Illustrator Robert Ingpen gives a fresh perspective to some literary classics, writes Jodie Minus

Poppykettles and Other Tales

It's just midway through our conversation and illustrator Robert Ingpen sounds distracted. Could he be drawing something while he's on the phone? "Well, I am actually," he says sheepishly. "How did you know? I'm drawing the tail of a monkey and Mowgli is reaching up to the monkey who is climbing through a tree. Mowgli is sort of introducing himself or talking to the monkey.
"All right," he says like a child admonished, "I'll put down the pen."

Ingpen, 69, doesn't like giving interviews but he has always liked to make "pictures telling stories". It began with drawings on the walls of his parents' home in Geelong, Victoria, in the 1940s and has spread to encompass more than 100 published books.

The sketch of Mowgli and the monkey is for Bath-based British book packager Palazzo Editions (published here by Walker Books), for which Ingpen is breathing life into old classics with his fresh illustrations. The series, which he sees as an "important issue of conservation" because it keeps the books in print, includes Peter Pan and Treasure Island; The Jungle Book will be published next month and The Wind in the Willows next year.

To illustrate stories that are familiar to generations and are designed to appeal to new readers, Ingpen employs cinematographic techniques, which are familiar to today's children, while also taking into account the period in which the story was written. His illustrations for Peter Pan and Treasure Island have a "sort of furry woolliness and a feyness, which gives you a dating without making it look too old-fashioned".

It shouldn't be surprising that a British publisher is employing an Australian to illustrate a series that will be published in a dozen different countries and languages. And Ingpen is eminently well qualified. After graduating from RMIT with a diploma in art and design in 1958, he spent 10 years working for CSIRO as a communications designer. He took scientific research in primary industries and translated it into straightforward words and pictures for farmers. The job taught him to think like a scientist in his approach to drawing and allowed him to "get rid of the baggage that artists and writers often carry around about things being difficult and unable to be resolved. That doesn’t happen if you do your thinking first."

When CSIRO moved to Canberra, Ingpen and his wife Angela stayed in Melbourne and, apart from some casual work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, he says he has been "unemployed ever since".

As a freelance illustrator, his first book job — "150 books ago" — was Cohn Thiele's 1974 award-winning novel Storm Boy, set in the Coorong in South Australia.

From what he can recall, "I must have liked it because it was written in a geographical situation I was very familiar with. So it was like being asked to draw a picture of the backyard."

Since then he has illustrated the works of some of the world’s best authors, including Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen ("I got the bloody duck," he says in reference to The Ugly Duckling); he has also designed the Northern Territory’s flag and coat of arms, stamps for Australian Post and even a tapestry for the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

In 1986, he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for illustration (the equivalent of a Nobel prize in the world of kids' lit), becoming the only Australian illustrator to have received this accolade.

His favourite achievement, however, is a book he wrote and illustrated in 1980. The Voyage of the Poppykettle is about a group of hairy Peruvians who set out to discover Australia aboard an oversized kettle, and although the book has long been out of print in Australia, Poppykettle Day has been celebrated in Geelong for the past 25 years. "Fifteen thousand children are bussed in to perform, act and display their creative and imaginative talents, and it’s their initiative (rather than that of) teachers, parents or grandparents." he says.

"I feel proud that without knowing what I was doing, I put together a story that now lives outside the book and is referred to in ways that have nothing to do with me or the characters in the story, just that Poppykettle is synonymous with imagination. And that is the business of making pictures that tell stories: you shouldn’t impose yourself at any point.

"It is not like the artist who is able to be found in their paintings just by looking at it the illustrator cannot be too obvious."

Jodie Minus is the children's books reviewer for The Australian.