The National Museum has hit upon an extraordinary way of celebrating winter with the launch of the newest exhibition, Mr Squiggle and Friends: The Creative World of Norman Hetherington, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA.

You’d have to wonder who doesn’t know Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon who, with his alter-ego, Norman Hetherington, ruled the children’s TV waves from 1959 to 1999.

A brilliant artist-turned-entertainer, Hetherington also created other memorable TV personalities such as Rocket, who transported him from the Moon, Blackboard who held the squiggles, riddle-master Bill Steamshovel who loved eating rocks and concrete and Gus the Snail.

Armed with the acquisition last year of more than 800 objects from the Norman Hetherington collection, much of it located in his Mosman home until his death in 2010, the museum’s curators have embarked on the daunting process of selection and the result will be a free exhibition open to young and old. 

I caught up with curator Danielle Cassar recently and found her a mine of information on Hetherington and his artistic creations. 

Cassar, a long-time curator and staffer at the Australian War Memorial who used to work on exhibitions about conflict zones, assures me that the museum will be buzzing with all kinds of hands-on activities, such as a digital Squiggle interactive where you can do your own squiggle. 

There’ll also be a compilation of Mr Squiggle episodes so that people can see why he was so popular. There’ll be plenty of marionettes but shadow puppets too, which were part of his practice, though not in Mr Squiggle. Hetherington even published a book called “hand shadows” – most readers will have created their own version with hands and fingers.

To put it modestly, curating the Norman Hetherington collection has been “a nice change” for Cassar. 

She had only been at the museum since last year when, during an orientation session, she spotted a little yellow Squiggle foot poking out of a box and got very excited. “I saw that parts of my childhood were in the museum, being preserved and being looked after,” she says.

She’d grown up singing the Mr Squiggle theme song and joining Miss Jane and Rebecca in trying to figure out what the squiggles on screen were turning into, and Blackboard was a favourite of hers. 

“The exhibition is such an intergenerational opportunity,” she says, “grandparents and parents will be bringing their own grandkids along and introducing them to these fabulous characters.”

Behind those fabulous characters is the ubiquitous figure of Hetherington but, like Barry Humphries with Edna Everage, he always asserted Mr Squiggle’s independence as an artist in his own right.

Not everybody knows that he was also a wartime concert performer in the 2nd Division Concert Party, later called the No. 4 Detachment, 1st Australian Army Entertainment Unit.

Trained as a visual artist at East Sydney Tech from 1937 to 1938, he was also a working cartoonist for The Bulletin. 

He had cut his teeth as a puppeteer with Clovelly Puppet Group and created his own Meryla Marionettes, later doing Christmas shows such as Anthony Hordern & Sons, David Jones, Farmer’s, Grace Bros and Myer, sometimes in six-week runs. 

Cassar says she has tried to absorb as many stories from Rebecca Hetherington, the custodian of her father’s works and, from 1989 on, the Mr Squiggle presenter – she’ll be in Canberra for the opening. 

The museum engaged in “careful but joyful discussions” with Rebecca before they chose what would come into their care from the huge collection under his house and were, she says, “quite deliberate in what they collected”.

As exhibitions go, this is huge. There are 300 items and 90 puppets, costumes, artworks, illustrations, backdrops and props. 

“We wanted to pull all these threads together for our audience,” Cassar says, because while he was an artist, Hetherington was also steeped in the theatre, a practice developed during performances for his local Methodist church, where he would also do the lighting and the costumes.

They even have a spectacular stage backdrop for The Reluctant Dragon, one of his earliest plays, where he played the dragon. 

According to daughter Rebecca, Hetherington grew up drawing and dreaming, but was a practical mix of a creative mind and an engineering mind who really understood the moving parts of his puppets.

Mr Squiggle and Friends: The Creative World of Norman Hetherington, National Museum of Australia, July 4-October 13. Free exhibition.