May Gibbs – Beloved Australian Author and Illustrator

Cecilia May Gibbs is one of Australia’s foremost children’s authors and illustrators and is best known today for the iconic Australian children’s story, The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, featuring two gumnut babies and their escape from the big bad Banksia men.

May Gibbs was born on 17 January 1877 in Kent, England. Her parents, Herbert William Gibbs and her mother Cecilia Rogers migrated to Australia when May was only four years old, finally settling in Perth, WA.

When she was 23, May returned to England to pursue her art studies, coming back to Perth in 1904. Over the next five years, she wrote articles and provided illustrations and cartoons for the Western Mail newspaper before deciding to return to England in 1909. Here she continued her art studies, wrote articles, worked as an illustrator and drew cartoons for the Common Cause, a suffragette publication.

Gibbs returned to Australia in 1913, finally settling in Sydney, New South Wales. She earned her living by providing illustrations for the New South Wales Department of Public Instruction, contributing to “Lone Hand”, and designing covers for the Sydney Mail. In 1916 she published Gumnut Babies, the first of the Gumnut books. She also wrote other books, designed postcards to be sent to soldiers in World War One, and designed and sold book-marks, small calendars and other novelties with gumnut and blossom baby illustrations.

Her work was extremely popular, and her book, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, (1918) sold 17,000 copies on its first release, and has never been out of print.

In 1919 May married mining agent Bertram James Ossoli Kelly, and they built their home, Nutcote, on the shores of Neutral Bay, Sydney.

May continued her career as an author and illustrator, publishing Little Ragged Blossom (1920) and Little Obelia (1921). Her gumnuts, blossom babies and bad Banksia men were to delight generations of children. On 3 August 1924, her first Bib and Bub comic strip was published in the Sydney Sunday News, running until 1967.

After her husband died in 1939, Gibbs lived on at Nutcote with her dogs (usually Scottish terriers), and in 1955 she was appointed Member of the British Empire. May Gibbs died without having had children, in Sydney on 27 November 1969. She bequeathed all her papers and copyrights to the New South Wales Society for Crippled Children (now Northcott Disability Services) and the Spastic Centre of New South Wales (now the Cerebral Palsy Alliance) and the residue of her estate, valued for probate at £42,532, to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).

• Topics:

• People
• Arts and Media