the war as bloodthirsty subhumans.
The Magic Pudding is a work of genius, deservedly long-lived and widely-read. It’s a work of its time as well, and bears the imprint of its mercurial creator, a man who was the source of scandal all his long life.
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