I’m all at sea if I’m not creating: Animalia author Graeme Base

Most mums keep their kids’ drawings, tucking away the best ones for posterity, and Graeme Base’s mother was no different. Except she most likely didn’t secretly throw out the many mediocre offerings that most mums do after bedtime.

Unsurprisingly Base, who grew up to become a world-renowned author and illustrator whose unique style blends extraordinarily rendered realism with fantasy imagery, had always wanted to be an artist. Even though he knew that some people thought art was “something you do for therapy, or when you’re not actually doing your proper job”.

Even if you don’t recognise his name, you know his books – his breakout 1986 book Animalia has sold more than 5 million copies (and still counting).

He also grew up to be someone who never throws anything away, a habit that will please his fans: next week, for the first time in his 40-year career, Base unveils a selection of his hundreds of unpublished artworks.

The Hidden World of Graeme Base will showcase some of the thousands of works he’s squirrelled away in “god knows how many” boxes for years. He’s kept almost everything he’s drawn, from finished artworks to preliminary sketches, many of which would eventually evolve into his now world-famous alphabet, or his mystery book The Eleventh Hour.

The idea for the new exhibition came off the back of the National Library of Australia approaching him. Australia’s largest reference library already had his books and some of his artworks, but were also keen on some of his earliest works for its collection.

“Initially, I wanted to give them everything because I wanted it to be in a safe place for posterity, but while I was trawling through all this stuff, preparing what to give them, I thought there might be an exhibition in it,” Base says.

“There was so much stuff, and that’s when the idea started growing in my mind to show works nobody had ever seen before, rather than just stuff from the books they’d recognise.”

Some of these illustrations – pencil doodles, ink sketches and more – would be better off with people who would want to hang them on walls, he thought, rather than putting them back into a cupboard. And it sounds like Base could definitely use the cupboard space.

“That started when I was young when I was a little tacker and drawing stuff or writing stuff. Mum kept it all – I never knew until years later, but every time I did something she’d put in a box, and when I was twenty-something, she said ‘I’ve got something for you’ and it was just jam-packed with scribbles, sketches, story ideas, you know, doodles.”

For the first time, Base will show a selection from that box, including, “what they call ‘juvenalia’; stuff from when I was in high school and college”.

The doodles and preliminary sketches offer an insight into the way he painstakingly creates his meticulous, mischievous illustrations; often one page of his book will take a month to create.

“The way I work is … OK, this is the idea for the picture, and then I’ll draw a character over and over and over and over, until I’ve refined it to exactly how I want it to be, then I would transfer that shape into the final artwork, and I would do that over and over with every character, so there would just be colossal numbers,” he says.

“Sometimes the drawings were just scribbles, sometimes they were highly finished, so a lot of those pieces are in this exhibition.”

There are little drawings done for their own sake, and others that led to published projects such as The Worst Band in the Universe, and his version of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. “And then the stuff that was just me as a young kid goofing off in maths lessons – and keeping them for some reason.”

Base was born in Britain and his family moved to Australia when he was eight, which is when he began drawing seriously.

“I had a really strong Pommy accent when we first moved here, and you know, I didn’t know how to kick the funny shaped ball, that kind of stuff. Any kid in that position quickly figures out, if you’re good at something, start doing it,” he says.

“That’s the way you carve out your niche in the playground. For me, it was drawing and, within a couple of years, maybe by the time I was 11 or 12, if anyone said, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I said, ‘I want to be an artist.’ ”

After high school, he studied graphic design, and ended up working in advertising – a job he quickly loathed.

Then he thought he might be a rock star. He was “dabbling in music”, and joined a pub-rock band in 1980 – largely because he “fancied the singer”. Robyn, to whom Base has been married for 44 years, was the band’s singer and Base became the drummer and songwriter. “But then we found a better drummer, so I moved on to keyboards,” he says.

The band, Rikitikitavi, (a bastardised spelling of the Rudyard Kipling short story), was quite the fixture in the Melbourne live scene throughout the ’80s.

“We played all the pubs and clubs, mostly doing supports,” says Base. “But for some big bands! We supported bands like Hunters and Collectors, Icehouse, the Models … ”

Inspired by the likes of Talking Heads, they sported a new romantic look. “Robyn had multicoloured hair, and I remember having, sort of, my ordinary hair, but just with this long blond droopy bit which came down almost to my mouth in the front. Very ’80s – sort of … Depeche Mode.”

While awaiting their big break, Base was working at his advertising gig by day, but was eventually fired, his boss telling him the reason was that he was “destroying my business”. (No, he didn’t get a reference).

For his own sanity, he’d been working on his “fantasy” drawings at night and, after his sacking, decided to see if he could get work illustrating book jackets, or record covers.

“Being a writer was never part of the game plan,” he says. But he started hawking his artworks around to publishers, and landed a few book jacket gigs, and illustrations for other people’s books. But he’s never been a fan of working to someone else’s brief. “That’s why I hadn’t worked in advertising,” he says.

He thought he’d have a go at writing his own, the first of which was an illustrated poem called My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch, published to some success in 1983. Then Base moved on to Animalia, after showing his publisher two of his insanely intricate pages for his now famous alliterative alphabet, including the one that remains to this day Base’s own favourite: the H page, with its detailed drawing of “Horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses”.

The rest, as they say, is publishing history, of which serious fans (and there are many) can now own their own piece.

Base is now 67, with more than 27 books to his name, different variations of his biggest titles, musicals adaptations and several awards including his recent appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in this year’s Australia Day Honours. But he hasn’t boxed up his pens and pencils just yet.

“I can’t just sit on a beach – I have to sit on a beach and draw something,” he says. “I’m kind of homeless or … all at sea if I’m not creating something.”

The Hidden World of Graeme Base is at Beinart Gallery, 307 Victoria Street, Brunswick, until March 22. beinart.org