James Hume-Cook

Born in Kihikihi, New Zealand, in 1866, he moved to Australia as a teenager and built an unusually varied career. Before and alongside his writing, he worked in business and public life, eventually serving in Victorian and federal politics, including a period in the first Australian Parliament.

As a writer, he published under the name James Hume-Cook and is especially remembered for Australian Fairy Tales, first published in 1925. The book recast fairy-story traditions in an Australian landscape, with illustrations by Christian Yandell Waller, giving young readers magical adventures rooted in local imagery rather than imported European settings.

That mix of civic energy and imagination makes him an interesting figure in early Australian culture: a politician, promoter, and storyteller whose children’s fiction helped give Australian fantasy a voice of its own. He died in 1942 in Victoria.