Cecilia May Gibbs was 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 Sydenham, Kent, in England. She migrated with her family to Australia when she was four years old, settling in Perth. After two journeys back to England to pursue her artistic interests, May finally settled in Sydney, Australia in 1913. Here she designed covers for magazines, provided illustrations, designed postcards and published the first of her gumnut books, Gumnut Babies.  Following her marriage in 1919 to mining agent, James Ossili Kelly, the couple moved into Nutcote, the house designed for them by architect BJ Waterhouse in Neutral Bay, on the shores of Sydney Harbour, in 1925.

May continued her career as an author and illustrator, writing numerous other stories and publishing her popular weekly comic strips Bib and Bub andTiggy Touchwood for many years.Her work remained extremely popular. After the death of her husband in 1939, she lived on at Nutcote with her dogs, (mainly Scottish terriers), publishing her last book in Prince Dande Lion in 1953.  She died childless in 1969, leaving her estate to UNICEF, the Spastic Centre of NSW and the NSW Society for Crippled Children (now the Northcott Society).

Sources: ‘May Gibbs:Mother of the Gumnuts’ Maureen Walsh Sydney University Press 2007

Australian Dictionary of Biography Online edition