Ted Prior

Ted Prior was born in Sydney in 1945. His family moved to Kandos in rural New South Wales when he was five, and he attended primary school there before returning to Sydney at eleven to attend Punchbowl Boys High School.

Prior left school at fifteen — an unremarkable exit point for many Australian boys of his generation — and at sixteen joined the New South Wales Police Cadets. He remained in the police force until he was twenty-one, when he left to attend art school full time.

That change of direction from law enforcement to art school tells you something about Prior. He had trained in one of the most structured careers available to a young Australian man, and walked away from it when something else felt more true. The same instinct — following the simple, direct thing rather than the expected one — shows up in every Grug book.

After art school, Prior worked as an art teacher — a practical application of his training that gave him an early understanding of how children engage with visual information. He then moved into children's television and animation, working in a medium that had its own demands for clarity, brevity, and character consistency.

Both threads — teaching and animation — ran directly into Grug. The books are visually disciplined in the way that comes from someone who has had to make images work for young audiences under constraints. The animation experience shows in the economy of the illustrations: every line is doing something.

By the time Prior moved to a rural property in Killabakh, northern New South Wales, in the late 1970s, he had a set of skills — drawing, storytelling, understanding of children's attention — that were exactly what a children's book series needed. The only thing missing was the character.

Prior created Grug in 1978 while living on his Killabakh property with his young family. He described the origin simply: he had been reading stories to his two eldest children, and decided "it would be fun to create our own picture book with an imaginary bush character. Grug was born, as was my career as a writer."

The character came directly from the landscape around him. The Burrawang trees (Macrozamia communis) on his property — cycads with distinctive grass-topped forms — gave Prior his central image: a small, round creature topped with a tuft of grass, born from the land itself. The opening line of every Grug book — "Once the top of a Burrawang tree fell to the ground… and the grassy top began to change. It became Grug" — reads like it wrote itself because it describes something Prior could see from his window.

The first book was published in 1979 by Hodder & Stoughton. Prior wrote and illustrated it himself, in pen and watercolour, with the same deliberately simple visual style he would maintain across all 47 titles. The technique was a deliberate choice: clean lines, no clutter, plenty of white space, colours bright enough for a child to identify from across the room.

Prior has said he thinks Grug's appeal is rooted in the character's simplicity. "I think the great appeal is that he is a simple childlike character" — one whose problems are small enough to be real for a three-year-old, and whose solutions are found through curiosity and friendship rather than dramatic intervention.

Following the success of the first book, Prior continued writing Grug stories through the 1980s. The character's world expanded steadily — to the beach, the zoo, the snow, cricket, the circus, the hospital — each book keeping the same format: 32 pages, 50–150 words, full-colour illustrations on every spread.

The series grew to over 30 titles before going out of print. It was republished in 2009 by Simon & Schuster Australia, and Prior did book signings across the country to mark the return. He has spoken about being moved by what he found at those signings — adults in their twenties and thirties arriving with worn copies of the books from their own childhoods, wanting the same books for their children.

New titles have continued since the republication. Grug and the Bushfire, published in 2020, was the first all-new story since 2016, directly inspired by the fires that swept through Prior's Killabakh property. Prior noted that Grug would have survived — he lives underground — and that the Australian bush always regenerates. A board book range launched in 2021–22 extended the series to the youngest possible readers. The total now stands at 47 titles.

By any measure, Ted Prior has done the thing that children's authors aspire to: created a character that outlasts its era. Grug has been in continuous print for over 45 years, adapted for stage and animation, and acquired by multiple generations of the same families.

The Windmill Theatre Company has performed Grug on stage over 300 times to more than 55,000 people globally, describing the character as "an integral part of our identity as both a company and a nation." Better Reading Australia named the series a 43-year icon. The CBCA regularly recommends the books in early-reader lists.

Prior has described being "constantly surprised" at how popular Grug has become. He set out to make something his own children would enjoy, on a rural property in northern NSW, and ended up making something that Australian parents have been sharing with their children ever since. The surprise seems genuine. It probably is.