New edition in Blackman family’s wonderland tradition

The artist and musician shows us her new children’s book and five-month-old son, Rumi.

Bertie Blackman and son Rumi at home in Sydney with her just-released children’s picture book, Mica the Star Sailor. Picture: John Feder

Bertie Blackman grew up around the wide-eyed figures that populate her father Charles Blackman’s paintings, so it was perhaps inevitable that such a depiction of innocent wonder would turn up in her own work, too.

Already a noted singer-songwriter and artist, Blackman has written and illustrated a book for children called Mica the Star Sailor about a girl astronaut who is based on herself.

Charles Blackman, who died in 2018, was renowned for his Alice series of pictures that depict a topsy-turvy wonderland; his daughter Bertie grew up being familiar with these and other paintings “looking at me, me looking at them”.

“It’s funny, I talk to children of other famous painters, and you live in the shadow of the paintings,” she said.

“And if you take up the practice yourself, it’s part of who you are — the way you express and practise art, there are going to be similar themes. I’m embracing that, too.”

Blackman completed the illustrations for Mica the Star Sailor when she was pregnant with her son Rumi, who is now five months.

Both baby and book were well on the way earlier this year, and Blackman worked on the drawings at the dining table of her apartment in inner Sydney.

“When I had the final draft of the manuscript done, I was due in about six weeks,” she said.

“So I did the illustrations in the last five weeks before I gave birth.

“I’d done so many different versions of them, so it was sitting down at the table with my big pregnant belly and going for it, and working around it.

“The words in it, and the scratching of the pen, is part of his (Rumi’s) being in some way.”

In the book, illustrated in blue tones, Mica has adventures with a giant fish, a squadron of bright red planes, and with creatures in a rainforest.

She is missing her father, who is an astronaut and often far away.

Blackman said Mica was based on herself when she was a child,

She was brought up by her mother, Genevieve, and sometimes did not see her father.

“Mum and Dad separated when I was little, and there were times when he wasn’t around a lot, and I would miss him,” she said.

“It’s like any child — if you have a parent who works late hours, or maybe you only see them once a year.”

With Mica the Star Sailor to be published by Affirm Press Kids on Tuesday, Blackman said she was working on other children’s books about fantastical creatures that try to find their own place in the world.