(L-R: Kerry Koala, Blinky Bill, Angelina Wallaby, Walter Wombat)
Cute flashbacks down in the ABC foyer at the moment. Normally I’m rushing in and out of work for coffee/lunch/retrieving things I’ve left behind in cinemas/sneaking peeks at my favourite news anchor, but today my stroll out for a seaweed salad was almost leisurely and for the first time I noticed the Blinky Bill cabinets underneath all the big screens. Excuse the iPhone photos (you’d never know I own a whole bunch of other cameras, huh), but who knows when they’ll be rolled back into the aunty archives.
These are puppets from the 1984-1987 television series of The New Adventures of Blinky Bill, based on Dorothy Wall’s 1933 classic. The show was filmed in French’s Forest though I always thought it was in my own backyard. Here’s an episode where Blinky makes the ranger spill his beer (beer! on children’s television! increds). Note that the puppets are KNITTED! Not hard felt like I’d have imagined. The details are really quite beautiful, the mottled colours of the fur. I dig Kerry’s batik look too.