China Miéville’s excellent essay on whether racially problematic literature of the past needs to be put in context and how asking for that to be done isn’t the same as calling for censorship makes me recall when I encountered the Australian children’s classic The Magic Pudding … and how it caused me to wince.

Irene and I visited Australia for the first time in 2003, and while wandering Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, we came across this whimsical statue.

We had no idea who any of these characters were, nor why they were deserving of such celebration. We struck up a conversation with another couple nearby, and soon learned that the quartet was from the Norman Lindsay book The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff, which Australians consider a work on par with Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. So I of course had to track down a copy before we left the country.

Not that there was much “tracking” involved, because it was indeed such an important book in Australia that copies were in every bookshop and department store. So that afternoon, I saw the illustration which had inspired the statue.

I saved the book to read on our flight home, and it was wonderful, all about a koala named Bunyip Bluegum, a sailor named Bill Barnacle, a penguin named Sam Sawnoff, and a grumpy magic pudding named Albert—magic because no matter how much you’d eat him, he’d always still be there, whole, apparently infinite, walking around with extruded arms and legs and a pot on his head.

Anyway, the adventures the four have are marvelous and magical, and I was smiling and chuckling away on my flight—until I got to the part where my chuckling stopped. (more…)