The Muddle-Headed Wombat by Ruth Park with illustrations by Noela Young
Published by Angus & Robertson
Pp. 225
This
Australian children’s classic is an utterly delightful tale of a wombat and his
adventures with Mouse and Tabby, his second-best friend. The animals live in a
little house at the edge of Big Bush which is “green and quiet and airy, and
the right place for animals to live.” They go to school, visit the circus, have
holidays by the sea and build a treehouse that collapses in a storm. Frequent
squabbles punctuate their escapades, as they have many differences, but they
always make up as they realise the value of friendship.
Wombat
is muddle-headed because he is a Wombat. He mixes up words and can’t count past
four – “He runs out of paws, that’s the trouble” – but he likes to be helpful
although his favoured solution to a problem is to sit on things. He is thrilled
to be going to school where “We’re going to learn things like four and eight
make eleventy one and C O W spells cat, and things like that.” Similar to Pooh
Bear he is not bright although he has inimitable logic, such as when he eats a
packet of chalk but not the green because “it might taste like spinach and I
don’t like spinach.” He is good at digging and seeing in the dark and is very
loyal and loves his friends, which in turn makes him loveable.
Mouse
is fastidious and house proud, always cleaning things, preparing meals
(pancakes for Tabby; snails for Wombat; and mosquitoes for itself) and
polishing its spectacles. Referred to throughout as ‘it’, Mouse is gender
neutral, although this was written in 1962 and Mouse carries its long tail
“over its arm as though it were the train on an evening dress” so is possibly
meant to be female. Mouse is also sentimental and cares for things and people,
particularly the grey tabby cat whom it adopts because “He was skinny and
miserable and he had a peaky little face with big ears. He wore a bright red
bow tie, but anyone could see it hadn’t been washed and ironed for weeks.”
Like
many cats, Tabby is vain and thinks he is handsome, while he also claims to be
frail and delicate, mainly to get out of hard work. He is very good at building
things, however, such as a caravan and a treehouse and is also remarkably
resilient, surviving being sucked into a carpet cleaner, dropped from a great
height while performing as a puppet, and accidentally shaken into a stream, not
to mention being sat on by Wombat who thinks “if he were sat on once or twice,
and flattened out like a bookmark, it would do him the world of good.”
Noela
Young’s charming illustrations add to the humour of the stories and caricature
the animals highlighting their best and worst traits. They regard themselves as
a family and they constantly attempt to adapt to living with each other while
retaining their individuality. The tales are equally diverting and reassuring
and were loved by both the adults and the children at holiday story-time.
