1 December 1983: Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy is published

In 1979, Lynley Dodd, married with two young children, drew an airborne scraggly dog on a pad of lined shopping paper and added these words underneath:
One morning at nine, on his way to the park,
went Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. [1]

On 1 December 1983, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy was first published in New Zealand. It introduced Hairy Maclary, a shaggy fictional dog, and his five companions, and it was the first book in a series that made Dame Lynley Dodd one of New Zealand’s best-known children’s book authors. Hairy Maclary went on to star in twelve books, with nine more telling stories about his friends. Together, the series has sold more than five million copies worldwide.

Hairy Maclary books are designed to be shared by an adult and a young child. The plots are simple and linear, suited to young children’s comprehension, and the illustrations and their meanings are as important as the text.

Lynley Dodd came to the book as both an artist and a writer. The idea that had been waiting in her notebook since 1979 was a small sketch of a shaggy dog beside a few lines of verse. She later recalled that when her publisher asked for a new idea, a loose scrap fell out of her ideas book, and so she set to work.

Hairy himself was not based on one dog. Lynley Dodd describes him as an imaginary mixture of terriers she has known. However, his canine companions were inspired by a friendly gang of dogs that wandered up the road near her home, sniffing and visiting letterboxes. The rhythm of the walk, the names and the sudden flight from Scarface Claw turned her scrap of verse into a picture-book world. Cats soon joined the adventures, and Slinky Malinki, inspired by the family cat Wooskit, first appeared in Hairy Maclary Scattercat (1985), then starred in his own book in 1990.