You are invited to The Australian Fairy Tale Society their first-ever storytelling concert – Stories of Light and Love! Come along on February 22nd, 2024 at 7:30 AEDT on Zoom to celebrate 10 years of the AFTS. Hear stories of welcome firelight and new dawns. Tales of what happens when there’s no light in the deep dark wood… Where loves are found, lost, and muddled!

This 90-minute concert will be welcoming and inclusive of everyone, and better still – it’s free!

The Australian Fairy Tale Society has launched many projects, events, and products, but the bones of what we do lie within the five fairy tales we explore in depth each year.  In the last ten years (due to a few twinned investigations) we have actually looked at closer to sixty stories.  For a long time we were content to look at what you might call the ‘Fairy Tale Greatest Hits’  – Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, Jack & the Beanstalk and so on – but then in 2019 we tackled our first Australian fairy tale and from then on we have settled into a pattern of

One Grimms

One Australian

One well known European (Andersen, Perrault, Arabian Nights etc)

One obscure European

One non-European

which has pushed us to explore the folkloric and literary heritage of many cultures, and continue to re-evaluate what a fairy tale is, and how stories from around the world connect with us.  If you want to immerse yourself in the fruits of our research, you can find all the Bibliographies and Points to Ponder for those sixty stories in our Members Only section.

Without doubt, finding and researching the Australian fairy tales is the biggest challenge.  There aren’t that many, with the two periods of fruitfulness occurring right now, and in the 1870s to 1920s, when what the writers called fairy tales were usually fairy stories anyway, which have attracted very little scholarly interest until recent years.   And let’s not ignore the diprotodon in the room – the horrific Aboriginal misrepresentation, and simultaneous cultural appropriation, that is present in every story from that early period.  The hardest of all was the first story we looked at, ‘The Magic Gun’, while the most fun was Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, especially once we saw the sexual meanings underlying the character dynamics.

The final two fairy tales for this financial year include our Aussie tale (usually done over the summer when you should have more reading time) as a rare example of an original Australian fairy tale.  Published in 1999, just when Juliet Marillier and Sophie Masson (both now AFTS members) were beginning their internationally-acclaimed work in retelling fairy tales.   Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, so you know the writing will be beautiful, the big question will be –

is it really a fairy tale?

Our April fairy tale, ‘The Stolen Bairn and the Sidhe’, builds on our November ‘Elves’ investigation.  It is a Scottish or Irish story of a baby who is taken by the sidhe (faerie) into the underworld and the mother who goes after her child in a quest in the spirit of Orpheus and Eurydice, or Tam Lin. A perfect story to lead up to Mothers’ Day.

Our 2024- 2025 financial year starts in June with another five stories.  This year the theme emerges as rather beastly, in contrast to all the brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers we’ve dealt with over the last year.

‘The Ebony Horse’ (Arabian Nights) is a grand adventure, starting with a sultan so obsessed with gadgets that he is lured into handing over his daughter in exchange for a mechanical, flying horse. His son objects, takes the horse, and is swept away to another land and another princess in need.  (Aladdin is the only other Arabian Nights story we’ve done so far.)

In contrast, we have the Russian story of ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ where Ivan the foolish grants freedom to a remarkable horse and wins instead the little humpbacked horse who helps him face the three impossible tasks set by the Tsar.  This is our third Russian story (‘Vasilisa the Fair’, and ‘Tsarevitch Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf’) and was made especially popular in Russia by a Pepita ballet.

These are the stories we’ll be exploring leading up to Horses’ Birthday on 1 August.

In September, we have the great Chinese love story (one of the Four Great Chinese Folktales) of ‘Lady White Snake’ where a mortal man and a snake spirit in the form of a beautiful woman, confront life, death, transformation, jealousy, and pills of immortality, so that they can be together.

Snakes again in November (I told you it was a beastly year) with the Grimms’ story of ‘Three Snake Leaves’.  As soon as the princess makes a condition of marriage that if she dies, her new husband must be buried with her, you know that marriage isn’t going to equal Happily Ever After for these two.  For a while it seems as if this is going to be another tale of deathless love, but a sea journey brings another threat to life, true love, and immortality.   Will this be a good Halloween story?

As the Keynote Speaker at our 2016 conference, Into the Bush: Its Beauty and Its Terror, Jackie Kerin led us through many paths following the many traces of the bunyip in the overlapping cultures of our land…and so, at long last, we look at the very simple story of ‘The Bunyip’ as it appears in Andrew (and Nora) Lang’s Brown Fairy Book, as a starting point for all this creature has come to represent.

The tale of ‘Kovlad: The Lost Child’, our first-ever Slavic story (though they are closely related to Russian fairy tales), starts with a much-longed-for child, a taboo that is (of course) broken, and the haunting that follows.  Don’t worry!  There are three sisters who will try to break
the curse.

Our final story of ‘The Glass Coffin’ by the Grimms might
recall Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, with a beautiful maiden waiting to be liberated from her coffin by love (a gender flip of ‘The Lost Child’), but this one also features a poor tailor lured down into the depths, and a battle
between a stag and a boar. 

With every story we investigate we learn more about the language of fairy tales, the meanings that are built into their imagery, and the relationship between written and oral tales around the world.  May this coming year bring you ever more stories to appreciate, understand, and be inspired by.

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

The Australian Fairy Tale Society is thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2023 AFTS Award for outstanding contributions to the field of fairy tales in Australia is Shirley Way.

Shirley Way has contributed immensely to the fairy tale community in so many ways over so many years – as former eZine editor, initiator of the podcast series (to be found on the AFTS youtube channel), member of the Brisbane Fairy Tale Ring, hardworking, skilled, and insightful Committee member, co-organiser of the AFTS conferences in 2020 and 2023, as well as captain of the hugely successful 2022 conference in Brisbane.

Congratulations Shirley!

Shirley’s co-nominees were:

Sophie Masson
www.sophiemassonauthor.com

This year, Sophie – with previous winner Lorena Carrington – launched a small indie publishing company, Pardalote Press, to get their magical stories and artworks out into the world.

Sophie’s book ‘French Fairy Tales’, which is illustrated by Lorena, inspired musician/composer Reilly McCarron to produce a CD, ‘Il était une fois’ (Once upon a time). And these three AFTS members are part of our anthology, ‘South of the Sun: Australian fairy tales for the 21st century’.

Sophie’s tales and passion for fairy tales have inspired art, music and readers around the world. Her body of work includes ‘French Fairy Tales’, ‘Satin’, ‘The Crystal Heart’, ‘Scarlet in the Snow’, ‘Moonlight and Ashes’, ‘The Firebird’, and ‘Hunter’s Moon’.

Spike Deane
www.spikedeane.com

An award-winning mixed media artist, specialising in cast glass, Spike draws much of her inspiration from fairy tales, folklore and mythology. Her prolific contributions to Australian fairy tale culture span from the old forests of Europe to engaging with chatbot, and an array of beautiful art in between.

Spike has volunteered her time, energy and skills as the AFTSeZine graphics editor since 2016.