The Billabonga Bird

Melbourne : Whitcombe & Tombs, 1919. Quarto, illustrated card wrappers, string-bound (now perished, spine glued down, edges with expert paper repairs), contemporary bookplate to inside upper wrapper, 30 pp (lightly foxed, short edge tears), 3 tipped-in plates (2 colour, one monochrome), black and white line drawings.The adventures of an imaginary bird, a bush fairy and their bush-elf friends and other creatures, in rhyming verse. Muir 2698

One of Gaze’s most inventive, surreal and creative books, described by historian Juliet O’Conor as ‘Anthropomorphism with an extreme fantasy make over’ (Bottersnikes and other lost things : A celebration of Australian Illustrated Children’s Books, Melbourne 2009, p. 196, illustrated).

Harold Gaze was born in New Zealand and studied at art school in London during the First World War, after which he moved to Melbourne where he wrote and illustrated a number of books for children. He later returned to London and settled in Pasadena, California in 1927 where he resided until his death, working with Disney and continuing to publish. Many of the details of Gaze’s life have proven elusive to researchers but his unique and creative children’s stories and imagery remain delightful and sought after today.