[QUEENSLAND; CHINESE IN AUSTRALIA] Ah Wong

New York, N.Y. : Printed … by the High Grade Press, 1943. “This edition of Ah Wong is limited to five hundred copies privately printed for the friends of the author as a Christmas greeting.” Octavo (190 mm), original printed blue wrappers (a little sunned at edges, a few faint marks), stapled; pp. 23; a very fine presentation copy, the limitation page inscribed and signed ‘Tania & Jimmy, with love – P. L. Travers’, and numbered ‘151’ in ms.

P. L. Travers (1899-1996), the Australian-born writer best known for the children’s classic Mary Poppins, spent her childhood growing up in Maryborough, Queensland, a major sugarcane centre. This obscure publication is a memoir of that time and place, and was privately printed for her circle of friends at Christmas 1943. In it, Travers recalls with affection Ah Wong, the Travers family’s Chinese cook.

‘I was ten when I first met him. The place was a sugar plantation in the tropics of Australia, and the day juts out like a promontory from the level lands of memory….’

Rare. Only two copies traced in Australian libraries (SLNSW; SLQ)