The Muddle-Headed Wombat is a fictional wombat

Wombat

Wombats are Australian marsupials; they are short-legged, muscular quadrupeds, approximately in length with a short, stubby tail. They are adaptable in their habitat tolerances, and are found in forested, mountainous, and heathland areas of south-eastern Australia, including Tasmania, as well as...

 featured in the radio serials and later in the children's books of the same name written by Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n author Ruth Park

Ruth Park

Ruth Park, AM was a New Zealand-born author, who spent most of her life in Australia. Her best known works are the novels The Harp in the South and Playing Beatie Bow , and the children's radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat , which also spawned a book series .-Personal history:Park was born in...

.

History

In 1941 the Australian Broadcasting Commission

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...

 decided to nationalise its Children's programs

Argonauts Club

The Argonauts Club was an Australian children's radio program, first broadcast in 1933 on ABC Radio in Melbourne. Its format was devised by Nina Murdoch who had run the station's Children's Hour on 3LO and stayed on when that station was taken over by the Australian Broadcasting Commission...

, broadcast from Sydney with Ida Elizabeth Osbourne

Ida Elizabeth Osbourne

Ida Elizabeth Osbourne was an actor and broadcaster born in Brighton, Victoria, the only daughter of Mr and Mrs W. L. Osbourne and educated at Firbank Grammar School.-Career:...

 as its first producer. In 1942 she commissioned Ruth Park to write a dramatised series, The Wide–Awake Bunyip. The first episode was aired in January 1943, with "Joe" (Albert Collins

Albert Collins (painter)

Albert E. Collins was an Australian painter, teacher and actor born in New Zealand. After a successful career in painting and teaching he joined ABC radio, where he gave pleasure to a generation of children as "Joe" of the Children's Session and the main character in the long-running serial...

) in the title role. When he died, in 1951, Ruth changed the title to The Muddle–Headed Wombat, with Leonard Teale

Leonard Teale

Leonard Teale AO , born Leonard George Thiele in Brisbane, was a well-known Australian actor of radio, television and films....

 the first to play the part. When Leonard left, John Ewart

John Ewart

John Ewart was an Australian Film Institute award winning actor.-Career:Ewart was born in Melbourne. He began his acting career when he was cast at the age of four in a radio production of Snow White...

 "Jimmy" made it his for the next 20 years. The part of his friend "Mouse" in both incarnations was played by the current female co-presenter. When John Appleton

John Appleton

John Appleton was born in Beverly, Massachusetts and raised in Cumberland County, Maine, USA. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1834, also studied at Cambridge Law School, and was admitted to the Cumberland County bar in 1837, commencing practice in Portland, Maine.He also did editorial work on...

 was made Supervisor of Children's Programs and keen to be involved, the part of "Tabby Cat" was created for him. The narrator throughout was "Mac" (Atholl Fleming

Atholl Fleming

Atholl Fleming was a British actor and an Australian radio personality.He was the third of nine children of R. S. Fleming, a Scottish Baptist minister of Beckenham in Kent. After a fall as a child, he became deaf in his right ear...

). The popularity of the series (ending when the Children's Hour was cancelled in 1970) led Ruth Park to write her Muddle–Headed Wombat books.

Synopsis

The Muddle-Headed Wombat books follow the Muddle-Headed Wombat and his friends, a good-natured, practical female mouse and a vain, neurotic male tabby cat. The characters call each other simply Wombat, Mouse and Tabby.

Wombat's speech is peppered with malapropisms and spoonerism

Spoonerism

A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . It is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner , Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this tendency...

s, e.g. treely ruly for really and truly, lawn the mow for mow the lawn and Cindergorilla for Cinderella. He has a bicycle with red wheels, of which he is intensely proud and which he anthropomorphises

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is any attribution of human characteristics to animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organizations, governments, spirits or deities. The term was coined in the mid 1700s...

, e.g. complaining that it bit him when he accidentally injured himself trying to repair it.

Books

The Muddle Headed Wombat series of books was published from 1962 to 1971 by Educational Press Pty Ltd

,
who commissioned Ruth Park to write books based on the radio show. Noella Young illustrated these books.

In 1971 the rights were transferred to Angus and Robertson Pty Ltd, who commissioned the later books and reprinted those originally published by Educational Press.

• The Muddle-Headed Wombat 1962 (ISBN 0207167338)
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat on Holiday 1964
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat in the Treetops 1965
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat at School 1966
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat in the Snow 1966
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat on a Rainy Day 1969
• The Muddle Headed Wombat in the Springtime 1970
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat on the River 1970
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat and the Bush Band 1973
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat and the Invention 1975
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat on Clean-Up Day 1976
• The Adventures of the Muddle-Headed Wombat 1979
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat 1979, contains:

The Muddle-Headed Wombat

The Muddle-Headed Wombat on Holiday

The Muddle-Headed Wombat in the Treetops

The Muddle-Headed Wombat at School

• More Adventures of the Muddle-Headed Wombat 1980
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat is Very Bad 1981
• The Muddle-Headed Wombat Stays at Home 1982