Old fashioned dinki di Australians will view this book with mixed reactions indeed. For those of us conditioned in the popular culture of May Gibbs whose Mr and Mrs Koala featured in her ‘Bib and Bub’ drawings, Dorothy Wall’s koala ‘Blinky Bill’, and of course Norman Lindsay’s delightfully comic bear ‘Bill Bluegum’, will be decidedly startled by this latest anthropomorphic koala. For ‘Bear Dinkum’ is a nasty bear, the written and illustrated creation of Neil Curtis, a Londoner from West Ham.

No mainstream humor this. The book has been conceived as a ‘comedy’ but of a sort that ‘black’ does not quite define. Because of the author/artist’s preoccupation with cruelty, violence and destruction, some would agree ‘sick’ could well be the elusive definition.