"The Magic Pudding is a pie, except when it’s something else, like a steak, or a jam donut, or an apple dumpling, or whatever its owner wants it to be. And it never runs out. No matter how many slices you cut, there’s always something left over. It’s magic.
But the Magic Pudding is also alive. It walks and it talks and it’s got a personality like no other. A meaner, sulkier, snider, snarlinger Pudding you’ve never met.
So Bunyip Bluegum (the koala bear) finds out when he joins Barnacle Bill (the sailor) and Sam Sawnoff (the penguin bold) as members of the Noble Society of Pudding Owners, whose “members are required to wander along the roads, indulgin’ in conversation, song and story, and eatin’ at regular intervals from the Pudding.”
Wild and woolly, funny and outrageously fun, The Magic Pudding stands somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and The Stinky Cheese Man as one of the craziest books ever written for young readers."
[That's a quote from the product description but I suspect it derives from an earlier preface]
Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) [W] wrote 'The Magic Pudding' in 1918 to settle an argument with a friend who claimed that children only liked to read about fairies. Lindsay insisted that they liked to read about food. The author of several novels, Lindsay was also a caricaturist, painter, sculptor and sketch artist, renowned in Australia and beyond.
This book became something of an accidental, or reluctant, local classic, considering that its author had little regard for it. Lindsay described it as his "little bundle of piffle" and believed that it held him back from becoming a serious writer.
In its original incarnation, 'The Magic Pudding' was an expensive, limited edition art book, featuring a large selection of illustrations from the more than one hundred pencil, ink and watercolour sketches that Lindsay had prepared for it. But he was opposed to the high cost of the publication:
"I wouldn’t have minded if it had come out as a kids’ book, to be sold at a price that would allow the kid to tear it up with a clear conscience".
- 'The Magic Pudding' illustrations above come from a twenty five year old copy and the B&W lithographs (out of order) were difficult to scan because of the shiny page finish.
- The original cover can be seen below, and the title page gave 'The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff' as the book's full name.
- 'The Magic Pudding' is in-print and available from Amazon.
- A few book characters, painted in watercolour in the 1950s by Lindsay, can be seen at the State Library of NSW site {presumably he came to like the characters in his dotage}.
- Wikipedia: Norman Lindsay & 'The Magic Pudding'.
- A feature (cartoon) film was made in 2000 but was not successful (despite the vocal presence of Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neil and John Cleese); excerpts can be found at Youtube.
- 'The Magic Pudding' in full at: Wikisource and Project Gutenberg.
- Previously: kids; australia; australia AND kids.
For anyone who doesn't know, Will Schofield (from A Journey Round My Skull fame and glory) has moved to more salubrious digs, with a much-easier-to-type site name: 50 Watts. Bookmark it / share it, but don't ignore it.