-= Story =-

Blinky was born in 1933, when Dorothy Wall, a New Zealand artist who had come to Sydney at the age of 20 to seek her fortune, first published Blinky Bill, the Quaint Little Australian. It was an immediate hit, and this book and her subsequent stories have remained continually in print.

Though essentially entertainments, her tales were threaded with subtle lessons in the virtues. That was typical of the books of her day. It was part of the normal order of things: if you wrote children’s books, you provided moral guidance to help nurture the character development of your young readers.

By 1994, when he made his Australian television debut, Blinky had become a post-modern koala, less concerned with virtue than with cracking jokes and, occasionally, with the fashionable issues of the day. And as youngsters increasingly got their values from television it was a disturbing trend, especially as Blinky was actually one of the best kids’ programmes around.

The programme was a production of the award-winning animation house Yoram Gross Film Studios. It was excellent viewing, and whenever I watched episodes while researching this book I quickly found an audience gathering - of my three sons. The stories were bright and amusing (and non-violent), the graphics were vivid and the music lively.

The show was a major export success for Australia, with viewers in more than 80 countries. It seems many Europeans, in particular, went nuts over the programme. Some German department stores gave over whole floors to Blinky Bill merchandise. At one time you could type “Blinky Bill” into an Internet search engine and be rewarded with links to an extraordinary number of Scandinavian-language websites.

The programme, like the original book, was simply a product of its times. It was intended to entertain, and succeeded brilliantly. Messages were presented – such as a plea for conservation, or a thrust against unscrupulous land developers - but they were low-key and were woven seamlessly into the plot. (This was in contrast to the original Dorothy Wall writings. She presented conservation messages in some of her fables, but at times did so in a clumsy manner that worked against the story line.)