Design and Art Australia Online

painter, illustrator, comic strip artist and ballet costume designer, was born in Temora, NSW. The family moved to Sydney when she was a child. She had a brother, Jim, who survived her. After secondary education at Sydney Girls High School, she studied art at East Sydney Technical College then, aged 20, worked as a commercial artist. She eventually had her own studio and two assistants. In 1937 she married Paul Denny. They had a daughter, Christina, but the marriage broke up.

In 1945 Fullarton began a career as an artist and writer of children’s books using Australian animals as her chief subject. Her first book, The Alphabet from A to Z, sold 50,000 copies. Then she did a book of nursery rhymes and A Day in the Bush, both again very successful. She drew Bim Bim in the sixpenny Rupert Rabbit comic book series of at least 11 eleven numbers and a special Christmas issue, published by Allied Authors and Artists from 1946 to 1949. (K. Urquart drew most of the comics in the books, however, including 'Rupert Rabbit’.) Her greatest success was the comic strip Frisky the Rabbit. First drawn for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1948, initially on a three-month trial, it became a lasting strip in the Sunday Herald's comic strip supplement. She produced it from a studio in the Herald building. Frisky, a book of reprints of the strip, was published by Angus and Robertson in 1956. The NSW Education Department made Frisky into an educational film distributed to schools throughout NSW and other states. During the myxamatosis epidemic Fullerton caused some controversy in making Frisky contract the disease (not fatally), leading to a deluge of letters from young readers. Farmers (and the visiting biologist Dr Julius Huxley) were not amused.

A new weekly strip followed, The World of Animals. It was published in all Australian states and in Europe. Her comic strip Alic apparently also appeared in the Sunday Herald (Sydney) in the late 1940s [acc. Germaine]. She continued to illustrate children’s books: after Frisky came Wimpy, the pygmy possum and adaptations of the The Water Babies, Thumbelina, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, the last also being published in the Melbourne Age.

Always fascinated by ballet, Fullarton was inspired by the visits of the de Basil Company before WWII. She left for Europe with her daughter and while Christina danced Nan continued drawing, sending Frisky and The World of Animals back from London, Germany, Holland and France (all places incorporated into the Frisky strips). After retiring from this, she worked behind the scenes in a London ballet company formed by her daughter and her son-in-law, the dancer-choreographer Alexander Roy. She worked on programs and publicitiy and designed and made ballet costumes, including much-admired costumes for a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Fullarton married again in 1970; her husband was an Italian-British restauranteur, Rene Bassett (d.1982). She suffered a stroke in 1998, which left her partly incapacitated, had a further attack early in 2000 and sank into a coma, dying in London soon afterwards {before May}.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007