Why Mary’s Fans are Poppin Into Bowral

The delightful little town of Bowral, population around 10,000 in the NSW Southern Highlands, has taken a jump on New York City, population 8.2-million, to erect a life-size statue to a design by one of England’s finest sculptors of the world’s most popular super-nanny, Mary Poppins.

And coincidentally it’s a Bowral teenager who is behind it all—just as it was another Bowral teen who gave the world that no-nonsense nanny way back in 1910.

As well, next month Bowral’s Melissa McShane, with the help of her dad Paul and the Southern Highlands Youth Arts Council of which he is Vice-President, is organising what she hopes will be the world’s Largest Umbrella Mosaic—in the shape of the nanny who famously floats down from the sky under an open umbrella, trusty carpetbag at hand.

The mosaic attempt, to draw attention to Bowral’s links with Mary Poppins and to raise funds for the statue of her, has been registered with the Guinness Book of Records, and will be held on Bowral’s Bradman oval – just a block from where Mary Poppins’ creator, Lyndon Goff lived as a teen.

And if the more-than 1000 umbrella-toting Mary Poppins fans turn up that Melissa McShane is hoping for, the mosaic will be large enough to be seen from space, and will break the existing record of 1,026 set by a town in Serbia in 2009.

And, if she was around today, the whole thing would no doubt have Mary Poppins reflecting on it as being “practically perfect.”

But just how Mary Poppins came about is not as happy a story as in the books Lyndon Goff later wrote under the name P.L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers.

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