When I was a small child, some of my favorite books featured two little blokes who could not have been dreamed of in any country but Australia.
I'd like to introduce you to Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, the most adorable characters in Australian children's literature*.
(They're the two in the front of the gumleaf-toboggan).
Gumnut** hats? Check.
Nuding it up with adorable blossom-skirted girlfriends? Check.
Riding down a gumtree branch on a gumleaf???!!! Check. They are Gumnut Babies, after all.
Although I admit I didn't remember them being quite so fat, Snugglepot & Cuddlepie are ovary-clenchingly adorable.
I would post a ton more pictures here, but I don't want to mess with copyright & stuff. Here is a pretty good site with some illustrations showing their dread enemy the Banksia Man, an adorable gumleaf house, the kangaroo cab-stand and so on.
The author, May Gibbs, did a fantastic job of weaving real Australiana into her stories.
This page, for instance, shows the Gumnut Babies looking at secondhand houses, which are actually cases which are really constructed by real grubs in Australia. We used to see them hanging off the outside walls of the house sometimes. I think the grubs cast off these cases and make new ones as they get bigger.
This page gets its inspiration from a tree called the scribbly-bark gum (here's a real one I found on Flickr). The scribbles on the bark are made by insect larvae burrowing between the layers of bark, but of course in the book, it's really the Gumnut Babies.
The stories might not carry as many levels of meaning for non-Australians, but they're still absolutely charming. I think it's partly because of the era they're from (the first book was published in 1918), but they still work today - they're just adorable and timeless.
*I won't say they're the most Australian, because even though they're totally Oz, they're no match for Albert the Magic Pudding, who will be the subject of a future post.
**For those of you unfamiliar with gumnuts, they are the hard woody fruit of the eucalyptus tree. They come in a few different shapes & sizes, but they're all sort of like little cups.
