This year marks the centenary of The Magic Pudding, the classic Australian children’s book crafted by Normal Lindsay on a bet. But there’s much more to be discovered about the writer and illustrator at Springwood. His stone cottage in the Blue Mountains hosts the Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum. Angus Dalton visits Lindsay’s home on the centenary of his most famous work.
At the top of the drive leading to the home of writer and artist Norman Lindsay stands a naked woman. Behind her squats a figure. With stout goat legs, a man’s torso, and horns, which curl tight against his head above a curling grin. He reaches towards the woman with fingers splayed as if to squeeze her smooth stone buttock. This bizarre, playful scene might have captured my attention longer if it wasn’t diverted immediately to another spectacle nearby. A mermaid spurting water from her lips up into the air astride a seahorse. Not the tiny, spindly kind, but an actual hoofed horse, with a tossing mane and a sail-like fin running along its back.
