The Garden on Red Gum Road

Phil Cummings was born in the small seaside town of Port Broughton in South Australia. He is the youngest of eight children with four brothers and three sisters. Life as a kid for Phil was a fabulous adventure. He was on a farm for the first eight or nine years of his life. When his family left the farm they moved to the mid north of South Australia to a railway town called Peterborough. His older brothers worked on the steam trains. The windows in his house would rattle constantly as the trains rumbled through the rail yards. When Phil left school he worked in a local garage, in the abattoirs and played sport constantly until he left to attend teachers’ college.

Danny Snell grew up in Adelaide, and trained at the Central School of Art and the University of South Australia before graduating with a Bachelor of Design (Illustration) in 1992. His first major picture book Whose Tail Is That?, written by Christine Nicholls, was shortlisted the following year for the Children’s Book Council’s Crichton Award for first time children’s book illustrators. His second book, the best selling Bilby Moon written by Margaret Spurling, was nominated as a Notable Book for 2001 and shortlisted for the 2001 Kids Own Australian Literature Award (KOALA). Since then he has illustrated as well as The Long Way Home by Emily Rodda, Scary Bear by Tania Cox and Seadragon Sea, also written by Margaret Spurling. He lives in Adelaide with his partner Louise and his two daughters, Leilani and Daisy.