'Dreaming
the Place' - My Introduction to Once Upon a Time in Oz - Griffith Review Number 42, December 2013
Once upon a time – and the story
begins. Story is one of the most powerful tools in the minds of human beings,
having deep and far-reaching cultural and political significance. It depends on
language and imagination, two other precious tools. It works its magic by its
music. Once upon a time Australia ‘existed’ only in the imaginations of people
in the northern hemisphere. It was an alluring dream, perhaps, or a myth, a
paradise to be desired, a Great South Land below the equator, balancing the
world, but unknown. Then explorers came by sea and gradually discovered the solid
reality of the land mass, and bit by bit they mapped the coastline. Myth was
then, and is now, never far from the surface in Australia. It is nourished by
fact, explained and embellished by fiction, spoken and written, and in its turn
it informs the way lives are lived and perceived.
One of my personal favourite
tales of early historical Australian myth is the story of the Portuguese sailor
Pedro Fernandez de Quiros who came in search of the Great South Land in 1605.
He found Vanuatu, but believed it to be the place he sought. He named it
Australia Del Espiritu Santo. So far the story is romantic but not really
extraordinary, so why do I like it so much? Well, there’s more. In the
nineteenth century, Archbishop Moran of Sydney believed that de Quiros had in
fact discovered Australia, had named it as the land of the Holy Spirit, and had
established the New Jerusalem near Gladstone in Queensland. This lovely
Australian yarn was taught as historical fact in Australian Catholic schools
for many years. I am not really being critical of the Archbishop, I look upon
him tenderly, admiring his fine Irish ability to work so boldly with fairy tale
to strengthen the faith of his flock. Yes,
yes, children, you are living in the land of the Holy Spirit. Happy ever after.
Of course I have here taken the Archbishop into a little narrative of my own,
weaving his fiction into my fiction and coming up with a smile and a shamrock.
The stories that resonate and
lodge in a culture are, after all, the expression of desires.
Already I have used several terms
for ‘story’. There are some distinctions to be made between, say, myths and
legends, fables and parables and fairy tales, sagas, folk tales, and yarns,
some genres depending on heroes, some on journeys, some on morals, some on
magic, but finally, they are all stories of some kind. So I’m not too fussed
here by fine distinctions. I am really looking at what I call ‘common’ stories,
stories that are not strictly the property of anyone in particular, but of
humanity itself. And then I will consider some stories invented in Australia,
stories that express aspects of life that appeal to Australians, and that in
their turn express the feeling of the country. I will look at how some of these
stories appear to sit in the culture of Australia.
Australia is a story as well as a
place. Aboriginal Australians see nothing unusual in that statement. From a
fantasy paradise of pearls and spices, waiting to be discovered in the southern
seas below the magical mirror of the equator, to the huge island reality of
today, with all that has happened here in the meantime, (oh, all that has
happened!), Australia has been and continues to be imagined and told from the
outside. It has been imagined and told also from the inside, taking into the
story a vast number of narratives from – well, it seems to me, from everywhere.
Some of these narratives resonate more loudly at one time than another, but the
story is going on all the time. At this point I stop and ask myself – how is
all this different from what goes on elsewhere? And I believe there is perhaps an
answer to be found in the way the Aboriginal place was telling itself for at
least those sixty-thousand years, while outside other people were dreaming
about it. Then in recent times, starting, say, in 1788, those other people
began to come here to live, and brought with them narratives from afar. The
shocking, defining moment in 1788 when the First Fleet landed fractures the
backbone of the story, and sets off a whole galaxy of further plots and
subplots that continue to play out.
In 2013, in the pharmacy of a
central Victorian town, I asked for a bottle of camomile shampoo. The
pharmacist’s assistant skipped across the shop floor to get it from the shelf,
singing: ‘Hi ho! Hi ho! It’s off to work we go!’ She laughed; I laughed. We
both got the reference, which was not particularly apt, but we were strangers
suddenly drawn together by the marching dwarves in Disney’s Snow White,
an animated movie from 1937 based on an old European fairy tale. This is a
banal anecdote, yet I set it out here because it is a quick illustration of one
of the ways ancient stories enter cultures, lodge in the imagination, and are
reinforced by rituals and reminders. Neither the girl in the pharmacy nor I
could have cared less right then about the princess and the wicked queen and
the mirror and the apple, not to mention the prince, yet the story really was
present in our brief moment of contact. We were in fact in the grip of the fairy
tale, strangely in thrall to magic. There in regional Australia, in the
twenty-first century, we were reacting to a slender reference to a nineteenth
century re-telling of a gruesome German story, as again retold in film and song.
2012 was the 200th anniversary
of the publication of those old stories collected and retold in German by Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm. Amid the worldwide celebrations I reflected on the fact that
there is much scholarship and other publication on the subject of fairy tales,
particularly in North America and Britain, but that in Australia, although
there is a vigorous interest, including the Fairy Tale Salon at Monash
University, there isn’t so much local exposure and publication. Griffith
Review 42 provides the forum for local writers to reflect on the
history and significance of all manner of old stories in the context of modern Australia,
a place of many, many cultures, and has given the writers inspiration to create
new fairy tales of their own, sometimes revising old tales, experimenting with
them, putting a new spin on them. The anniversary of the Grimm stories was the trigger
for a broad investigation of how old stories have lodged in Australian culture,
and how stories tell the country and the culture. Irrespective of genre, what are
the tales that pre-occupy, entertain and guide the culture today in the land of
Oz? And how did they make their way here? What has happened to them here, over
time?
Wherever people go they carry
their personal and cultural stories with them. Storytelling is a mechanism for
reflecting on what it is to be human in time and space. Storytelling consists
of the story and the telling, and the
telling must be to a degree an entertainment. The stories in question here are
tales that mingle, in strange and seamless ways, the natural and the
supernatural, but there are also plainer stories, less magical narratives that
have lodged in the story of the country. Once upon a time in Australia. All
cultures retell and refine the key narratives that speak to the heart. These
are the narratives that carry darkness and light, good and evil, instructing,
by the magic of words, all human beings in the truths of their own existence.
Many ‘common’ stories take their elements from real events in the lives of the
tellers, hence the Biblical story of a great flood, or the poverty and famine
that give rise to such cruelty in the story of Hansel and Gretel.
The
first people in Australia, the people with the first stories, are the
Aboriginal people who have been here for at least sixty-thousand years. The
time, however long it might be, is known by Aboriginal people to be forever, a
time that stretches into the future as well as into the past – a fantastic
circle of time. Aborigines have a story of a great flood, as do many cultures, a
story well documented in rock art. The Flood, based in history, has become a
motif in the narratives of many cultures, and is a sacred story in some. Current
archeological wisdom puts Australian Aboriginal rock art as the most ancient
art on the planet. Having said that, I pause for breath. And there, in the
pictorial telling, is the story of the Flood. Considering that Europeans have
been here only since 1788, and that non-Europeans have come later, the Aboriginal
people have what I might call the home ground of the Australian story.
Aboriginal people developed and preserved their legends as oral stories, as
images, as dance, as ceremony, as ritual, and as visual art. Throughout the
country there is a general pattern to the narratives, but details vary from
place to place – place being central to the stories. These stories, sacred to
the lands and peoples who are their custodians, are, as I see the matter, a
vast hum and whisper of wisdom behind, around, within the fabric of modern
Australia. Because the stories are sacred, they are owned by their people, and
are not always available to be made public in the ordinary way. This makes them
even more powerful. There are creation myths, nature myths, and tales that
dramatise the beauty and strangeness of everyday life. And although the
resolution of a story may be an explanation of some natural phenomenon, the
dreadful human passions found in stories across all cultures are also found in
the Aboriginal narratives. You can see the jealousy, hatred and rage of some
characters in European fairy tales coming out in the story of ‘The Flowers of
Blood’, which also works with the motif of the doomed lovers. It isn’t so far
from Shakespeare. The beginning of the story has the arbitrary feeling of many
a European tale, and has the concision of a Bible story. The violence and
retribution also are familiar tropes from all the storytellers of the world,
yet the whole narrative is beautifully stamped with the tone of an Aboriginal
legend.
Here
is the story:
‘The
elders decided that a young girl would marry a coarse old man of the tribe. Now
the girl not only hated the old man, but she was planning to marry a fine young
man from another tribe in the east. The lovers eloped and fled to the land of
his people where they set up camp beside a lake. They lived happily and almost
forgot all about the old man. But the jealousy of that man grew until he
assembled his own people and attacked the tribe where the lovers were living,
planning to take the young woman for himself. Everybody, including the woman, was
killed, their blood staining the ground all around bright red. After a year the
old man returned to the place to gloat over the skeletons of his victims. But
all he found was a carpet of scarlet flowers with great big black eyes. These flowers
had grown from the blood of the dead, and showed that the spirits of the dead
were still active and powerful. When he tried to flee, a spear came flying out
of a cloud and struck him lifeless to the ground. The tears of the spirits
changed the sweet lake to salt, and now the man and the spear that killed him
are just little stones on the shore of the water. Every year the Flowers of
Blood bloom in memory of the lovers.’
The
Flowers of Blood are now known to gardeners as Sturt’s Desert Pea, and are the
floral emblem of South Australia. I chose to tell that story because I love it,
but also because the flowers introduce to my narrative the name of
Charles Sturt, one of the men who explored the Australian continent. The
nineteenth century explorers, who moved inland from the coastal areas to map
the rivers and mountains and deserts, created a key narrative of this country,
the explorer narrative. Charles Sturt was an explorer who lived to tell the tale.
Robert Burke and William Wills both of whom died on their journey, and Ludwig
Leichhardt who actually disappeared, never to be seen again, during his search
for a great inland sea, are much more romantic, are the stuff of legend,
forming motifs that are sometimes revisited in the imaginations of Australian
writers.
Writers,
I mustn’t forget, have a key role in the invention, development and preservation
of the stories that inform, haunt and perhaps shape the way people in Australia
make and perceive their culture. The disappearance of Leichhardt was the
inspiration for the novel Voss by Patrick White, a legendary Australian
writer, and this novel must be acknowledged as an Australian classic. In 2013,
when the hard copy printed word is giving way to electronic media, when film,
for one thing, is more current than books, Voss remains unfilmed,
although it has been produced as an opera. When, in a mythic future, it does
make it to the screen, it will further deepen the grip that the story of the doomed
explorer has on the story that is Australia.
The
land itself has often been a character in the story, a land envisaged as vast
and strange and dangerous. For to begin with, in 1788, when people came from
English cities to take unlawful possession of the Aboriginal lands of
Australia, the land put up its own resistance. The prison colony clung to the
eastern shore, established in the name of the English king. But beyond the borders
of the colony was a frightening world, its forests and deserts could and did
swallow up not just explorers, but in particular, little children. This was
not, after all, the paradise dreamt by the fantasists who longed for the Great
South Land of jewels and palm trees, this was a nightmare that struck terror
into the heart.
The
lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the
heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia
the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes,
there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are
mirror images of each other. And the landscape of Australia played and plays
its part in them, nourishing the anxiety, proving the validity of the fear. Australia,
raw, rough and wild, where the people were already cut off from home by thousands
of miles of ocean, was the perfect place for children to disappear, for the
future to go missing. ‘Babes in the Wood’,
‘Hansel and Gretel’, are just two common European oral narratives that speak to
this theme, and they were carried here in some form by the people who came in
1788. In Australian folklore there is a most interesting hero who sometimes
emerges – the Aboriginal tracker who recovers the children and returns them to
their parents. The most heart-breaking and haunting of these stories are the
ones where the children are never found. The stories collected by the Grimms and
published in 1812 were brought here in translation by the educators of the
colony in the early part of the nineteenth century, but many of the narratives were
familiar in some form long before the collection was made.
‘Red
Riding Hood’, a very ancient and seemingly universal narrative, is retold by
the Grimms, and is a warning to girls to keep out of the forest, for the wolf
who lurks there will rape them and eat them. So it sits well in Australia
alongside all the stories, fairy tale and non-fiction, of the dangers of the
bush. The sad thing about this story, I think, is that its message has never
really taken. For girls continue to listen to the wolf, and to stray from the
straight and narrow, sometimes going to their doom. Girls will be girls and
wolves will be wolves. The streets of the city are now a perfect stand-in for
the paths of the forest, and although the story of Red Riding-Hood is told over
and over again, and children’s eyes widen with horror at the sight of the wolf,
it seems to make no difference. The girl in the story is usually resurrected,
perhaps undercutting the dreadful warning.
All
over the world children disappear, but I think I am right in observing that in
Australia, probably because of the early experience of the vulnerability of the
children, the narrative has a special edge and flavour. In 1980 a white baby girl
disappeared from a camper’s tent near the vast red rock of Uluru in the centre
of the continent, and was never seen again. Her mother knew she had been taken
and eaten by a wild dog, a dingo, but the mother was not believed and was
herself convicted of killing the baby and concealing the body, and was
imprisoned. After three years in prison, the mother was exonerated and was released
from prison. On a scale of terrible true stories, this is one of the worst. If
you are looking for demons, there’s the dog of course, but worse than the dog
is the society whose legal system allowed the mother to be cruelly punished for
her own tragedy. Once upon a time in Australia. I think that if this story were
not true, it could scarcely be imagined.
Then
there’s the matter of Joan Lindsay’s novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock,
published in 1967 and made into a movie in 1975. The movie has had the effect
of lodging the narrative in the imaginations of people all over the world,
including Australia. On St Valentine’s Day 1900, the demonic Australian bush
swallows up a group of beautiful young women who are never to be found. So far,
so mythic. But the wonderful particularity of this whole thing is that many
many people believe the story to be true. People will swear they have read
accounts of it in old newspapers. And,
you see, in the world of Ludwig Leichhardt and the baby at Uluru, it could be
true. Once upon a time in Australia. In 1966 three children, Jane, Arnna and
Grant Beaumont disappeared forever from a sunny beach in South Australia. Such
things happen.
They
feed into the story of the country, the story Australians tell themselves about
themselves, and the story the outside world tells about Australia.
I am
interested in how easily the words ‘the outside world’ slipped into that
sentence. I wonder if I feel there is an ‘inside world’ because Australia is an
island, because it is geographically far from older cultures, even though the
Aboriginal culture of Australia is the oldest in the world. Perhaps the short
time between now and 1788 is also a factor in cutting and containing the place.
Is Australia embattled? Threatened by
the outside world? As I write, there is a heated, complex and omnipresent
debate about how Australia as a country should treat the many people who are desperate
refugees from other countries. Should they simply be welcomed and assimilated?
Should they be put in special camps here? Should they be put in camps out on
islands off the mainland of Australia? Should they be allowed to drown? What to
do? Who is in and who is out? I think
the perception of inside and outside is quite common among Australians. Do
other people, say, Americans, Chinese imagine in this way that there is an
outside world from which they must be rigorously protected? Do they think like
that? I believe it’s quite tricky and dangerous to generalize about people, to
say Australians believe this or that, Americans believe the other. But it is
possible to examine the narratives that seem to capture the popular imagination,
and to say that these are the stories that might make up some of the fabric of
Australia. The narratives of inside and outside are found in many of those
stories.
Many
of the stories told to children in Australia today have come with people who
have been welcomed from the outside world – immigrants from, well, everywhere,
who have been coming here since the 1950s, and who have immeasurably enriched
the culture of this country. Greek, Italian, Indian stories – and many others. The
Chinese who came to the goldfields in the 1850s and 1880s have put down into
the culture a bright strand of strange and beautiful stories of demons, princesses
and ferocious dragons.
It is
impossible to ignore the fact that the dominant narrative carried by the First
Fleet was the Christian story. In the name of the king, in the name of a
Christian God, they planted the Union Jack in that amazing arrogant and
un-Christian gesture of the confident colonist.
The stories of the Old and New Testaments are deeply woven into the
culture of Australia, one way and another.
Voyage
within you, on the fabled ocean,
And you
will find that Southern Continent
Quiros’
vision – and his hidalgo heart
And
mythical Australia, where reside
All things
in their imagined counterpart
James
McAuley ‘Terra Australis’ 1946
The
outside world perceives Australia as a land of sport, and the inside world also
sees itself and promotes itself as a place where sport is paramount, where
legendary heroes are the gods and goddesses of sport. Those heroes are part of
the internal and ongoing story. Then there are the heroes of war, of science,
of song. Dame Nellie Melba sang her way into myth in the early part of the
twentieth century, and she is part of the language. These are the narratives
that focus on goodness and greatness, and that fashion the legends. The story of the failure of the Anzac military
landing in Turkey in 1915 is perhaps as deeply etched and as important as that
first great fracture in the history of the country when the ships landed at
Botany Bay in 1788. And so the legends build. With tales also of Ned Kelly, the rebel
underdog who rose to the status and grandeur of legend. Ned Kelly, the outlaw
who shot a policeman and was executed in 1880. Hero or villain? Hero in this
land of Oz.
Now
the original Land of Oz was a magical place invented by L. Frank Baum,
an American, in stories he published in the early 1900s. These stories are what
are sometimes called ‘literary fairy tales’, like the stories of Oscar Wilde,
tales invented by one writer, but relating in tone and content to the oral narratives
that spring from deep within a culture. The stories of Oz had a powerful
influence on Americans who absorbed them into their own telling of themselves.
Curiously enough, in the late 1930s ‘Oz’ became a popular term for ‘Australia’.
The movie The Wizard of Oz appeared in 1939, and it told a fairy tale in
which dreams really do come true, although they are ultimately grounded in
reality. It has become one of the most beloved and enduring movies of all time.
Australia, Oz, is it a place, perhaps where dreams, like the dreams of de
Quiros, can come true? Yet in reality?
Once
upon a time in Oz there was a Magic Pudding. No matter how many times you cut
it and ate it, it reformed, and you had a whole pudding again. That’s a great
dream. This 1918 story by Australian Norman Lindsay tells the hilarious
adventures of some Australian animals, and it is characterized by a larrikin
humour which is considered to be typically Australian both inside and outside
of Oz. The larrikins of Oz Magazine
from the 1960s took that humour out of Sydney and into London, a journey that,
in those days was seen as a rite of passage by young Australians. I always see
it, perhaps fancifully, as a kind of mirror image of the journey of the First Fleet
in 1788.
In my
own adventures here in the essayland of Oz, I have wandered far from the
Brothers Grimm whose anniversary was once my inspiration. If their story of Red
Riding Hood has not had the effect of keeping girls from wolves, their
‘Cinderella’ (which has in fact been supplanted by the softer French version retold
in 1950 by the Disney movie) is a dazzling success in the delivery of its
message. Or perhaps I mean to say that ‘Cinderella’ speaks to the heart and of
the heart of the majority of people. Everywhere. Perhaps it doesn’t exactly
have a ‘message’ or a ‘lesson’, perhaps it just tells it how it is in the realm
of hopeful magic in the human imagination. For irrespective of the details of
the different versions (of which there are at least 1500 across many cultures,
beginning with a Chinese narrative from 805), the story of the good and
beautiful girl who rises from obscurity and victimhood to marry the prince by
the agency of magic, and lives happily ever after, is the story that captures
the imaginations of girls everywhere. It forms the basis of romantic stories
over and over again. Disney vigorously promotes the story of Cinderella, but
she was ready and waiting for the Disney treatment and marketing. She is not
the only princess who has had the Disney treatment, but she dominates, she leads
the field. There’s something about Cinderella. When Diana Spencer married Prince
Charles in 1981, her wedding was widely describe as a fairy tale, as a
Cinderella story, regardless of the fact that most of Diana’s story was at odds
with that of Cinderella. There was a prince and a beautiful girl and a
fantastic wedding. Hey presto – Cinderella!
I
think it would be difficult for any little girl in Australia today to escape
the central narrative of ‘Cinderella’, even if she is ultimately going to
reject its tropes. Fantasy is truly a wonderful and powerful magic, and stories
of magic whisper to the heart the secret of the hope of happiness. Little girl,
supposing you are beautiful, and then supposing you are good, and supposing
there is some magic, you will marry a prince and you will be complete, and you
will be happy. It’s quite a story, really. The girl can’t do it without the
magic, mind you, and the prince is actually just a given, a necessary element
of the plot, which is a tale of all sex and no death. It’s really a story about
an everlasting wedding party. It seems to me that attempts to divert or subvert
the power of this narrative are always doomed; the essence of the myth of
Cinderella holds its ground. And the role of the prince gives boys their script
too. The noble and beautiful girl with the miraculous shoe will be theirs, they
don’t have to do a great deal. The story of Cinderella might still be the
underlying and even the dominant myth, the norm in the culture of Oz, where
today the gay community seeks the happy ever after of a Cinderella wedding.
***
Oh, once
upon a time, children, there was a land of dreams where pearls were strung on
amber vines, and bright birds sang long and sweet in the tall jasper trees. And
in another country there was a king who banished from his land all the people
who had done bad things. He sent them far far away across the ocean to a place
where they would have to steal the land and kill the people and make their own
way in deep forests and wide deserts. There were fires and floods and wars. And
after many years, and many troubles, those people learned to dream that place
into the land of pearls and bright birds whistling in the jasper trees. There
were rivers of precious gold, and great hillsides spilling with miraculous
metals and volcanic glass. Whispering coral and whirling malachite. Oh milk and
honey and marzipan! The people became known throughout the world for their great
skill at games, for their courage, and for their kindness and good humour. They
made peace with the people who had been there first, and they freely welcomed
strangers from other lands. They all lived happily ever after in peace and
harmony, working together, telling each other stories, singing songs, swimming
in the lazy rolling surf. Bells rang out across the fields, fields of emerald
green. The sapphire skies were forever clear and pure by day, the moon and
stars bright in the skies by night. Eternally.
Yes? Once upon a time in Oz?
