Dot and the Kangaroo by PEDLEY, Ethel C - 1899

London: Thomas Burleigh, 1899. First Edition. Frank P. Mahony. The very rare first edition of this Australian children's classic. [Muir, 5913]
The story of Dot, the little girl lost in the Australian bush, who is helped by a kindly grey kangaroo, has become ‘a fundamental text of Australian children's literature' (People, Print and Paper, NAtional Library of Australia). It has rarely been out of print over the past century, appearing in innumerable editions, with illustrations by a variety of artists.
The author, Ethel Pedley, was an English-born music teacher and committed conservationist who lived in Sydney for many years. She died at the home of her friend Emmeline Woolley in Darlinghurst in 1898, and was buried at Waverley Cemetery. Before she died, Pedley had made arrangements for Bulletin artist Frank Mahony to illustrate the book. Mahony's depictions of the bush give an authentically Australian air to the publication, which although published in London was ‘entirely produced in Australia'. Quarto, bound in original cloth, frontispiece portrait, 19 plates, some foxing, stain on upper board, recased with inner hinges reinforced, endpapers embrowned, rear patterned endpaper with signs of tape removal, head and tail of spine restored, a very good copy withal.