The Death of a Wombat

Ivan Smith was Features Writer-Producer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission when he wrote the radio script, The Death of a Wombat, which won so many international awards, including coveted Italia Prize.

The Death of a Wombat has been called many things: a profound allegorical statement of the human condition, a vivid and deeply moving word picture which sets a standard for imaginative feature writing. So superlatively is the story told, we feel terrible, urgent, personal sense of tragedy in the death of this animal.

Now published for the first time, The Death of a Wombat remains the same brilliantly imaginative ‘impression in words’, succeeding in being both detailed documentary and superb lyricism.

As the book could not be ‘illustrated’ in the usual sense of the word – it needed an artist who could paint his own allegorical poem, using The Death of a Wombat as his theme – the publisher decided to approach Clifton Pugh, who has such an enviable reputation in international art circles, believing that this great Australian bush painter would do justice to such an exacting task.

Clifton Pugh, excited by the challenge, created a magnificent art collection, The Death of a Wombat, comprising seventeen major oil paintings – fifteen of which are reproduced in colour in the text – and more than fifty etchings and line drawings, which must be hailed as a major event in the international and Australian art world.