Hairy Maclary leads creator to glory

By JO-MARIE BROWN

Hairy Maclary has achieved quite a lot since he first set out from Donaldson's Dairy.

And so has his creator, Lynley Dodd.

The best-selling author and illustrator has been made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours for services to children's literature.

Having created such memorable characters as the scruffy-haired Maclary, along with canine companions Hercules Morse, Bottomley Potts, Bitzer Maloney and Muffin McLay, Dodd has delighted millions of children worldwide with the group's antics.

"I never imagined it would take off like it has," she says.

The Maclary phenomenon began in 1983 when Dodd got a call from her publisher telling her to abandon the book she was working on as a similar one had been spotted overseas.

"'Think of something else quickly', she said to me. So I rushed upstairs to my ideas book and out fell this little bit of paper that I'd had for two years with this drawing of a dog and a bit of rhyme underneath.

"I got the story pretty well established in one day because I was in such a panic."

Dodd, who still has that piece of paper, has sold more than three million children's books worldwide, on the strength of singsong rhymes that just beg to be read aloud.

But holding a child's attention is anything but easy.

"It's hard to write for children. It's easy to add words but it's difficult to cut them right down to nothing."

Dodd became interested in art while growing up in a small forestry settlement near Taupo, and later taught the subject at a Wellington college.

"Art was my thing. The writing very much came second once I decided to do my own books, and it was very hard work."

Dodd credits her father with passing on a passion for "silly" words.

With no formal training as a writer, the 60-year-old says she is extremely self-critical of her work.

"I thought if I learned how to write I probably wouldn't do it at all. It's better not to know what I should be doing."

Among dozens of accolades, Dodd has won New Zealand's Picture Story Book of the Year Award four times. She receives a constant stream of fan-mail from children around the world.

So why are her books so appealing? "The rhyme certainly helps, plus there's a lot of anarchy.

"The characters get up to the sort of mischief [the children] would like to be getting away with and can't."

Hairy Maclary and friends have starred in 14 books, and Dodd has written 10 others.

Being made a DCNZM, the equivalent of a Dame under the old honours system, is a tremendous thrill, says Dodd, who works from a small studio in her Tauranga home.