Michelle J. Smith
Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
While popularly misunderstood as “universal” and “timeless”, fairy tales are strongly embedded within the values of the time and place in which they are told. Early Australian fairy tales did not develop from enduring local oral or literary traditions as in Europe but were most often written by white settlers, as First Nations peoples were dispossessed, and their ways of life displaced. These literary tales provided origin stories for Australia’s natural features, explained the history of the land, and attempted to familiarise child readers with native flora and fauna.
The first Australian fairy tales were retellings of British and European tales that were transferred into bush or outback settings. The Three Koala Bears and Little Goldilocks: An Australian Fairy Tale, published in the early 1930s, is one of the most remarkable of these stories as it is oriented around still photographs of the interactions between a live girl actress and several koalas placed in staged situations. The images were taken by Cinesound, an early Australian film production company. The written text introduces the reader to a once upon a time in which “three little Australian bears” lived in the bush eating gum leaves and drinking “milk from little white bowls”. Goldilocks now resides on the edge of the bush and as expected, consumes the bears’ food, apart from the unappealing gum leaves. The final page of the book includes information about the characteristics and diet of “Australia’s National Pet”. Whether because of the perception of the fairy tale as a valuable educational tool, or the genre’s common depictions of animals and forest settings, colonial fairy tales commonly sought to explain local natural environments.
A quest for the origins
Olga Ernst’s Fairy Tales from the Land of the Wattle (1904) is one of several fairy-tale collections that sought to provide origin stories for natural features. “The Origin of the Wattle” locates a “race of fairies, called ‘The Children of the Lake’” in the interior regions of Australia surrounding Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) in South Australia. While today it is a salt lake, the story observes that the area was once “fruitful and productive” but that the plains gradually became “barren and desolate”. The fairies are at risk of perishing with the loss of plants and animals, and the only solution to their survival rests with Oberon, the king of the fairy tribes, who might change their form to spare them from death. The beautiful fairies look like “lovely golden balls” as they float between the trees with their golden hair. Oberon changes the fairies into seeds, which are distributed by birds into the state of Victoria during bushfires. The seeds grow into wattle trees, with the blossoms of the golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha) becoming an iconic Australian symbol.
The use of fairies is a clear illustration of how early Australian fairy tales reframed the environment through the perspective of white settlers
The use of Oberon and unnamed blonde-haired fairies is a clear illustration of how early Australian fairy tales reframed the environment through the perspective of white settlers, specifically through the importation of characters from British and European traditions.
Who’s afraid of the big bad bunyip?
Ernst’s description of the fairies as a “race” that inhabited Australia’s interior in the seeming absence of First Nations people is typical of the genre in the colonial period. Mary Hannay Foott’s Butha and the Bunyip: An Australian Little Red Riding Hood (1891), however, is
unique in that it depicts First Nations characters and their engagement with Country (an aboriginal term for the land to which they are connected). Foott’s protagonist is an Aboriginal girl named Butha who lives with her parents in a region filled with animals to hunt, such as wallabies, bandicoots and possums. On an overnight journey to bring food to her grandmother, Butha discovers a trail of blood after a man’s tracks and eventually discovers the cause of his injury: a bunyip. This creature, which fills the role of the wolf, originates in First Nations mythology: the bunyip is amphibious and is feared for preying on animals and children, particularly near lakes, rivers, waterholes, or billabongs.
Foott’s protagonist resembles Little Red Riding Hood variants in which the girl is a trickster who can outwit the wolf: Butha placates the hungry, threatening bunyip with its “long-snake bill”, by offering him various items of food from her bag. In a cultural climate in which First Nations people were seen as in need of white “protection” and modernisation, “Butha and the Bunyip” maps a familiar story of survival in the face of the dangers of the European forest onto the bush and highlights the ways in which First Nations people were highly practiced in obtaining plentiful resources from the lands on which they lived.
An anthropomorphic koala
European tale traditions were transplanted onto new soil in Australia during the colonial period. Across approximately forty years, Australian authors cultivated an explicit relationship between the environment, national identity, and fairy tales for children. Yet the Australian children’s fairy tale was a comparatively short-lived phenomenon that had largely disappeared by the 1930s. Instead of reproducing imported fairy-tale characters and stories, Australian children’s authors began to write their own original fantasy stories set in the bush, such as May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books about the “gumnut babies” (which began in 1918) and Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill books, which featured an anthropomorphic koala (which began in 1933).
From the 1930s, Australian authors began to write their own original fantasy stories set in the bush
Today, Australian authors for both adults and children are once again drawing on fairy-tale tradition in their fiction, including Kate Forsyth and Margo Lanagan. One noticeable difference is that First Nations voices are now visible in the genre, as exemplified by Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013): in an apocalyptic future, an Aboriginal young woman is found in a gum tree, mute and with no memory, ten years after she disappeared. It is a far cry from the golden-haired fairies of Australia’s early tales.
