Ruth Park’s The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow, 1966. NAA: A1336, 68967

As Wombat of The Muddle-headed Wombat stories would put it, the Archives is ‘reely truly’ the custodian of some ‘terribubbly’ important treasures. And for Wombat, few things in the Archives’ collection could be quite so terribubbly precious as the copyright documents for Ruth Park’s famous The Muddle-headed Wombat series. Last December brought the first anniversary of the death of New Zealand-born Ruth Park (1917–2010), Wombat’s creator and of course a serious novelist too, perhaps most admired for her uncompromising The Harp in the South trilogy. Canberra writer Ian Warden takes a look at one of her books held in the Archives’ copyright collection – The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow. 

Before the Copyright Act 1968, anyone seeking copyright protection of their creations had to submit an application form to the Commonwealth’s Registrar of Copyrights. These files are now held by the Archives, and form a unique record of Australian creativity in fields such as film, literature and music. 

Wombat would note with approval that the Archives has the form with which in December 1966 Ruth Park Niland made her Application for Registration of Copyright for The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow. The Archives also has the copy of the book, illustrated by Noela Young, that had to accompany the application. 

Ruth Park’s Application for Registration of Copyright for The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow, 1966. NAA: A1336, 68967

The beginning of Wombat

Are you sitting comfortabubbly? Then I’ll begin by noting that although Wombat isn’t the most profound of Park’s literary creations, he is easily the best known. Generations of Australian children listened to his adventures (shared with his companions Mouse and the cat Tabby) on ABC Radio’s Children’s Session in the 1950s and 1960s. 

When that program closed in 1972, Park’s Muddle-headed Wombat books continued to appear. The books, starring the not very sensibubble but always well-meaning marsupial, have been translated into 10 languages. So elsewhere in the world Wombat is known by other names including Vombat, Battino, Woo and El Wombo. 

In her autobiography Fishing in the Styx (1993), Park declared her special affection for Wombat. She felt they’d been through so much together that he somehow ‘belonged in the family’. 

It was not only that the pittance the ABC paid for Wombat radio scripts was often the only sure source of family income for the perennially battling Park, her writer husband D’Arcy Niland and their children, but also that in Park’s words Wombat ‘had originated there [in the family] too’. 

‘[One day] one of my daughters said in the tragic tones of a four-year-old confronted with the hopeless, “I don’t think there’s anyone in the world I’m smarter than.” It occurred to me then that many tiny children may feel like that…So I thought, I’ll work out a character that any child is smarter than.’ 

Ruth Park, 1956. NAA: A1200, L21540

Wombat visits the snow

And so any small child reading or being read The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow is given lots of self-esteem-boosting reasons to feel the bewildered Wombat’s clear-thinking intellectual superior. 

The three comrades – Wombat, vain Tabby and excitabubble Mouse – forsake Big Bush to go for a holiday in the snow. Wombat, pedalling tirelessly with his sturdy legs, takes them there on his big red bicycle. 

Things get off to an unpromising start when Wombat muddle-headedly picks up and eats a small piece of wood, which turns out to be one of Mouse’s little skis. Wombat has never seen snow before and can’t understand why big snowflakes don’t make loud, clanging noises when they fall to earth. 

Then, in the ultimate proof that every small child is smarter than he is, the kind-hearted Wombat takes pity on the snowman on the freezing lawn outside their cottage and brings him in out of the cold and puts him to bed. ‘You come under the warm blankets with me and you’ll soon be comfortabubble, poor old snowman,’ Wombat croons to his big white friend. 

The next morning the snowman is gone. ‘Where did he go, Mouse?’ the perplexed (and inexplicably wet) Wombat marvels. 

Tabby, Wombat and Mouse from The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow, 1966. NAA: A1336, 68967

Strict deadlines

Although Wombat’s adventures are ‘light’ and carefree reading for us, many of them were composed by Park in stressful circumstances. She and D’Arcy Niland struggled, idealistically, to make livings from nothing but writing. To keep the family afloat she had to churn out Wombat’s adventures, for little money and to strict deadlines, however wretched life was. Once, with Niland gone bush to do research for a novel, she found herself alone in their dilapidated Sydney home with Wombat deadlines to meet and five ‘itching, blazing hot, miserable’ chicken-pox afflicted children to nurse. 

‘By day I anointed them with bicarbonate of soda; by night I shot out of a delirious sleep to answer the dread call, “Quick, I’m sick in the froat!!” In between times I wrote The Muddle-headed Wombat, carefully tailored to the talents of [the ABC’s] three contract actors, on the kitchen table where I could hear the imperious summons of both phone and sufferers.’