Remembering May Gibbs
Dr Belle Alderman AM
Director, National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature Inc
Virginia Sandell

When I left America for Australia I brought with me a long-time interest in children’s books. Upon my arrival, I was given a collection of May Gibbs’ illustrated stories. What an amazing and inventive Aussie creator. Confession time! The big bad banksia men sent shivers down my spine. I adored the imminently lovable gumnut babies. But is the work of May Gibbs still of interest?

Our Centre holds a very large collection of May Gibbs’ books. Not long ago we acquired a four drawer filing cabinet of material on May Gibbs. Jane Brummitt, from Adelaide, is distantly related to May Gibbs. Jane became a collector of everything May Gibbs – ephemera like a May Gibbs letter opener, an apron, a doll, a cup and so much more. Jane scoured Australian libraries and research collections tracing the life of May Gibbs. She photocopied items along the way and filed them by year of publication. As happens such collections can become very large.

What should be done with these collections? Is anyone interested? One day, Jane asked whether our Centre would be interested in her collection. ‘Yes!’ I answered. The collection arrived in many boxes containing hanging folders each with a tab by year of publication. These filled a four drawer filing cabinet.

The absolutely lovely Tania McCarney, who has created a picture book biography of May Gibbs, offered to create a guide to this collection. This task took many months and ended up as a gigantic spreadsheet with intricate details of every. single. item.

Would anyone be interested in this collection?

Recently, I received a request from a PhD candidate, Virginia Sandell, whose research on Australian women cartoonists includes the cartoons of May Gibbs on women’s suffrage. Here’s what Virginia Sandell discovered in Jane Brummit’s four drawer filing cabinet of May Gibbs material housed at our Centre.

Virginia Sandell talks about her research on May Gibbs below

One of the difficulties in researching little-known figures from the past is they can be hard to find; often leaving few traces of their lives and work in libraries, archives or other repositories. Sometimes a brief mention in newspapers or a casual reference in other works opens new avenues to explore, but more often than not, leads to yet another dead end. And in researching early twentieth century Australian women cartoonists for my thesis there have been lots of dead ends!

So recently I was excited to come across the National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature (NCACL) and a treasure trove of files related to one of the women cartoonists I am researching — May Gibbs. While May Gibbs is widely known as the author and illustrator of much-loved children’s classic tales such as ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie’—still in print more than 100 years after it was first published in 1918 — she is seldom remembered as a cartoonist.

Indeed, few know that May Gibbs was a cartoonist at all. But Gibbs was one of Australia’s earliest cartooning women with her political cartoons appearing from 1902 under the pseudonym ‘Blob’ in the now long-forgotten Western Australian publication, the Social Kodak.

The May Gibbs collection at NCACL was compiled over many years by author and researcher Jane Brummitt and then archived for NCACL by Tania McCartney. It contains a wealth of materials which Jane sourced over the course of many years of her own research, and which she has generously donated to NCACL. Collections such as this are invaluable to future researchers and contribute to building richer and deeper understandings of the past.

The May Gibbs collection is contained in fifty-nine files with a detailed list of hundreds of items ranging over thirty-five pages. There are books, photographs, postcards, cards, posters, flyers, magazines and newspaper clippings, advertisements, copies of paintings and illustrations, cartoons, comic strips, letters and brochures, together with Brummitt’s handwritten or typed notes, emails, and a range of ‘ephemera’.

For my research, I was keen to concentrate on just seven files which covered Gibbs’ early life and work in Western Australia through to the end of the First World War in 1918. Included in these files are photocopies of Gibbs’ cartoon work in support of women’s suffrage in the UK in 1911 which were published in the Common Cause newspaper and in the Christian Commonwealth newspaper—the latter a publication which had proved difficult to trace and access, so it was great to find it here in the NCACL records. Also included in these files are Brummitt’s own notes about many of the issues and protagonists portrayed in May Gibbs’ cartoons.

Many thanks to Belle and her great team who warmly welcomed me to the NCACL, had a trolley full of my requested files ready and waiting for me, and made a comfortable space available for me to undertake my research over the two days I spent with them.

Virginia Sandell is a PhD candidate at the University of New England. Her PhD thesis examines the lives and work of some of Australia’s women cartoonists in the first half of the twentieth century.

 See also:
MAY GIBBS – Her Life, Work, and Nutcote
The Gumnut Legacy of May Gibbs – NCACL
NCACL’S May Gibbs Legacy Collection – NCACL a blog written by Tania McCartney
May Gibbs titles held in the NCACL collection

Posted by: NCACL | Published: 18 Aug 2026