Sydney is a water city, with our character and identity defined by the harbour. People have sailed here throughout time, the harbour and rivers forming shared spaces, thoroughfares, and barriers as well.
Welcome!
The Australian Fairy Tale Society was established to investigate, create and communicate fairy tales from an Australian perspective. Local Rings and our Magic Mirror (Zoom) gather five times a year to explore specific fairy tales, like a book club for fairy tales. We have an irregular eZine, YouTube channel, Redbubble merchandise store, and an original anthology, South of the Sun: Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century, and another West of the Moon: More Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century in progress.
Recent conference themes include Australian Fairy Tales: Flesh or Fossil?; Cottage, Cauldron, Castle: Power and Place in Fairy Tales; and Once and Future Tales: What was, what is, what if?
For our conference, we invite you to submit presentations in a diversity of forms, because this is one of the delights of an AFTS conference.
Submissions open February 1 and will close 11pm AEDT, February 28, 2025.
Case study(or poster display) of a creative process of staging a fairy tale performance
Performance, 10 minutes max, with optional 5 minute Q&A. For example, storytelling, puppetry, theatre, singing, music, dance.
Panel discussion, 25 minute maximum including Q&A
Workshop, 30 minute maximum including set-up time. For example, art, writing, storytelling, sand sculpture, puppetry, gardening, cake decorating
Games or participative activities, 10 minute maximum
Launch of your book, video game, performance
Sales and/or displays of your books, art, puppets, toys, costumes etc.
New ideas welcome!
Stuck for ideas? Here are some ways you could explore the theme…
Over Water
Voyages in fairy tales
Voyages of fairy tales: how fairy tales have travelled across the seas from other parts of the world to make their home here
Discovering new and old as we explore stories that have travelled across time: what matches with the original and what clashes
Maritime fairy tale characters (e.g. sailors, smugglers, fishermen, pirates, lifesavers): what they have and what they could represent
Shipwrecks – be they fairy tale, Australian or creative shipwrecks
‘Kingdoms’ (Communities) by or in the sea.
Under Water (what lies beneath)
Psychological and symbolic meanings in fairy tales
Underwater portals to other worlds, which could be magical kingdoms, Death, or somewhere else)
Magical underwater creatures: mermaids, nixies, etc and what they could represent, including fluid identities and disability
Water colours in fairy tale art
Magical and Healing Waters
Blood, sweat, tears, rain, tea – The Water of Life, the Water of Death
Waterholes, rivers, bathing pools
Watermills, bridges, wishing wells
Still waters (= finding peace?)
Reflections and/or scrying the future
For further inspiration, here are some fairy tales with watery themes –
Fisherman and His Soul; Frog Prince; Isle of Magnificence; Knights of the Fish; Lady White Snake; Little Mermaid; Little Obelia; Melusine; Nixie of the Millpond; Selkie; Three Men in the Well; Three Snake Leaves; Turbot; Water Lily; Water of Life; Well at World’s End.
Western Australian writer Demelza Carlton is a USA Today bestselling author of more than a hundred books, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages and sold more than three million copies worldwide.
Her fairy tale collection, including Silence: The Little Mermaid Retold, and her six-book series Sirens of War, set off the WA coast, make her the perfect keynote speaker for our 2025 conference theme: ‘Under Water, Over Water, Magical Waters of Fairy tales’ – even if she was once scared of fish!
You’ve always loved the ocean, but on your first snorkelling trip you found you were afraid of fish. How did you overcome that?
Lots more snorkelling, a bit of scuba diving, and swimming with sharks, actually. It’s hard to be afraid of fish when you’re chasing a shark for a photo you promised your kid, and it’s swimming away as fast as it can. I’ve now swum with sea lions, sharks and sea cucumbers, and stood on spray-drenched cliffs over a seeting sea as a seven-metre cyclonic swell surged in, shattering a shipwreck below. And I live in Perth, WA, the shark attack capital of the world – and can assure you that sharks taste delicious!
While doing your Masters research on shipwrecks at remote islands off the WA coast, you came across one that didn’t make sense. How did that inspire a multi-book series about mermaids?
During a cyclone in the 1920s, a fishing boat broke free of its moorings with the two-man crew still aboard. One man managed to swim ashore, but the other couldn’t swim, so he disappeared in the waves when the boat sank. Everyone thought he drowned, but his body wasn’t found… until more than three weeks’ later, when it washed up miles from the boat went down, in the complete opposite direction to the ocean currents. Stranger still, the man was recognisable – which meant his corpse hadn’t been floating at sea for all those weeks – and he’d done some first aid to his broken leg. There was nowhere the man could have been all that time except in the ocean; because if he’d washed up on the island, someone would have seen him and helped him. So how could a man survive for three weeks at sea, do first aid on himself, and yet drown within sight of land?
No matter how much research I did, I couldn’t solve the mystery, so I wrote ‘mermaids did it’ in my report and left it at that. When I did the final proofread, I burst out laughing when I saw that bit. I quickly deleted it, submitted my dissertation, and celebrated with a glass of wine. Wine in hand, I decided to search mermaid myths on the internet. Was it actually possible?
I was amazed to find heaps of mermaid stories from all over the Indian Ocean, and of course I also dug out my copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales to read the fairy tale I remembered. Put the two together with my miracle man, and I had a story.
What if the reason mermaids went ashore was a biological imperative – they needed human men in order to breed – but instead of saving the man like the prince in Andersen’s tale, my Indian Ocean mermaid accidentally lost him to the waves? She’d be heartbroken, not wanting to return to the place she lost the man for a very long time. And a very long time later, she did come ashore again at the same islands to investigate an environmental issue. Right at the same time, a brand-new deckhand starts work on a lobster fishing vessel at the islands; a deckhand, who’s very interested in the woman who lives in the fishing shack next door to his. And he just happens to have the same first name as the man she lost to the waves…
What drew you to shipwrecks off the WA coast as your area of research?
It wasn’t just shipwrecks – my Masters is in Emergency Management, and my research project involved plane crashes, wartime battles, quarantines and tsunamis, as well as shipwrecks. I have a personal connection to the Batavia disaster at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, up near Geraldton as one of my ancestors was the navigator. That might explain why I get lost so easily!
[In June 1629, Dutch-owned ship Batavia struck a reef and sank amongst islands 65km off the coast of what is now Western Australia. The whole story is chilling, if you want to read about it.]
What had you planned to do with that qualification, before becoming a writer?
I was investigating those incidents for my job as an administrator at a remote site, to improve our emergency management planning. Seeing as I was doing the research anyway, turning it into a Masters research project and getting the qualification seemed like a no-brainer.
That research inspired your first book, Ocean’s Gift, about a mermaid off the WA coast, which turned into a three-book Siren of Secrets trilogy and the six-book Siren of War series. What made you want to set a fairy tale story in Australia, rather than the traditional European setting?
At the time, I’d lived most of my life here, and my research showed that mermaid legends were everywhere – especially in the Indian Ocean. This part of the world is kind of a fairy tale to most of the rest of the world, so instead of imagining somewhere new that I’d never seen, I wanted to breathe new life into old legends in a place I knew well, which many of my overseas (and east coast Australian!) readers probably don’t.
Why do you think so many Australian writers stick with more traditional settings?
I think they do it because that’s what publishers want, and know how to sell. It’s also closer to their source material, which is usually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and to what Disney do with their fairy tales – and let’s face it, Disney definitely knows how to sell fairy tales!
It’s a very personal choice – why set any book anywhere? Writers are told to write what they know. Well, I’m Australian, not English, so I can’t wax lyrical about the beauties of an English wood, because I’ve never seen one. I have gotten my feet wet in both the Baltic and the North Sea though, and seen some of the less populated parts of France and Eastern Europe, so when I chose to write my mediaeval fairy tales, those are the places I tended to set those stories. The history in those regions is particularly fascinating, and also little-known in the English-speaking world.
You also include environmental issues. How important, for you, is it to incorporate these?
I absolutely do! I admit those mostly come up in my contemporary and sci-fi stories, more than my mediaeval ones, but while I was visiting relatives in the Netherlands, they showed me a small desert in Hoge Veluwe National Park that resembles the Pinnacles in WA’s Nambung National Park.
I did some digging, and it turned out that around a thousand years ago, this particular region was the only arable land in a sea of marshland – until a combination of flooding and salt production resulted in salinity issues that turned it into desert.
So, in 2025, I’ll be releasing a new, present-day fairy tale series that centres around an eco-village. I’ve been having so much fun researching all the technology and sustainable practices that will make this village a reality.
What are you looking forward to about the Australian Fairy Tale conference?
I miss academic life, and while I get to do a lot of research for my books, most of it is on history, geography, and the cutting-edge of science for my sci-fi, rather than in-depth research into origins and interpretations of fairy tales. I’m really hoping to get my geek on and listen to other people’s findings on fairy tales, instead of constantly having to think of how a modern audience would relate to them.
Next month, find out more about Demelza’s fairy tale books, her favourite (and least favourite) tales, and some of her research trips around the world. Learn even more by visiting her online at www.demelzacarlton.com. Enjoy Part 2!
The new year is coming, so our gift to you is the five fairy tales we will explore in the 2025-2026 financial year.
We start off in July with our Grimms story, Hans My Hedgehog; perhaps known from the initial episode of Jim Henson’s beautiful 1980s TV series, The Storyteller.
As a consequence, it might be one of the better-known Animal Bridegroom stories, (a most popular sub-group of fairy tales), along with Frog Prince, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and Rose Red, and many enchanted snake stories; all of them originating with the Psyche and Eros myth.
These stories place the male lead as the one who needs rescuing, so they are popular sources for re-tellings with a Strong Woman as heroine. When a woman is the questor, yes she is strong, she is the hero, the rescuer – but with a lot more suffering, and a reward of getting her man to take her back.
We’ll also examine that the end doesn’t match the beginning, the disenchantment doesn’t resolve the enchantment we’re told of. There’s a missing piece that would make sense of the story’s logic, but what is it?
The September stories are from two European nations well-known for their fairy tales, and both feature a Magic Flight.
Firstly, we have The Master Maid (i.e. the best maid of all) from Norway. Norwegian stories, generally, achieved significance due to the high quality of the collection (Norwegian Folktales) created by Peter Christen Asbjoernsen and Jorgen Moe in 1841 – although most of the stories in that collection are animal stories (e.g. The Three Billy Goats Gruff) or folktales, with no magic.
In 2019, we had the joy of looking at the unjustly obscure Tatterhood (pls read if you haven’t done so!). It’s interesting that Master Maid, like Tatterhood, also features a bold young heroine, who does the rescuing, though the question does arise as to why she didn’t escape herself before the rather lacklustre hero arrived. Is this sort of tough female representation particularly Norwegian or Scandinavian, or were all European fairy tales this varied before the Grimms started editing their source material?
However, Master Maid‘s key feature is the common (or not so common) fairy tale trope of the Magic Flight, which have the fleeing hero or couple throw down a series of previously-gifted talismans, which transform into incredible obstacles to delay or vanquish the pursuing villain. Jason and Medea may have been the first to participate in this.
Another example of the Magic Flight comes from a nation that’s produced many fairy tales: France. The Bee and the Orange Tree was written by Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy in the 1697 book that first coined the term ‘fairy tale’, giving rise to the whole genre.
The Bee and the Orange Tree is also the name of an online journal. Whereas d’Aulnoy featured in the AFTS web series, Salonline, where she was portrayed by our own Eliane Morel, or more factually in the Salonline book of essays and stories we wrote about the Salons.
For November, our Australian fairy tale (usually a difficult choice) is the 21st century original story, ‘The Sixteenth Brolga‘ created by Holly Ringland specifically for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) exhibition, Fairy Tale. The exhibition catalogue, Fairy Tales in Art and Film, contains the tale, beautifully illustrated with the Australian pre-Raphaelite painting that inspired it – Spirit of the Plains by Sydney Long, 1897. (Or read it via Holly’s sub-stack.)
The Sixteenth Brolga is brief and subtle; full of brush strokes of meaning. The only action really is two different people looking at this painting, seeing what it is, and what might be – a picture of time and transformation from a contemporary urban, Australian perspective.
As Ringland’s The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding interweaves seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, we can use The Sixteenth Brolga as her model for how to write an original Australian fairy tale, as well as how to sample fairy tales within a broader narrative.
Right in time for the 2026 Lunar Festival in February, we will investigate two Vietnamese fairy tales. Surprising, considering how many Australians have Vietnamese heritage, that it has taken us this long to explore any Vietnamese fairy tales, or tales that fulfil this function, even though they weren’t created in that form, but instead combine indigenous myths and introduced stories from colonisers from different eras.
The Moon Boy may be of interest to Westerners, as it combines the moon’s usual feminine associations with a masculine hero – although in many versions, Cuoi really isn’t a particularly heroic hero.
The Mosquito, which could be labelled a pourquoi story or legend has some intriguing and potentially misogynstic connections with the Chinese story of Lady White Snake, as explored in 2024.
For April 2026, we focus on The Queen’s Necklace, an original 1890s fairy tale written by Helena Nyblom (1843-1926), who achieved fame as a fairy tale writer in the generation following Hans Christian Andersen. The Danish-born writer, who moved to Sweden, was actually more interested in her poetry, music, and six children.
The story is largely about greed, and could be compared to Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince, (which we investigated in 2021), that was written not long after. An American revision by Jane Langton in 1994 tidied up some loose ends, particularly in creating a satisfying love story and giving the villain a meaningful death.
Literary fairy tales can form an interesting contrast to what might be thought of as folk (i.e. authorless or of unknown authorship) stories, with a much more conscious choice of language and treatment of psychological and social issues, while still maintaining the essential magical elements.
From Saturday 14 to Sunday 15 June, 2025 – a week after the International Storytelling Conference, and a week before Supanova Comic Con – the Australian Fairy Tale Society will host its eleventh conference.
This inspiration to see the world in fresh new ways comes with an opportunity for members and new friends to gather and share old stories, and new ideas, performances, academic talks, panel discussions and workshops, plus sales of book and art.
To celebrate the character of Sydney as a water city, where harbour and rivers form shared spaces, thoroughfares, and barriers as well, our theme is:
Over Water, Under Water, Magical Waters of Fairy Tales
Over Water: Voyages in fairy tales, and voyages of fairy tales – how fairy tales have travelled across the seas from other parts of the world to make their home here.
Under Water: The many meanings that lie beneath fairy tales, and the underwater portals to other worlds that exist within the stories, as well as how we experience them.
Magical and Healing Waters: Water of Life and Water of Death, Rapunzel’s tears and three drops of blood, watermills and bridges, bathing pools and wishing wells, and the sweat of effort to reach the hero’s destiny.
The artist members of the AFTS contribute so much beauty and insight to our understanding of what fairy tales are and what they can be – and you can own some of this remarkable work yourself through our online Redbubble store. https://www.redbubble.com/people/austfairytales/shop
Here you will find unique Australian artworks that you can match to the object of your choice, like clothing, mugs, soft furnishings, etc.
From fairy tale art
To our conference art
And the logos of the Fairy Tale Rings that members love to wear, especially to Rings, conferences, book and art events)
We love this way of celebrating our member artists and giving the world an opportunity to see their work, as well as surreptitiously letting the world know about the AFTS too! We are enormously grateful to them for their generosity in sharing their talents with us.
Buying any of the AFTS merch is a wonderful gift to yourself, a way of identifying yourself as a person with an individual and magical view of the world, and maybe opening up some conversations.
And this time of year, when you might be looking for gifts that have some meaning, that are not generic and mass-produced, is an ideal time for giving something special.
You’d better dive in quickly so that all you want is delivered in time for Christmas – though it’s always the right time to give AFTS merch.
This year, the Sydney Fairy Tale Ring has begun meeting to share what we call Magic Movies – fairy tale films from around the world – as another creative form that interprets the many strands of fairy tales; and there are many films to choose from.
Why? What is it about fairy tales that attracts film-makers to create their own interpretations?
The earliest motivation, back in 1890s France, was simply to show what film could do. Georges Melies was the best-known of these innovators, using stop animation to create magical appearances, puppets, costumes and coloured slides to tie them to a narrative already popular through pantomimes. Those first audiences must have gasped in wonder.
In a way, Melies was following on from earlier forms of fairy tales as spectacles, known as feerie. Even before 17th century French Salons nurtured the performance of original fairy tales, the old oral stories were displayed in a sort of living statue form as outdoor entertainments for the aristocracy. After the 1789 revolution, a new proletariat audience watched their own versions of feerie, while over in England, James Plance presented what he called fairy tale Extravaganzas.
Only a generation later, German artist Lotte Reiniger created the world’s first animated fairy tale film, Prince Achmed (1926), to use her stunning paper-cut shadow puppetry in stop animation with full colour to create a stunning work of art.
But of course, Prince Achmed‘s fame has been well and truly eclipsed by Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, the beginning of world-wide dominance over the genre, so that other visions had little chance of being seen. Disney only paused in their fairy tale film production when the exquisitely animated and scored Sleeping Beauty failed commercially in 1959, (only to be resumed with 1989’s The Little Mermaid), just at the time that Japanese animated films took off with their version of the Chinese story, The White Serpent (1958).
To add to the struggles of making any sort of film in post-war France, director Jean Cocteau created La Belle et la Bete (1946), with magnificent costumes made almost from rags, and using techniques like making candles light up in sequence by blowing them out then running the film backwards. The Italian-Spanish mini-series Fantaghiro (1991) from Italo Calvino’s, Fantaghiro the Beautiful, had a much easier time of it with special effects.
BBC One animated the illustrations of Quentin Blake to their re-fracturing of Roald Dahl’s fractured fairy tales in six comic poems, Revolting Rhymes (2016), not with drawing but with computer animation, slipstreaming on what Tangled achieved in 2010. And some films live on mostly because of the costumes, like the French film Donkeyskin (1971) starring Catherine Deneuve.
Other film-makers use the template of fairy tale narratives to communicate their own messages for their own time. The most popular fairy tales, retold in film after film in Europe, America, and to a much lesser extent, Asia, are Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Bluebeard – as you would expect – have been used in many different genres.
In the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, there were many shorts that parodied fairy tales for slapstick humour and occasionally for satire, e.g. Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop as Cinderella, Looney Tunes’ Little Red Riding Habit, Tex Avery’s Peachy Cobbler.
Cinderella was used to transform child star Deanna Durbin into romantic roles. Powell and Pressburger’s story told of the price of being an artist in the spellbinding Red Shoes (1948), and Jannik Hastrup extended that to look at what happens to the artist when what they have created lives beyond them in Hans Christian Andersen and the Long Shadow (1998) though it has not been translated into English, so most of us will never know how good it might be.
Political comments were made in communist era Czechoslovakia in Karel Zeman’s King Lavra (1948), a retelling of King Thrushbeard, the flood of Soviet fairy tales starting with Ivanov-Vano’s The Humpback Horse (1947), and in the French film, Paul Grimault’s The King and the Mockingbird (1979), a version of Andersen’s The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep that proclaims the values of freedom.
The world of fairy tale interpretation was transformed by Angela Carter’s book of retellings, The Bloody Chamber, which was followed by Neil Jordan’s film version, In the Company of Wolves. Horror fairy tale retellings came in the aftermath. That is probably the favourite use of fairy tales in Asia, with films such as A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) from Korea, as well as Little Otik (2000) from the Czech variant of Hans, My Hedgehog, and the American Hard Candy (2005), based on Little Red Riding Hood.
Women with power could be seen in such 21st century films as Blancanieves, a fractured version of Snow White (Spain 2012), Tale of Tales (Italy 2015), a reworking of Basile’s collection, and Green Snake (China 2021), as well as all the Add-A-Sword films like Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).
Some film-makers chose to avoid retellings in favour of creating new fairy tales specifically for film, such as Michael Ocelot’s Azur and Asmar (2006) and his Kirikou films (1998, 2005), Pan’s Labyrinth (Spain 2006) and many others.
Fairy tale films are also created to reach a particular audience, whether that be cultural – as in the massive output from Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, such as the Christmas favourite Three Nuts for Cinderella (1973), and the 2010 Chinese film of the oldest Cinderella, Yeh Shen.
For the child and family market dominated by Disney, Don Bluth, also American, created some competition in the 1980s, with films such as Swan Princess (1994) made because they believed Disney was purely motivated by avarice with no concern for art (surely not!). Disney responded with Little Mermaid (1989) to begin its renaissance. In spite of all Bluth’s efforts, it was Pixar’s Shrek (2001) that really shook up the notion of what fairy tale-themed films could be, while Studio Ghibli’s success with Princess Kaguya (2013) had a lot to do with not being in competition for the same audience.
Where does Australia lie in all of this? Very much at the rear, I’m afraid.
Australian rainforests and what was described as ‘Aboriginal mythology’ were used as the backdrop for the original environmental message movie, Fern Gully (1992), with American actors and occasional faux Aussie accents. This century, there has been the unsavoury and dreary Jane Campion fractured version of Sleeping Beauty (2011), and the Cate Blanchett-narrated short film of Sweet Tooth (2019), a retelling of Hansel and Gretel set in Europe but with Australian actors.
There are so many possibilities for what could be created next.
Further reading: Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. Routledge, 2011.
The Australian Fairy Tale Society is thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2024 AFTS Award for outstanding contributions to the field of fairy tales in Australia is Kathryn Gossow.
We greatly appreciate Kathryn’s contributions over many years:
She was a key part of the group that created and promoted the ‘South of the Sun‘ anthology – the only collection of contemporary Australian fairy tales;
Kathryn, with Anne E Stewart, liaised with the Qld Gallery of Modern Art to ensure Brisbane Fairy Tale Ring members and local storytellers participated in the unique 2023-2024 ‘Fairy Tales‘ exhibition, and to also sell ‘South of the Sun’ beside other fairy tale classics;
Liaison with the Qld Writers Centre led to a Brisbane Fairy Tale Ring panel at GenreCon 2022 and 2023;
We are thrilled to announce that thanks to the support of Hobsons Bay City Council through its Make it Happen Grants program, the opening sessions for each day of the conference will be open to the public!
That’s right, Michael Earp’s Keynote Address and our Special Guest Presentation from Jaeden Williams (Boonwurrung educator, and founder/director of Biik Bundjil) will be free for everyone to attend. PLUS Michael’s Keynote Address will be Auslan interpreted too.
However, spaces for both sessions will be limited so whether you’re coming to the whole conference or just the morning sessions with Jaeden and Michael, register now!!!
(Note: if you’ve registered for the conference, you already have a place at the Keynote and Guest Presentation)
If you’re coming from regional Victoria, interstate, or even overseas(!) we have a handy dandy welcome pack to give you a starting point to find your way to the Newport Community Hub and other nifty bits of advice. You can download the welcome pack here.
We’re undergoing a little program revision, but start and end times will not change. Be ready to start at 9:45am each day, finishing by 6:30pm AEST and 4:30pm AEST on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th respectively. That gives you plenty of time to calmly plane, train, or automobile your way home. An updated conference program will be out very, very soon…
All AFTS members will have access to the recordings of conference sessions in the future, but if you have registered (regardless of whether you’re a member, and joining in-person or online) you will get access first. So what are you waiting for, get registered and get excited for a jam-packed weekend. We can’t wait to welcome you to Newport!
And if you need a reminder, our fantastic conference artwork is by the brilliant Roslyn Quin(@roslynquinart)!
Presenter at Brisbane 2022, Sydney 2023 and Melbourne 2024 conferences
Perth Fairy Tale Ring co-leader with Christine della Vedova
Magic Mirror co-leader with Leanbh Pearson and Alexandra Larach.
Alyssa comes to us fresh from her time at Emerson College, UK, honing her storytelling skills, with her Creative Writing postgraduate under her belt.
And now she can set off on a new adventure, with her crew of able and eager members of the AFTS Committee – Vice President Em Chandler, Secretary Helen Hewitt, Treasurer and Membership Officer Diane Curran, and (not so) Ordinary Members Debs Chahila, Serene Conneeley, Jo Henwood, Priti Modyiyer, Patsy Poppenbeek, Nola Wernicke – and welcoming new Ordinary Member Gabi Brown.
Now that the ‘South of the Sun’ committee is winding down and handing over to the new ‘West of the Moon’ anthology group, Gabi is able to contribute her considerable skills and experience to the executive.
Big thanks to our 2024-2025 committee – full of talent and enthusiasm, and ready to nurture our society’s growth.
Melbourne is currently in the midst of creating the amazing Once and Future Tales conference on August 3-4. Register here!
We love getting together in person to share ideas, and enjoy each others’ company and because we are a national Society with a sprinkling of international members, some of you will be travelling considerable distance to join us.
To make that a little easier for an existing AFTS member, we offer a bursary of up to $450 to pay for transport and accommodation and the helping hand of a local ‘fairy godmother/father’ to help you find your way around Melbourne.
We want to offer this opportunity to someone who is
part of our community
might need a boost to cover the costs of getting here
will use the chance of going to the conference to continue to invest in our Society.
Australian Fairy Tale Society 