Note, at the start, that Mattingley’s Young Adult novel New Patches for Old, must NOT be confused with another book with an almost identical title:
New Patches for Old: a Turkish Folktale by Barbara Walker, & Ahmet E. Uysal, illustrated by Harold Berson, Parents Magazine Press, New York, 1974.
Nice as Walker and Ahmet’s retelling may be, it is (apparently) a drolly humorous folktale that has been widely retold by others: for example:
Hilton, N. (1987). The Long Red Scarf. [Illustrator: Margaret Power]. Omnibus Books, Adelaide: Penguin, Ringwood.
“Blanchard’s Trousers”, by the French writer Hugues Lapaire — published in The Victorian Readers SIXTH Book, 1940, pp. 177-193, part of the Victorian Education Department’s official Primary school reading scheme in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s. (Lapaire’s story, originally “La Culotte de Blanchard”, appeared, translated, in an English magazine Argosy, volume 18, number 110, July 1935. Hugues Lapaire – 1869 – 1967 is a French writer, but I have been able to find little else about him or his droll short story, although it is probably a vignette excerpted from a novel called, Mesdemoiselles Blanchard, or, The Blanchard Women.)
An amusing “Little Golden Book”, Hiram’s Red Shirt, written by the prolific picture-story book author, Mabel Watts, illustrated by the great Aurelius Battaglia, tells a similar story of make-do patching that reduces Hiram’s favourite but worn-out red shirt to a hopelessly unrecoverable patchwork – time, then for a new shirt, and a lesson in time wasted trying to mend the unmendable. Very funny!
But, whether folktales or not (I do not know if Lapaire wrote his story with any knowledge of the Turkish tale), these are OTHER stories, …
By contrast, Christobel Mattingley’s New Patches for Old is a full-length novel for Young Adult (teenage readers) and NOT a Turkish folktale – I am sure there is no connection between her novel and the folktale beyond the obvious title!
The original Penguin or Puffin cover has a beautiful illustration by Chris Molan: she is one of my favourite cover artists.
The story is about an English family that migrates to Australia, and initially struggles to establish itself in the new country, with a different climate and culture, trying to find new work, new connections with new neighbours, and, indeed, hoping to make a new life!
Although such an English family uses the same language as Australians (who, it must be emphasised, speak English, and not Austrian, or anything else: I do not mean to insult my knowledgeable readers with this comment, but I have met non-Australians who think we all have kangaroos hopping down our streets, amongst other remarkable, but imaginary cultural differences, and speak a foreign, that is, non-English language), and Britain and Australia share a great deal of culture and history, the novel is about the MIGRANT experience that could apply in as powerful a way to migrants from any country arriving in any other country.
The central character is a young teenage girl known, initially, as Patricia, and also known as Pat, and later as Patches – shy, hesitant, timid, even and a lovely person to meet.
Her early experiences landing in the middle of a fierce Australian (Adelaide city) summer, from a miserable gloomy drizzly British winter where her father has been retrenched, are strongly shown.
Everything feels new. Everything feels difficult.
Patricia begins in a new school, wearing a patched second-hand uniform because, of course, the family can’t afford a new one.
At first she knows no one at the school. Then she is befriended and offered a cool homemade drink. But after the first, gratefully received, refreshing gulp, she sees ugly black bits at the bottom of the plastic bottle, that look like flies well, you can imagine the shock! These turn out to be unfamiliar passionfruit pips not flies!
There is so much for Patricia to learn about, and become familiar with. We follow her, every sensitive step of the way.
(The image of the patched school uniform may remind some readers of the embarrassment of the scorch-mark in a March girl’s dress at a major social occasion in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. But this intense sense of social embarrassment is surely a common experience for many girls who are, naturally, sensitive about their appearance in public. However, any potential comparison with a classic such as Little Women is to Mattingley’s credit. She is as good a writer as Alcott! Her characters are as vivid!)
The book has striking verbal imagery of patchwork, and gardening, and watering the garden in hope. (Beginning a new garden always reminds me of the philosophical conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide – “we must cultivate our garden”. In key points of Mattingley’s young adult novels, New Patches For Old (1977) and Southerly Buster (1983), the imagery and patterning of language attain the vigour of free verse. Mattingley is a very fine writer!
These (prose) images are very beautiful throughout the book, and function as underlying metaphors for the major narrative and emotional theme – resilience and survival.
Mattingley has a sensitive poet’s ear for language, and an artist’s eye, for imagery. For example, the lace-delicate tracery of the rare and fragile paper-nautilus seashell – flotsam that is found by happy beach-combing accident on a deserted beach – which is given to Patricia, or “Patches”, exactly symbolises the young teenager who feels as though she has barely survived ocean-tossed storms to make a new home in a distant land.
Christobel Mattingley has had a long and vivid career. She has written many different kinds of books, mainly for children, but also for adults and general reading. Her work includes fiction, picture story-books, true stories and biography, and non-fiction. Her writing is always focused and imaginative. She is profoundly sensitive and insightful, even in her simplest (but only seemingly simplest) stories.
She writes about the human condition as it is experienced by young children, and old people, and everybody in between, touching on and illuminating different stages of life and human interactions.
It is difficult to isolate ONE book from such diversity. Nonetheless, I think “New Patches for Old” may be Mattingley’s BEST, or at least one of her masterpiece-novel!
(More details can be found in my larger exploration of Mattingley’s early writing, and especially her two teenage or Young Adult novels, “New Patches for Old” and “Southerly Buster”
Gough, J. 1987. “Tapestries of Image and Emotion: the Novels of Christobel Mattingley”, Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 97-104.)
Very highly recommended!!
John Gough – Deakin University (retired) – [email protected]

Patricia Morgan is unwilling to move to Australia, although the rest of the family is excited about their new adventure, and her father is grateful to escape unemployment in England. However, nicknamed "Patches" it is not easy for Patricia to make friends in a new school and a shabby home. It is not until she embraces her new life that she can really find happiness.