Over Water, Under Water, Magical Waters of Fairy Tales
14-15 June, 2025

2025 Sydney Conference art by Helen McCosker

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.

We are looking for:

• Talk of 20 minutes with an optional 5 minute Q&A
• 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.