Multi-award winning Katoomba author Tohby Riddle has a jam-packed creative brain.
It flits between themes and genres - everything from thoughts on grammar to Yowies, and more recently, a story about an astronaut's cat stuck in a spaceship on the moon but dreaming of a much more vivid life on earth.
And Riddle's genius is leaving these tiny kernels of ideas to germinate quietly, until they're ready to finish percolating to become the fully formed, endearing, quintessential whimsical tales he is known for. He calls it the "unpredictable process of discovery" from "years of noticing things".
His latest book The Astronaut's Cat was released during lockdown, but it's resonated with the community. Recently Australian Children's Laureate and children's author Ursula Dubosarsky declared Riddle's book her granddaughter's favourite.
"She's opened the book and turned the pages many, many times and she crawls over and pulls the book out and hands it to me," she told The Sydney Morning Herald.
The picture book has astronaut photographs from the moon and raises themes about Earth and the environment. And it's just fortuitous that it explores self isolation, while we are all in a pandemic and have effectively been 'inside cats' like the main character.
"The Astronaut's Cat was thought up about 18 months ago. I never could have predicted it'd be released during a pandemic lockdown," he told the Gazette. "But it's a big-picture, high-concept book, so I guess it was possible it could have relevance to a range of situations - and so it has.
"The astronaut's cat is an inside cat - on the moon. But what she sees outside her porthole gets her wondering and imagining. And when she dreams, all is possible."
Riddle has had a long fascination with space. He said when humans first saw earth from outer space - via photos from the Apollo space program in the 1960s - it informed a new understanding of Earth, its preciousness, and its place in the universe.
"NASA has an incredible archive of photos taken by the astronauts who landed on the Moon. I find the beautiful, desolate landscapes awe-inspiring - like something out of a strange dream. But, as beautiful as it is, it is also an environment extremely hostile to life-forms from Earth. So the inside cat's situation in the book emphasises the preciousness of our planet, where you can still walk out the door and not die instantly, while being shot through with micrometeoroids.
"That perspective, provided by the first astronauts, of a lonely blue ball in a great dark void, made us understand our planet in a whole new way - its fragility and isolation - and its sheer preciousness to us."
The other "nice kind of synchronicity" about his recent story, was finding out the typeface he chose - Futura - was the same as the one used on the plaque left behind by the first astronauts on the moon. He picked it because he knew it had been popular at the time of the Apollo space missions from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Riddle was a cartoonist for Good Weekend magazine for nearly ten years. He is used to working in solitude from home "and that solitude completely disappeared when my three kids and wife all set themselves up at home 24/7. It wasn't self-isolation, it was noisy group-isolation".
But his family cat Pom Pom is always around and she formed the inspiration for his space cat.
"I'm guessing she's be pretty chuffed. In her mind she's always been famous."
The book is dedicated to St Canice's Primary School in Katoomba.
