Once Upon a Time…

(in June 2013 to be exact) I posted on my FaceBook page about a workshop I had just delivered at the English Teachers Association conference in Brisbane about adapting fairy tales into Australian stories, and Reilly McCarron, (also an Accredited Storyteller with the NSW Storytelling Guild) wrote back so enthusiastically that within a few sentences we were agreeing that what we both wanted was an Australian Fairy Tale Society – and since it didn’t exist, it was up to us to start it.

This happened at an extraordinarily fruitful time in Reilly’s life.  She was enriching her work as a professional Storyteller, by playing her harp and singing,

was in the middle of doing her folklore qualification through the Open University, and now she was ready to create a new Society.    But when we met at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney in August I discovered her fruitfulness had extended to creating a small human – another claim on her time.  But we didn’t stop. We both just continued to give our all alongside all the other things in our lives.

Our first step was to create a FaceBook page – and our first surprise was how popular it was. 

We realised we were riding the zeitgeist.  The AFTS came into being at exactly the time people wanted it to exist.  2012 had seen international excitement over the bicentenary of the Grimms’ first edition of Kinder-und Hausmärchen Children’s and Household Tales.  Dr Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Dr Belinda Calderone, and Catherine Snell had been running Monash Fairy Tale Salon symposiums since 2012. (Belinda and Catherine later became Presidents of the AFTS, as did Louisa John Krol, who was also heavily involved with the Salons.)

Sarah Gibson had created her multi-media platform, Re-Enchantment, and Kate Forsyth, Sophie Masson, and Juliet Marillier were writing fairy tale re-tellings that remain international bestsellers.  People were keen to find out more.

I honestly can’t remember whether we wanted to establish AFTS as a business in order to hold conferences, or whether we needed to hold a conference in order to get the Society started.

But they both involved a lot of building-the-plane-while-we-were-flying-it, obtaining advice from the Department of Fair Trading and Beyond Bank, so that in October 2013 we got our ABN and Registered Business Name – and thus, the Australian Fairy Tale Society was officially born ten years ago this month.

Money challenges were huge – it took two years before the Society could pay me back the money I had advanced – and that was even with the support of our forty-two Founding Members who paid membership fees twice within twelve months, and the Pozible crowd funding project that Reilly organised, using her own website for the AFTS until we could start our own. 

Regan Kubecek contributed her artwork to the Pozible campaign

and created our beautiful logo which gave our Society our signature colours of blue, green, gold, and red.

By early 2014 we had attracted some ‘star’ members – Kate Forsyth, Sophie Masson, Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar – as well as Members interested in being on the Committee, which was absolutely essential to the Society continuing to thrive.

And finally it all came together on the June long weekend 2014 when he had our Inaugural Conference in Paddington Uniting Church in Sydney – and at last we could meet each other.

And that was the real beginning of us becoming a community.

Video courtesy Jackie Kerin

Jo Henwood