Sydney Wakefield, a farmer from New South Wales, is best known for his Bottersnikes and Gumbles series of children's books, all illustrated by Desmond Digby (q.v.).
Wakefield was born on the day his parents arrived in Australia as English immigrants. They lived for three years on an orchard near Griffith, New South Wales. Wakefield's mother died when he was six months old and his father returned to England and took up farming in Oxfordshire. Wakefield enlisted in the army in 1945, aged seventeen, and was commissioned into the 2nd Punjab regiment of the Indian Army.
After the war, Wakefield joined his father, who had returned to Australia and established an orchard near Gosford, New South Wales. He enrolled in a social studies course at Sydney University between 1949-1950, married in 1953 and established a mixed farm at Kariong near Gosford. He wrote stories about the fat, lazy Bottersnikes and the giggling Gumbles, initially for his own children. The Bottersnikes and Gumbles stories are full of absurd situations, humour and puns, and they overlay a respect for the environment.
