Pup Publishing

A Sapphire Coast collaboration commemorates the Black Summer bushfires in a new illustrated children’s book, that adults will love too.

 

The Tale of the Singleton Pup tells the story of a small pup with a big heart. Bella is a rescue pup from Singleton who finds a loving family in a tiny bush town. At eight weeks old she is lanky, carefree and endlessly playful, until the bushfires come roaring towards her new home.

 

Told in verse that salutes the bush poets and with illustrations rendered in lush detail, it is evocative of a time that still haunts many. Yet it manages to journey through the terrifying chaos to the other side.

 

‘Belinda and I were very conscious that if we were going to take people, and especially children, back to that time, we had to bring them out again, safely,’ said author Helen Lewis.

 

The first few lines of the poem came to her while she was in evacuation at the Tura Beach Country Club, who made their premises available to people and their pets. She made a note of them on her phone.

‘Bella was eight weeks old and I had only had her for five days. We had collected her from Singleton and here we were moving her again. She took it all in her stride, she was amazingly resilient and I think she kept me grounded.’.

A chance meeting with Belinda Rosenbaum just after the bushfire emergency had been declared over and the pandemic had begun, kicked off their collaboration. "I remember vividly the feelings I had when first reading Helen's words, I was flooded at once with imagery and knew I was on the hook and needed to be the visual storyteller of this gorgeous little pup's tale."

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Helen Lewis is a writer, editor and researcher who was born in England and moved to Australia when she was twenty-one. She now lives on a rural property in the Eden hinterland where she writes and gardens. Her biography-memoir, The Dead Still Cry Out: the story of a combat cameraman, won the 2018 NiB Literary Award for excellence in research and writing and was shortlisted for the NiB Military History
prize.

 

Belinda Rosenbaum is a mixed media artist and illustrator living in Merimbula. Always inspired by the natural world, her artworks are richly layered, whimsical and day-dreamy,
often an assemblage of hand and digital work.

 

The Tale of the Singleton Pup published by Pup Publishing is
available through bookshops and John Reed Books sales@johnreedbooks.com.au