With just five weeks to go, we’ve released Helen McCosker‘s stunning artwork on conference merchandise at our Red Bubble store.
While there, browse all the other incredible art from our talented members: Lorena Carrington, Erin-Claire Barrow, Debra Phillips, Helen Hewitt, Sue Khoo, Zoya Makarova and more.
Our keynote speaker Demelza Carlton is an internationally celebrated author, who’ll make her only Sydney appearance at our conference, Over Water, Under Water, Magical Waters of Fairy Tales!
Joining her will be acclaimed fairy tale writers Kate Forsyth and Kell Woods, and a range of authors and academics, storytellers and psychologists, artists and other performers, and all the fairy tale enthusiasts from around the country, at a beautiful ocean-facing site in the water-based city of Sydney.
For the full list of presenters and topics, please visit our conference page.
Register now for our June 14-15 conference at Prince Henry Centre, Little Bay, Sydney. (Please note, sessions run 10am-6pm each day.)
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.
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)!
Registrations have opened for our 2024 conference – register here for what is going to be a jam-packed two-day conference on August 3 & 4 in Newport.
And what better way to kick off the announcements of this year’s presenters – and the conference as a whole – than with our Keynote Speaker… Michael Earp!
Michael Earp is a non-binary writer and bookseller living in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). They are editor of, and contributor to Everything Under the Moon: Fairy tales in a queerer light, Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories, Out-Side: Queer Words and Art from Regional Victoria and co-edited Avast! Pirate Stories From Transgender Authors with Alison Evans. Their writing has also appeared in Archer, The Age, PopMatters, The Victorian Writer, Aurealis and Underdog: #LoveOzYA Short Stories. For over twenty years they have worked between bookselling and publishing as a children’s and young adult specialist. Their role managing The Little Bookroom, the world’s oldest children’s bookstore saw them named ABA Bookseller of the year. A passionate advocate for LGBTQIA+ literature for young people, they established the #AusQueerYA Tumblr to catalogue all Australian young adult fiction containing queer content and characters. Representation of all people in the literature available to readers of all ages is the ethos that motivates their entire career. They have a Masters in Children’s Literature and a Teaching degree and previously served as committee chair for the #LoveOzYA campaign. Tea is the source of all their power.
In the coming weeks, plenty more presenters and other titbits and teasers will be announced. But don’t wait around, put August 3-4 in your diary and register now! We can’t welcome you to Newport for what will be a full-to-burst, exciting, diverse, and all-around fantastic conference. And don’t forget, if you can’t get to the whole weekend, don’t fret! There are single-day registrations and online attendee registrations.
“Once upon a time” takes us into a place where time moves differently.
Fairy tales allow us to time travel to the past and scry into the future, uncovering lessons from what once was and paving the way for what might be. We can create conversations with our ancestors, premonitions for our descendants, and dreams of our here and now. Like King Arthur and Finn Macool, what tales lie waiting for our clarion call? And which, like Briar Rose, must be put to sleep for a spell?
Through folk and fairy tales we stitch together motif and memory, epics and anecdotes creating letters from the past to the future. But how do we hold these tales in our hearts here and now?
Do we tell stories because they have happened or because, maybe, they are yet to be?
“Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories
not of atoms.”
October 1-2, 2022 at Brisbane’s South Bank precinct
The Australian Fairy Tale Society investigates and creates fairy tales from an Australian perspective. Local Fairy Tale Rings gather in person and via Zoom to explore specific fairy tales. We have mined rich themes at previous conferences, and celebrate members’ talents through our eZine and a new anthology, ‘South of the Sun: Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century’.
Invitation
As always our focus is on the Australian interpretation of fairy tales, particularly contemporary multicultural, diverse Australia. As AFTS Conference-goers delight in diversity, we are looking for –
Talks of no more than 25 minutes, including Q&A
Case studies of projects, with a fairy tale basis
Performances of no more than 10 minutes, with an option for 5 minutes’ Q&A
Panel discussions of no more than 25 minutes, including Q&A
Stalls to sell your merchandise.
Feel free to contact us with a new idea. We want to celebrate your creativity not stifle it!
Proposals
By midnight May 6, 2022, please submit your proposal using the online form. This will include –
Name/s
Email address and phone
Bio (max 150 words)
Type of presentation (as above)
Title / Topic, plus a 100-200 word description
Your experience in delivering this material or something similar
Resources … a) that you will provide, b) that the AFTS needs to supply.
What happens next
If your presentation is accepted for the conference, we will ask you to provide –
A colour photograph in high resolution, preferably a close-up of your face, for the program
A two-paragraph introduction which can be used by the MC
Permission to video-record your presentation for later access by AFTS members. (This will be subject to grant funding.)
Permission to use the material you have given us, including your photograph, in any conference promotions. If this includes media interviews, we will discuss this with you first.
Permission to use elements from your presentation (e.g. photos, summaries, links to your publications) in future AFTS publications, such as the eZine. We will discuss these needs as they arise.
We intend to respond to your submissions by the end of June, in order to announce the program in July 2022.
Benefits
The joy of sharing your fairy tale passion with like-minded enthusiasts.
A discount to the conference, and a gift of an annual membership. You will need to complete forms for both of these.
Want updates?
Sign up to receive the latest 2022 Conference news. (This feature is coming soon.)
8 June 2020 9am – 4.30pm Heffernan Hall, Hannaford Community Centre, 608 Darling St, Rozelle NSW 2039
Please submit your proposal (Subject heading: Conference Proposal 2020) to austfairytales@gmail.com by midnight 14 February 2020.
The imagery of fairy tales is as potent as any spell,
whether through the power of the words to conjure carriages made of pumpkins or
blue bearded villains, or the art that can present those words to our sight in
illustrations, sculptures, jewellery, costumes, photography, paintings, food
decoration, masks, puppetry, automata, garden design, doll houses, toys,
quilts, and all manner of other arts.
The Australian Fairy Tale Society was established to
investigate, create, and communicate fairy tales from an Australian
perspective. Our previous conferences
have been on The Fairy Tale in Australia, Transformations, Into the Bush, So
Many Mattresses, and Gardens of Good and Evil.
Local Rings gather five times a year to explore specific fairy
tales. We have an irregular Ezine and
are working hard at creating an original Anthology, South of the Sun:
Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century.https://www.pozible.com/project/south-of-the-sun-1
In our 6th annual conference we want to look (pun intended!) more closely at these visual and artistic representations in Magic Mirrors: the Seen and the Unseen, and we invite you to submit proposals for what you could present at our conference in a variety of forms, because diversity is one of the delights of an AFTS conference.
We are looking for:
Talks of 20 minutes talk with an option
for 5 minutes Q & A. It is possible
that, if we receive many high quality submissions, we may invite several people
to collaborate in a joint presentation.
Please indicate if that would not be acceptable to you.
Performances of storytelling, puppetry,
theatre, singing, music, dance, etc, of no more than 10 minutes performance
with an option for 5 minutes Q&A.
Please include either a video or audio clip of your performance or the
name of an AFTS or Storytelling Guild member who can act as a referee for your
performances. We could also arrange an
audition time.
Panel presentations or discussions of no
more than 25 minutes total including Q & A.
Workshops (eg art, writing, storytelling,
puppetry, gardening, cake decorating etc) of no more than 30 minutes total
including set up time. These might be
for a family audience if Inner West Council wants to open these sessions to the
public, or might be exclusively for the adults attending the conference.
Displays of your books, art, puppets,
toys, costumes, etc for sale, or to decorate Heffernan Hall.
Feel free to contact us with a new idea!
Here are some possible themes you could explore:
Art
How Australian and international artists have
interpreted fairy tales.
How Australian artists (of all formats, of all
cultures) could interpret fairy tales.
The use of Australian imagery in fairy tale
interpretation.
Perceptions of
Character and identity.
Relationships – between characters and
archetypes in stories; fairy tale family dynamics; relationship of Australian
fairy tale arts to international works and to multicultural Australian arts.
Truth, deception, unreliability.
Future – hope and fear, beauty and destruction.
Scenes (as well as Seen) – how stories have been
and can be structured and arranged to shape responses, how perceptions can be
changed.
Reflections
The heart as a mirror.
Seeing ourselves, our families, our cultural
representations, in classic and contemporary fairy tales eg representations of
people with disabilities, various cultural backgrounds, LBGTI representations,
age, “beauty”, etc.
Past – negotiating our history in representing
what is Australian.
Reversals of fortune and perception.
Duality
Binaries in fairy tales: male and female, young and old, life and
death, good and evil, light and dark, world and underworld etc.
Multicultural identities in Australia and
Australian arts and stories.
Costumes, masks, theatrical representations of
fairy tales and fairy tale characters.
False representations in fairy tale creators eg
the Grimms and their ”folk collections”, Andrew and Nora Lang, Australian fairy
tale writers using English or Aboriginal sources.
Fairy tale mirrors
Eg In Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Snow Queen, Mirror
of Matsuyama (Theodora Yei), The Magic Mirror (a Turkish version of The
Firebird), The Three Brothers (Arabian), and how
these relate to Australian culture.
Australian fairy tale retellings
How Australian fairy tale re tellings have or could reflect self, nation, the world.
SUBMISSIONS
As always, and in accordance with our Objectives, our focus
is on the Australian interpretation of fairy tales, particularly
contemporary multicultural, diverse Australia.
Including any elements of participation will be positively
regarded.
Please submit your proposal (Subject heading: Conference Proposal 2020) to austfairytales@gmail.com by midnight 03 February 2020:
A summary of 100-200 words of what you will
communicate and how you will present this.
Bio of max 150 words
Your experience in communicating or investigating this material.
Any special needs for your presentation or expectations of what we
should provide including AV.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
If your presentation is accepted for the conference we will
ask you to provide:
A colour photo in high
resolution, preferably a close-up of your face, suitable for inclusion in a
printed programme.
An introduction which
can be used by the MC.
Permission to use the
material you have given us, including your photograph, in any conference promotions.
If this includes interviews with radio stations or other media we will discuss
this with you first.
Permission to use
elements from your presentation eg photographs, summaries, links to your
publications in future AFTS publications, such as the Ezine. We will discuss these needs as they arise.
Your conference registration will be discounted to $75
including your annual AFTS membership fee for 2020-2021.
We intend to respond to your submissions by the end of February in order to announce the program in March 2020.
“So Many Mattresses: Truth, Reality, Fiction On A European Bed”
Would we recognise an Australian fairy tale if it came to our doorstep, lacking robes of “once upon a time”, looking a little bedraggled? How do we sort truths from transplants?
Many “mattresses” have unrolled in Australia – historical, cultural, interpretative, creative – and more await stimulation by that provocative pea (or gumnut), inducing dreams and imaginings.
Awaken to the kiss of curiosity! What lies beneath? How might you respond, or create your own?
Learn! Create! Meet! Explore! Discuss! Enjoy!
Join us as we venture into layers of possibility…
What:Australian Fairy Tale Society 4th Annual Conference, as part of the 2017 Glen Eira Storytelling Festival
Who:All adults welcome. We are a national, intercultural, intergenerational, interdisciplinary non-profit group, also a registered charity. We focus on collecting, preserving, discussing, sharing and creating Australian fairy tales. Our aim is to encourage academics, writers, artists, performers and enthusiasts from around the country to network and share all things fairy tale through a national website, annual conferences and local fairy tale rings.
Cost:
$65 members of the Australian Fairy Tale Society ($25 to join)
Michael Earp is a non-binary writer and bookseller living in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). They are editor of, and contributor to Everything Under the Moon: Fairy tales in a queerer light, Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories, Out-Side: Queer Words and Art from Regional Victoria and co-edited Avast! Pirate Stories From Transgender Authors with Alison Evans. Their writing has also appeared in Archer, The Age, PopMatters, The Victorian Writer, Aurealis and Underdog: #LoveOzYA Short Stories. For over twenty years they have worked between bookselling and publishing as a children’s and young adult specialist. Their role managing The Little Bookroom, the world’s oldest children’s bookstore saw them named ABA Bookseller of the year. A passionate advocate for LGBTQIA+ literature for young people, they established the #AusQueerYA Tumblr to catalogue all Australian young adult fiction containing queer content and characters. Representation of all people in the literature available to readers of all ages is the ethos that motivates their entire career. They have a Masters in Children’s Literature and a Teaching degree and previously served as committee chair for the #LoveOzYA campaign. Tea is the source of all their power.
Australian Fairy Tale Society 