Interview by Danielle Wood

Birds, butterflies and beating hearts

by Danielle Wood

First Published in The Weekend Tasmanian, August 29, 2015

In the world of one of Carmel Bird’s best-loved and most anthologised short stories, ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’, a ‘toy fact’ is a particular kind of truth – the truth according to the writer of fiction.

A toy fact can be absolutely true, or not quite. And even if it is a very long way from being true, then it will be so seductive that it ought to be. For Bird, such facts are the gorgeous, vivid scraps of stuff out of which stories are made.

Here is a toy fact: Carmel Bird and the cabbage white butterfly both arrived in Tasmania in the year 1940. Carmel sprang from her parents – her mother a creative soul and her father a Launceston optician with the magnificent name Will Power. As for the cabbage white: it came from Europe, via mainland Australia, and few gardeners relish the sight of the species’ slender green caterpillars on their brassicas.

Here is another fact, one that seems to chime quite nicely with caterpillars, butterflies and the transformative process that joins and separates them: Carmel Bird was born Janice Maureen Power, and Janice she remained while growing up in Launceston and studying to be a teacher of English and French. She took her birth name with her when she left Tasmania in 1963, but if getting married and then divorced taught her anything, it was that surnames could be acquired and abandoned with relative ease. And if this were true of surnames, then why not of first names, too?

‘I liked the music of Carmel. I did not especially like the music of Janice,’ Bird said.

As Carmel Bird, she has turned her mischievous, witty, dark, light, fierce attention on just about everything. She has written and edited more than 30 books, been thrice short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award (with The White Garden, Red Shoes, and Cape Grimm), and inspired countless other writers through her how-to manuals (including Dear Writer and Not Now Jack – I’m Writing a Novel).

Although she moved away from Tasmania in the early 1960s – and now lives in Castlemaine in country Victoria – she has never really, truly left her birthplace behind. The two new books she has released this year, Fair Game: a Tasmanian Memoir and the short fiction collection My Hearts are Your Hearts contain plenty of evidence of how deeply the island’s trademark triangle is imprinted on Bird’s imagination.

‘I was born in Tasmania early in World War 2. In our bomb shelter there were maps ­– very pretty – of the world, and there was weeny little Tasmania, way away from where the war was. And there was also a huge map of Tasmania. I really loved the shape. I imagine that could be where my personal obsession with the place began,’ Bird said.

‘Because it was left off many maps, and was treated as a joke, and because the perspective my family and associates had of the world was focused far away (the war), it came to be that I perceived Tasmania as unreal. And I thought it was thrilling that I, being marvellously real myself, was roaming around in this non-existent place.’

When she ‘flew the island’, she took Tasmania and all its fairy-tale associations with her, hidden in a ‘fabulous, fictional capsule’ in her memory. And there, it has continued to echo.

Since she was fifteen years old, and possibly even earlier, Bird has been squirrelling away references to Tasmania from the obscure corners of world literature and popular culture.

Underlined in Bird’s 1950’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts are the lines: ‘She had been born, but it was only gossip said so, in Tasmania: her grandfather had been exported for some hanky-panky mid-Victorian scandal’. In his autobiography, Hans Christian Andersen describes how a Lady Blessington keeps ‘a Tasmanian blackbird’ on her balcony. Small matter, Bird says, that there’s no such thing as a ‘Tasmanian blackbird’. The important thing, to Andersen, was that the warbling creature came from an unknown and exotic corner of the globe.

Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, Vladimir Nabokov, Agatha Christie and Noel Coward (‘I once had an aunt who went to Tasmania’) are also represented in Bird’s Tasmaniana snippet collection.

‘Tasmania [is] a name, a location, that pops up in literature when a writer seeks a far off, inconsequential, mythical or gruesome place to insert into the prose,’ Bird writes in Fair Game, her own most recent literary return to the island, and a story that began – like Bird herself – in association with butterflies.

A watercolour image of butterflies arrived some years ago in Bird’s mailbox, on a postcard. These butterflies have now taken up residence on the cover of Fair Game, a slender volume that has been exquisitely produced by boutique publisher Finlay Lloyd as part of its ‘Smalls’ series.

The image is from a cartoon lithograph titled ‘E-migration or a flight of fair game, 1832’, by English artist Alfred Ducote. A close look reveals that the butterflies are in fact women: their wings large, their feet tiny, their elaborate Georgian hair-dos adorned with tiny crowns.

But what Ducote is satirising – and what Bird has written about in her memoir – is far from a beautiful scene. In 1832, 200 young women were sent from England to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the ship Princess Royal – the first large group of non-convict women to make the journey – to become wives and servants in a colonial society suffering from a desperate gender imbalance.

In Ducote’s image, the butterfly women are being swept off the English cliffs by women with brooms. What awaits them in Van Diemen’s Land are men with butterfly nets, their speech bubbles exclaiming: ‘I spies mine’, or ‘I spies a prime ’un’. But these details are small and difficult to see.

‘It takes a very close look and a magnifying glass to release the narrative of the journey they are making from a hostile England to a rapacious Van Diemen’s Land,’ Bird writes. ‘It is not a joyful picture; it is a depiction of a chapter in a tragedy.’

Fair Game is a deceptive book, full of tangential musings, personal recollections and gossipy Tasmanian detours (‘I went to school with…’, ‘I once briefly dated…’), but by the last page, the final layer of has been removed and the reader has been brought face-to-face with the truth of what happened to many of those young women who crossed the world, poor and desperate, only to discover that they were absolutely ‘fair game’.

Bird has dedicated the memoir to her father, and also to Lucy Halligan, daughter of Bird’s close friend, the writer Marion Halligan. Before Lucy died in 2004 of complications from a life-long heart complaint, she was in the habit of sending postcards; it was she who sent the butterfly women to Bird, with a characteristically lively note on the reverse.

It’s hard not to hear the beats of Lucy’s ‘faulty heart’ echoing through Bird’s other new release, the short fiction collection Your Hearts are My Hearts. The hearts that Bird excavates in these stories might be anything from chocolate hearts wrapped in scarlet foil and displayed in a bowl, to transplanted body-part hearts, to the island of Tasmania itself, whose shape, in Bird’s ‘heart of heart…resembles that of a love heart’.

A private girls’ college in Deloraine, an artist’s home in the Huon Valley, and a second-hand imaginary version of Queenstown are among the Tasmanian locations that have made their way into the stories.

‘I didn’t have a rigid scheme for the collection, but the motif of the heart weaves and flickers through the narratives, and the stories do quietly sing to each other,’ Bird says.

Whether she is writing short stories or novels, it is all part of the same endless piece of string for Bird.

‘The first short story I ever read was “The Fly” by Katherine Mansfield. This was in Year Eleven and “The Fly” was a revelation to me. I have been a student and a practitioner of the form ever since. I will hear something, or observe something, and ­– ping! ­– something goes off in my mind, and a whole lot of details and recollections and voices gather, and I start to write a story,’ Bird said.

‘I also love reading and writing novels. I work on a novel and I write short stories at the same time, because I can’t help myself. My whole attitude to life, I suppose, is that of a writer of fiction, and I am, as it were, on the job all the time.’

I first met Carmel Bird in the pages of ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’, which hooked me with its opening description of women ‘magging’ over a paling fence, passing between themselves ‘hot scones wrapped in tea-towels, cups of sugar, bowls of stewed plums and a continuous ribbon of talk’.

But our second meeting – on paper, still – was a profound one for me. I had just given up my job in Hobart and was driving across the Nullabor Plain towards Perth and an uncertain plan to start writing fiction. It was January and my car had no airconditioner and by the time I reached Kalgoorlie, I was so hot that I didn’t care where I spent the daylight hours so long as it was indoors, and cool.

I found the library. I found Bird’s Not Now Jack ­– I’m Writing a Novel, and since then I have had total faith in the truism ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will appear’. Bird taught me, through the pages of that book, about the concept of suspending observations from life in the ‘marvellous clear jelly’ of fiction (and included a recipe for Japonica Jelly as well). She told me, firmly, that ‘real writers don’t have mothers’, which meant that I could not expect anyone to hold my hand or mop my fevered brow; I must just get on with it, alone. She urged me to give up housework. Her advice – on writing, and on the writing life – was and is golden to me.

While interviewing her for this article, I asked – somewhat nervously – about the how-to books, including my beloved Not Now Jack. They weren’t, were they, just something she did – the way writers sometimes must – to pay the rent?

‘No!’ she exclaimed, to my great relief. ‘No, they were much more than that. I loved writing them.’

Bird was first asked to teach a creative writing course in the early 1980s, a time when the concept of teaching creative writing was very new in Australian tertiary institutions. Soon she was also assessing manuscripts for the Victorian Ministry for the Arts. This process was anonymous and Bird was given the moniker ‘Number Eight’, with which she signed her reports.

Much of the advice in Bird’s how-to books came directly from the reports that ‘Number Eight’ wrote for real life writing hopefuls. The advice is enduring, and when Dear Writer was recently re-released (as an e-book and in paperback), the only details Bird really needed to change were to do with the march of technology in the publishing industry.

Bird has never been afraid of embracing technology, either within the worlds of her fiction, or in the way her work is presented to the world. She was the first Australian writer to have a website (her current site hosts a link to the original, ‘vintage’, model) and her book Red Shoes was issued with a CD-ROM appendix, at a time when such a thing was cutting edge technology.

‘I think communication, medical and space technology are all wonderful, but it’s also clear that technical progress is double-edged,’ Bird said.

‘Since at least World War 2 it has been more or less clear that the world is probably on a dizzy trip to disaster…the extinction of species, loss of crops, starvation, millions of refugees, the rise of sea levels, wild weather events. Bits of this get into my fiction, of course.’

Having just read Fair Game and My Hearts are Your Hearts, my mind is jostling with the many, many ‘bits’ – beautiful and terrible – that make their way into Bird’s fiction. There’s a $6000 raincoat from Paris, a monkey on the loose at a garden party, a retinue of faded Beatrix Potter figurines on a child’s grave, the broken insect that is the body a 15-year-old girl on the deck of the Princess Royal. And there’s Bird’s father Will Power standing in a Launceston garden on the day of an eclipse, comforting his little blonde daughter, who has just smashed a precious piece of green glass.

Look, Bird always seems to be saying to her readers. Look.

Carmel Bird will appear in two sessions of the forthcoming Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival in Hobart.

·      ‘Our Heart is Her Heart’, in conversation with Danielle Wood, 2.30-3.30pm, Saturday, September 12, Hadleys Orient Hotel. Tickets, $15/$10, available from www.taswriters.org

·      ‘Short, Sharp Shreds’, a short story celebration with Adam Ouston and Robbie Arnott, 3.45-4.45pm, Sunday, September 13, Hadleys Orient Hotel. Tickets, $20/$15, available from www.taswriters.org

As a fledgling writer Danielle Wood encountered Carmel Bird in the pages of Bird’s how-to book, Not Now Jack – I’m Writing a Novel, and immediately took her advice to heart. Danielle, a former Mercury journalist, is the author of books including the Vogel Award-winning The Alphabet of Light and Dark, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, Housewife Superstar: the very best of Marjorie Bligh and Mothers Grimm. With Heather Rose, she is ‘Angelica Banks’, author of the Tuesday McGillycuddy books for children: Finding Serendipity, A Week Without Tuesday and the forthcoming Blueberry Pancakes Forever. Danielle lives in Hobart with her family and a menagerie of creatures great and small. She teaches writing at the University of Tasmania.

Have You Seen This Child

Conference: “Grounding the Sacred”

Australian Catholic University, July 2015

Speaker: Carmel Bird

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

First I will tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a Spanish princess who travelled in a coach all the way from Spain to Bohemia where she married a prince. She brought with her many wedding gifts from her family, and among the gifts was a little statue given to her by her mother. Hundreds of years earlier, somewhere in the wild country of Southern Spain, a monk had made the statue from wood and wax. It was the image of a small boy who had spoken to the monk in a vision, urging him to pray. Following a time in prayer, the monk was inspired to fashion the likeness of the boy, and understood that his visionary visitor had been the child Jesus. The statue had come into the possession of a nun who gave it to the mother of the Spanish princess. When the princess’s own daughter was very old, she in turn gave the statue to a church in Prague. It was beloved and venerated, but when a foreign army took possession of Prague, the statue was damaged, discarded and buried in rubble behind the altar. Its hands had been broken off. And so it lay for years until it was discovered and was venerated again. It was at this point that it spoke out in a language the priest could understand saying, ‘Have pity on me and I will have pity on you. Give me my hands and I will give you peace. The more you honour me, the more I will bless you.’ And so it happened that the statue was completely restored, and has ever since stood in honour in the church of Our Lady of Victories in Prague where it is visited by people from all over the world, and is known as the Infant Jesus of Prague.

That’s the end of the story. Now I will speak to you in a more conversational tone.

The statue of the child Jesus is what might be called a trope which enters my fiction in a short story published in 1987. But before I discuss the significance of this image in the fiction, I must take some time to move the image from the fuzzy world of legend into what passes for reality.

There are points in the legend where time and place and person become specific, but the whole matter is so overlaid with mystery that I chose to frame it first in the vague language of the fairy tale. Rather than use terms such ‘a far country’, I considered that Spain and Bohemia were exotic enough to be tolerated in the context. However when it came to the fact about the Swedish army taking Prague, I decided to wipe them and just call them foreign. And all the characters, with the exception of the mysterious monk in wild southern Spain somewhere, do have names, the most celebrated of which is that of St Teresa of Avila who supposedly gave the statue to the mother of the original princess. It’s interesting to follow a few dates. The statue can be dated to the fourteenth century. That’s vague but useful. The princess married the prince in 1556. Teresa of Avila was born in 1515 and died in 1582. She was canonized in 1622. The statue was given to the church in 1628. The Swedish army occupied Prague in 1631. The statue was discovered, spoke, and was restored in 1637. Then in 1639 the Swedish army again swept into the city, but this time the people prayed for deliverance before the statue and the city was saved. The statue is now the focus of a world-wide devotion.

So, he is the Infant of Prague, enshrined in the church of Our Lady of Victories in Prague. He is 48 centimetres high, the size of a baby. He is dressed, according to the liturgical seasons, always in lavish royal robes from his vast and precious wardrobe. Very often reproductions of him are dressed in scarlet. In 2009 Pope Benedict gave him an ermine cape, and also a golden crown decorated with pearls and garnets. He has his own website, email, phone number and a shop where he sells a dizzying array of replicas of himself. His feast is in the third week of May. He is popularly associated with weddings and marriage, and in some parts of Ireland the bride puts a statue of him out of doors in a hedge in order to invoke good weather for her wedding day.

I’m not in the realm of high art or high literature here, but this statue is one kind of conduit to a spiritual realm. He is part of one level of the Catholic tradition of sacred objects, of pilgrimage, of prayer and veneration. The Christian may offer prayers to Christ, sometimes with an image in mind. Generally, I imagine, the idea is that the supplicant is invoking some kind of adult Christ. There are untold artistic representations of the adult Christ on which to focus. The picture in the Christian’s mind might be that of the Crucifixion. At some point in the life of some images, the image itself takes on a kind of life of its own and the prayers are felt to be mediated through the physical presence of the statue or painting. The statue itself can become something sacred. However, the question arises – does the sanctity of the object persevere if, for instance, the object is placed in an unsanctified context? If it is stolen, say, and sold as simply a work of art or folk art? Is the power independent of context? Sacred spaces can be ritually de-sanctified. Churches become houses or community centres. I am reminded of the chapel in Brideshead Revisited where, after it has been de-consecrated it is described as being ‘just an oddly decorated room.’

Often black statues of Mary reveal themselves in mysterious and miraculous ways, and are considered to be sacred as a result. Statues sometimes take on a physical life of their own and move themselves around from one location to another. The Infant of Prague has become a sacred object. Such objects are the subject of devotion, of what can only be called love. To the people who offer their prayers through or to them, they are beloved. Of themselves, they are beloved. It is as if the spirit of the sacred somehow dwells within them. I realise that some of the words I am now using have wandered off message – what do I mean by ‘the spirit of the sacred’? I don’t really know, but they were the only words to hand.

For my eighth birthday, in the spring of 1948, I received an imitation amber box, the size of a match box. It opened like a book, and inside was a little imitation amber rosary. An imitation silver charm of the Infant of Prague hung from the end of the chaplet, and the lid of the box, or the cover of the book, was imitation silver, impressed with a larger image of him. When I left my home in Tasmania in 1963, to live in Victoria, this box was stored in a suitcase containing other treasures, mostly small dolls, in the roof space of the garage. The whole suitcase has since disappeared, and although I have sometimes looked for an imitation amber rosary in an imitation silver and amber book, I have never seen another. It interests me that he went missing with the dolls, because if he resembles anything, it’s a doll. Statues of the Infant Jesus often resemble dolls. Charles Dickens, in his Pictures from Italy, described one such statue in Rome as ‘a little wooden doll, in face very like General Tom Thumb, the American dwarf.’ Once in the parlour of a convent in Spain I saw a nun dancing joyfully with a pudgy plaster Baby Jesus in her arms. I do have statues of the Infant of Prague, and a painting I once did of him, but perhaps more importantly he inhabits, one way or another, alongside the Black Madonna, certain strands of my fiction.

Now some of the deep preoccupations of my fiction are conception, pregnancy, babies, children. And lost children. Also art, as it happens, is a preoccupation of my fiction. These are obviously habits of my thinking and imagination. I am not saying they are unusual, just that they seem to be a natural element in my writing, currents that flow through the narratives. And they sometimes chime with the sacred imagery of Mary and Jesus. Conception and childbirth are of course central to the Christian story. The whole Bible can be seen to hinge on those few words in the Gospels about the conception and birth of Christ. ‘And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.’

There are other celebrated statues of the Infant Jesus in churches throughout the world, and although I have never visited the Infant of Prague, I saw, in 1974, the Bambinello in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. This was in fact the statue Charles Dickens described as resembling Tom Thumb. The Bambinello doesn’t have the fame of the Infant of Prague, but he is very important and beloved in Italy, particularly in Rome where he is taken out in a special car to visit the sick. He is also considered to be significant in money matters. If you climb on your knees the one hundred and twenty four steps of the marble staircase that leads up to the Church in Aracoeli, you might win the lottery. In 1994 I noticed a very small newspaper item saying that the Bambinello had been stolen. Not just art theft, but sacrilege. Here were two of my preoccupations coming together – the holy child’s statue and the lost child. The lost child statue. There is even a little personal echo in there – whatever became of the Infant of Prague in the suitcase with the dolls? The common sense answer to that one is that somebody gave the suitcase to a charity, and the Infant ended up in a shop and was sold for thirty pieces of copper.

It is twenty years since the Bambinello was stolen. It has never been recovered, and the statue that now stands in the church in Rome is a copy, also made from an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane. (I love the beginning of Pinocchio, the words being a subversion of fairy tales and of the idea of the making of a holy statue – once upon a time there was a piece of wood.) Anyway, the powers of the new Bambinello are the same as those of the original. This is an interesting concept – whichever way you happen to look at it. And the question arises: how about the powers of the stolen one?

International art theft is big business, but business requires a buyer. Who would buy the Bambinello, and why? He is decorated in jewels, but there must be easier ways to steal jewels. I asked myself this question, and because one way I answer questions is to write fiction, the result was a novel.

It was Ford Madox Ford who described the novel as ‘a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.’ I like that.

The Bambinello can not be classified as a work of great art, although he is a kind of work of art. Artifact I suppose. He is a fifteenth century statue sixty cm high, and his legend says that he was made in the Holy Land by a Franciscan. He was carved out of a piece of wood from the garden of Gethsemene, was painted by angels, and was baptized in the River Jordan. The boat bringing him to Rome was shipwrecked, but he floated ashore. He is a focus for devotion, and as such can I think be described as holy, or sacred. He exists within the sacred space of the Aracoeli, and is set apart from the everyday while being linked to the darker realities of life such as illness and money. Thieves violate the sacred space of the church, and further transgress by abducting the sacred object. They remove from the gaze of the worshippers the focus of their devotion, the statue that is the conduit of their hopes and prayers. 

My real interest here is not so much the arts in general, as the literary art. I write fiction – which is a matter of making up stories and writing them down. I made up a story about the theft of the Bambinello. That’s one thing. But it’s a big jump from thinking and writing about sacred objects to embracing the idea of ‘the sacred’.

Literature, suggest the notes about this conference, might make the sacred tangible. Or it might be a way of structuring the experience of the sacred. This may well be so. However I have to say that when I wrote the novel about the Bambinello, I was not conscious of setting out to do anything so grand.

‘The sacred’ in its abstract form must be the whole other realm of that which is set apart from all that is ‘unsacred’. I wonder if it is really possible to name a category ‘the sacred’ – or is it only possible to name objects or places as ‘being sacred’? How useful is the abstract noun when compared to the adjective? Is the literary art a gateway, a guide that can lead a person to enter the sacred? To perceive the sacred? Embrace the sacred? And does literary expression of aspects of the sacred bring the realm of the sacred into the realm of the unsacred? I hesitate to use the word ‘profane’ here because I think it might have too many misleading connotations. So ‘unsacred’ is now in my working vocabulary. I have never thought of it before. Literature can tell you where to look, how to look, what to do with the sacred when it confronts you. More elusive for me than the terms ‘arts’, ‘literature’ and ‘the sacred’, is the word ‘grounding’ in this context. I have chosen to interpret it for my purposes to mean ‘placing’ and ‘revealing’. Placing the sacred by means of making art or literature. As a client of art or literature, finding a way to know, to recognize what is sacred.

It’s still rather too grand for me.

As a fiction writer I don’t set out to invoke the sacred. I think that writing poetry usually has a whole different approach, and probably does often have as its aim an access to the numinous. But for a fiction writer what generally comes first is the excitement of telling stories, of making some sense of things by inventing narrative. Could that mean I am, when writing a story, sometimes trying to make sense of the sacred? Actually, I am inclined to think that it might not be possible to make sense of it. In the case of this novel, which is called Child of the Twilight, there was the inspiration from the news item about the theft of the statue – a news item which chimed with some of my preoccupations – statue of holy child, lost children, babies and pregnancy and conception (working backwards there). All this led to the construction of a fictional narrative, a story that touches on the sacred, but is in the first place more interested in the characters and the plot than in guiding readers towards the sacred. It is possible that by way of the plot and the characters, the novel addresses the question of the sanctity of human life. That’s possible.

When readers consider a novel they are in the luxurious position of being able to interpret it from several angles and in various ways. Things readers say, things critics say, things reviewers say, things academics say about a book are often something of a surprise to the writer. The writer is working from the inside out, while the reader is coming at it from the outside in. What I think I am doing isn’t necessarily the same as what a reader sees me doing. As a writer I reveal my moral position on matters whether I know it or not, and I reveal a great deal more than that. I think there is a lot of truth in the idea that readers find what they must in a text. Charlotte Bronte has the narrator of Vilette say: ‘To a feather-brained schoolgirl nothing is sacred.’ She could be right. There are readers and readers.

The title ‘Child of the Twilight’ was really meant to be ‘Child of the Twilight of Time’ but the publisher’s marketing department cut it back because it was too long. Now I come to think of it, that’s item number one in what is different in what I was doing and what the reader sees. The title on this book actually means nothing to me.

Child of the Twilight is narrated by a young American woman, a novelist born in 1988. She is named Sydney, after the Australian place where she was conceived. Her parents were both infertile, and Sydney was the result of genetic material from two unknown and undocumented sources. So although the woman she calls mother did give birth to her, by Assisted Reproductive Technology, known by its acronym as ART, she can never trace her own true history. (The same letters in a different order form the common acronym for Religious Art Theft.) The fact of her origins is central to Sydney’s own understanding of herself and of the world in general. Her family is wealthy, travelled, and pious, education of its girls being in Sacred Heart schools. This places them in the worldwide and very real family of girls who went to Sacred Heart convents. Sydney herself is a species of non-believer, considering all knowledge with a fairly cold eye. She describes herself as Sydney the Navigator, sometimes commenting on her own construction of the fiction the reader is reading. Her mother went to a Sacred Heart school in California with the mother of a young Franciscan from Tasmania. This priest, Roland the Good, was delivering a letter to the statue of the Bambinello on the night that the statue went missing. The search for the statue takes the story through several closely related narratives of conception and birth and death and loss, all with a focus on the sacred statue of the Bambinello. The true identity of the statue, the true identities of the characters – these are all questioned. Sydney sees herself as being outside ordinary reality because, in her conception, she lost the history of her own bloodlines, and is deeply interested in the bloodlines of her characters. Like the writers of the Old Testament she has a preoccupation with procreation. And don’t forget the famous found baby – Moses in the bulrushes. There’s a happy ending. Sydney says she takes a ‘biblical approach to character, whereby this one begat that one begat the other – until you get to the one who is really going to do the deeds and make the difference to things.’ Luke’s Gospel gives Mary’s bloodline; Matthew’s Gospel gives Joseph’s. But Sydney says: ‘The idea of bloodlines really appeals to me as a literary device partly because I am totally unbegotten, so that I personally lie outside the Bible, having no bloodline to speak of.’ She goes on to say that in the case of Jesus she can ‘follow the line that leads to Mary. But Mary is simply the Pure Vessel, isn’t she? The uterus. It’s not as if she supplied the Oocyte to the Godly Spermatozoon. As I understand it – and my understanding is possibly flawed here – the miraculous foetus arrived holus bolus, going from the Word to the Flesh in one clean movement. So while I don’t claim to be miraculous in the same way – although I am a modern miracle – I can see a parallel between myself and Jesus in that we are both outside the biblical theory of character.’

And so Sydney begins the story of the Bambinello and her other characters, most of whom have bloodlines, and so could be biblical, she says, were the Bible to be brought up to date.

It all starts like this:

‘Early on a wet February evening in 1994, Roland Bruccoli, a young Franciscan Father from Australia, arrived in Rome. Through the blurred windows of his cab he saw lights misted in greenish haloes around the street lamps as he drove through the dusk. It was Roland’s first visit to Italy, and for sentimental reasons he went swiftly to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli to pay a visit to the miraculous statue of the Infant Jesus, the Bambinello. His mother in Melbourne had asked him to do this. She believed that Roland’s birth in 1964 had been in answer to a request she made to the statue, and the idea of her son bearing a message to the Bambinello was sweet and deeply satisfying. Such hopes and prayers may be answered in unexpected ways, and the unexpected ways can be so very unexpected.

Things were, you see, more complicated than this pleasant little story sounds, for Roland had a twin, Eleena. When they were four years old, Eleena had run joyfully up a green embankment dotted with pink and white daisies. She ran onto the road and into the path of an oncoming car. This was during a neighbourhood cricket match, and Roland had been running behind his sister. Their father’s voice – Eleena, Roland, Eleena, stop, come back Eleena – died out, the sound of the word Eleena hanging on the air.

Everything stopped. The ball, the bat, the bowler, the conversation of the spectators, the laughter of children playing. Time. The daisies. The sun for a fragment of a second was arrested in the heavens, and one small cloud hung motionless just above the horizon. The car stopped. The young driver rushed forward, fell on her knees over the warm dead child. The air was cold, suddenly chill with disbelief. Cherry-red beads from Eleena’s broken necklace pattered across the road onto the sweet damp silent grass on the verge, bouncing into the gutter, rolling under and over little daisy faces.

I remember the story of Eleena’s death as my mother told it to me over the years. My mother has a catalogue of tales of babies and children lost and gone, one way and another. I think it is a habit of mind she has formed, a kind of accompaniment to her own infertility – children are so hard to come by, so fragile, so easily lost. Eleena was on our prayer list. An old-fashioned Catholic childhood can be a strangely morbid affair at times, with the communion of saints, meaning the company of the dead, forever hovering around, needing support, sometimes supporting in their turn.

Roland’s mother’s request regarding the message to the Bambinello in 1994 was clearly not a simple one, and was inevitably complicated by Eleena’s death all those years before. Roland, her envoy, her courier, had with him in the Roman church a small pink envelope in which there was a letter to the Bambinello. It was Roland’s task to place the envelope in one of the golden baskets provided, to send the message on its way. Heaven knows what was in the letter.

The church of the Aracoeli was empty. A few candles were still burning, conveying hopes and prayers to Heaven. It was almost time, said the Friar who met Roland at the door, to take the Bambinello into the safety of the monastery for the night. But something most strange had happened.

The Baby Boy was gone.

Roland blinked at the empty space where the golden thing should be, was not, and he felt a creeping, billowing fear. Around him an eerie atmosphere of anguish had opened up like some poisonous silver and black flower. Almost all the candles had died, their messages and prayers delivered in warm pinky yellow light to Heaven. The police came, at once, it seemed, in a breathless and vivid silence. But no traces of the thieves were found. They conducted short interviews, took notes, photographs, made diagrams, crossed themselves, looked at Roland with mulberry-black eyes and a quizzical air.

Not quite of suspicion, not quite of respect. What was an Australian doing here?’

The novel then traces the lives of the characters as they intersect with the Bambinello. Of course I won’t tell you the outcome. It ends with a letter from the narrator, Sydney, to you, the reader. She says that you may join in with the characters and pray for those who have died. (People have died in the course of the story.) She says you might be writing letters to the Bambinello yourself, asking for happy future outcomes for your own personal Assisted Reproductive Technology. She signs off with the words: ‘May your oocyte be sweetly receptive, may your spermatozoon joyfully go the distance. Only time will tell, she says, Only time will tell.’

Perhaps this narrative of the theft of the Bambinello may invite readers to contemplate some of the drama of the realm of the sacred. Only time will tell.

IS THERE AN AUSTRALIAN FAIRY TALE?

MY KEYNOTE SPEECH TO AUSTRALIAN FAIRY TALE SOCIETY JUNE 2014

‘Is there an Australian fairy tale? That is the question.’

One of the matters raised by this conference, in its call for papers, is:

Is there an Australian fairy tale?

This is a deep and serious question concerned as much with what is called ‘national identity’ as it is with what is called ‘fairy tale’. Where to look for national identity, for national sensibility? What is meant by fairy tale in this context? Should Australia have a particular fairy tale anyway? Do other countries have their own? Germany has the tellers, Grimm, and Denmark has Andersen, another teller; and Russian tales have their own characteristics, Chinese tales have theirs – and so on. The tellings reflect and reveal national character. Is there an Australian way of telling, perhaps? It is a truism to say that the same motifs and plots turn up in different cultures across the world, and that the ways in which the stories are expressed mark the nationality of the tale.

I have found it necessary, in the composition of a response to the question posed, to keep carefully defining my terms. Quite frequently I have found this difficult to do. I am still not sure what is meant by ‘national identity’, and could discuss the words here at some length. I am going to leave it vague. Likewise ‘fairy tale’ – I am prepared to let this term merge, perhaps unfashionably, with such terms as folk tale and myth and so on. What I am seeking is a narrative that has the reach and grip of – well, of Cinderella, for instance. A powerful archetypal narrative – I will come back to it shortly. (The Oxford dictionary has an entry under Cinderella. I don’t know how many fairy tale heroes and heroines make it into the dictionary. Very few.)

The history of this continent must be implicated in the search for a story. It seems reasonable to begin, maybe, by asking who or what comes to mind as a locus of heroism in Australian culture and history, for the hero narrative is a key narrative in folk lore, and folk lore is close to fairy tale in many respects. Who are some heroes then – could be Ned Kelly, Don Bradman, Phar Lap, Burke and Wills, the Anzacs, Caroline Chisholm, St Mary McKillop, Truganini. What are some common images associated with Australia? The kangaroo (one of them flies) the koala, the Opera House, Uluru, the Southern Cross, the Tasmanian devil, the beach, the wattle, the bush. But there is nothing there with any hope of accumulating the power of Cinderella – which is I think now the uber-fairy tale of western culture. I suppose I am setting the bar high. And remember that nobody had to go looking for the Cinderella story, and no country can really claim her as its own.

When, in Australia, you see a book titled ‘Classic Fairy Tales’ you know to expect certain stories – basically those from Perrault, Grimm, Andersen – with maybe a smattering of Greek myths. In these stories are found the variations of the family drama, the quest, the triumph over adversity, the elements of fear and joy and magic and so on. They are stories that articulate in various ways what it is the human heart seeks – that’s happiness – the promise of everlasting happiness. There were adventures and ups and downs. And then they lived happily ever after. It’s the promise of everlasting life. There are deaths and the fear of death in fairy tales, but the narratives of the heroes and heroines stop short at the moment of bliss, seeming to defy and deny death.

Even little children know that this moment of bliss is a fantasy – and that is what a fairy tale must be, at its level of entertainment – a fantasy. Truth is articulated there, but fantasy is the poetry, the bait, the drug, the beautiful costume dressing up the truth, the detail that takes the reader, the listener, back to that story again and again and again. Seeking to touch the magic, and seeking wisdom.

A three year old recently said to me: ‘Cinderella will die in the end you know.’ Yes, I know. But within the parameters of the story Cinders signs off on everlasting bliss. And the child knew that too. She knew what a story was. Everyone knows that little children move easily and naturally between fantasy and reality. They must do this. And adults do it too, to a degree. The motifs and meanings of those ‘Classic Fairy Tales’ and their ilk, as Jung and Campbell and company have explained, are somehow lodged in human nature, are part of the human response to the mystery of being alive. The motifs and meanings are not contained within national boundaries. The details of a story will be local – in China Cinderella has, instead of a fairy godmother, the bones of a magical fish. But the centre of the business will be – dare I use the word – universal. So I suppose an Australian fairy tale would have its local details and motifs, its universal themes. But historically and culturally, Australia is not well placed for the development of such a narrative. You may know a book called World Tales, edited by Idries Shah. It’s a collection of sixty-five old stories from many different countries, tracing what the editor calls ‘the extraordinary coincidence of stories told in all times and all places’. I noticed at the time of publication, 1980, that Australia was not one of these places. I remember thinking this was sad, but probably to be expected. Perhaps if Idries Shah or his equivalent were to collect world tales today, there just might be a place for an Australian story of some kind. Perhaps not.

If you look at some accepted synonyms for the term ‘fairy tale’ – you find fable, fiction, fabrication, figment, fantasy. You can also get a myth, a yarn, a legend, a parable, a romance, a dream, a make-believe – and a lie. There’s the ugly word for it. A lie.

The blissful trick of the fairy tale in its powerful classic form is that the lie – with its lovely fantasy and poetry and music – the lie is telling the truth. This is the magic – at one level – of the fairy tale – the lie and the truth are working in unison to beguile and to inform. Fairy tales thus exert their grip on the people who tell them and on the people who hear them.

I live in rural Victoria, and in the local street there is a video shop and a bakery and a pub, and a shop called Cinderella’s Fairytale Wedding. They sell and rent out bridal wear. Cinderella’s Fairytale Wedding. The name is self-explanatory – here is the star of fairy tale completely embedded in popular culture. I don’t need to tell you this. Everyone here is conscious of the grip that princesses – thanks partly to the marketing of Disney and Big W and so on – have on the minds and imaginations of – well probably children just about everywhere. And not just children. Of course Disney and the marketers have great material to work with. They have the fairy tale, for heaven’s sake. The versions of Cinderella they sell are specific to a particular kind of western paradigm, being based on the French story collected by Charles Perrault in the eighteenth century. His story was modeled on a pre-existing folk tale, and was later translated into German by the Brothers Grimm. But as you well know, the story of Cinderella is not confined to any national archive. The first recorded Cinderella story, as far as I know, was located in China in the ninth century AD. There are many hundreds of Cinderella stories spread throughout all cultures. It is truly transnational, and, perhaps thanks to Disney, its narrative and motifs now dominate the fairy tale landscape – even in Australia.

A blogger called Becky Morales of online KidWorldCitizen is compiling a collection called ‘Cinderella Stories Around the World’. One of the versions in her collection is Cindy-Ella, an Australian Cinderella by Tom Niland Champion. It’s a kind of satire of popular Australian clichés. Cindy-Ella lives with her cruel step-mother and step-sisters Rochelle and Sheryle. Her tasks include cleaning the dunny, feeding the budgie and hanging the undies on the line. The romance of fairy tale seems to have gone missing somewhere. When Cindy-Ella is forbidden to go to the local dance, she consults her fairy god-nanna who uses a magic branch of wattle to conjure a new denim skirt and thongs – meaning footwear. Cindy-Ella rides to the dance in the pouch of a kangaroo, dances with the top sheep-shearer, and has to leave when the kookaburra laughs. Not midnight I guess. As she runs off she drops a thong. Sheep shearer finally matches her up with her thong, and they live happily ever after. This is a lot of fun. I do query the use of the thong, however. I would argue that the glass slipper was a special (even impossible) piece of exquisite footwear that existed nowhere else, and that marked Cinderella as the one who is uniquely beautiful and ideal. Although perhaps the thong, conflating as it does the idea of a shoe and intimate apparel, is quite witty in its way, for the shoe in the Cinderella story sends a powerful sexual message which is one of the keys to the story’s fascination.

This humorous telling does in no way amount to anything that could be seriously called an ‘Australian fairy tale’. It’s an Australian version of an old story.

A very early Australian folklorist, Joseph Jacobs who died in 1916, collected stories from European, English, Jewish, and Indian cultures, but didn’t ever publish a collection of Australian narratives. Of course writers and editors who came after Joseph Jacobs have written and collected Australian stories, but nothing really stands out as a lasting, powerful, magical narrative that could be classified as a tale with the power of a Cinderella or a Snow White.

In seeking an Australian fairy tale, I am seeking a narrative that might be lodged somehow deep in the heart, the soul, maybe I mean the psyche of Australian culture. That’s a fanciful way of putting it, but I felt I must say it thus. I speak of fairy tales, I speak of make-believe, I speak of lies.

Is there some huge LIE bugging the Australian soul? Yes there is. You know it; I know it; and I am going to tell it now. I will tell the lie, and the lie will tell the truth because you and I know the truth. That’s how they work, fairy tales.

So here perhaps is the Australian fairy story so far. Gather round. Here is the lie.

Once upon a time there was a great and powerful King who ruled over a vast empire, the greatest the world had ever seen. His ships went out across the oceans exploring new lands. They discovered a Great South Land, a land so inviting, and a land that was – marvelously – without human inhabitants. It was a country ready to receive civilized people, and was destined to become a part of the King’s great empire. It was a strange and beautiful place, free for the taking, where the King and his counselors realised they could build a wonderful new outpost, a rich and glorious colony that would strengthen the power of the King in that distant part of the world.

To help bring this paradise into being, the King selected from among his own people a company of slaves, men and woman and even children who had disobeyed the King’s laws. As a punishment they would sail in chains across the seas, and they would be the builders of the new paradise. These people would clear the land and grow the crops and make the roads, and build handsome buildings for the Governor of the Great South Land and for the officers and the soldiers. And the bounty of the land would return home to the King. So the ships set out, and after many long days and weeks at sea, they came to the shores of the Great South Land. Nobody had ever owned this land before the King’s men came. And so the Governor raised the King’s flag and claimed the land for the King. And the King sent out more men to be farmers and explorers, and there was great peace and prosperity.

Now the Governor and the officers had white, white skins, and they wore fine jackets and boots; and the slaves also were white-skinned, and they wore rough dark garments that marked them for the slaves they were. Imagine the surprise of the Governor and his company when there appeared before them on the shore tall dark naked people, speaking in a strange, strange tongue. These people had lived in the land for many thousands of years. They had a particular relationship with the land that was completely different from the way the King’s men thought about it. They were people of an ancient race, untouched by the civilizing ideas of the King and his soldiers. The newcomers soon made it clear to these native people that all the land now belonged to the great white King who ruled it from far, far away. His rules would be enforced by the Governor and the soldiers.

Now, on learning of the existence of the naked people, the King’s instructions to the Governor said that the lives of the ancient peoples must be protected and that the King’s men were to befriend those people. However no mention was made regarding the ancient peoples’ ownership of the land. It was obvious to the King that the land had belonged to nobody, and that it now belonged to him.

How was it possible to be friendly towards the people while denying them their own home? Wait and see.

Gradually the newcomers moved out to live in places all over the Great South Land, and as they moved, they were able to persuade the naked people, of whom there were many many different tribes speaking many many different languages, to follow the King’s laws. These rules would protect them. This was friendship. Sometimes the people tried to resist, sometimes they even attacked and killed the King’s men, but eventually they realized that the newcomers were right, and they agreed that the land belonged to the King. And the King was pleased with all his people. The tribal people were placed below the slaves in the hierarchy of the land. They were like the strange animals and flowers, part of the natural bounty of the empire. The King’s men believed it was obvious that the tribal people would quietly die out. And some did.

But as it happened, the two groups, the newcomers, and the tribes, who had lived in the land for many thousands of years, mostly lived happily ever after in the Great South Land where the King’s men became more and more rich and powerful as time went on.

Not the end. To be continued.

This fairy tale, this travesty of truth, is still in the process of being re-written, but for the time being I would propose it as the great Australian fairy tale, or the great Australian lie. It attempts to conceal the dark history of Australia; it is a breathless bare-faced lie that cloaks an atrocity, a terrible horror story of theft and murder, and it has been the underlying myth for two hundred or so years.

As I was telling it, I found it weirdly impossible to insert women into the narrative. It really is a boys’ own story, the old story of Australia. The old lie. No wonder, what with one thing and another, that a satisfactory Australian fairy tale remains elusive. Well, it’s still unformed, and 1788 is not so very long ago in folklore and fairy tale time. Perhaps Australia doesn’t need and won’t get a real fairy tale of its own. Perhaps national fairy tales are a thing of the past, in a society that can probably be described as global. What I have told you is not a particularly engaging tale on any level apart from horror – it has no real characters, no real drama – with the exception, perhaps of the King and the theft of the land. Powerful fairy stories usually foreground a character the listener can identify with. In the story, at least as I told it, the native people and the King’s men are distinctive, but there is nobody who could be called a character.

The final paragraph of the story I told you – the happy ever after part – presents a particularly shocking and untruthful account. For there has been no consolatory closure to the tale. The invaders and the tribes did NOT and do not live in harmony. There are several ways of describing in more detail what happened – there’s history, politics, anthropology – but one way of doing it is by looking at how the literature, the fiction for children and the fiction for adults, has transcribed the story of black people and white people in the Great South Land. This literature was until recently almost exclusively written by non-Aboriginal people.

Then, there is the vast story-telling tradition that has forever informed the lives of Aboriginal Australians. Like the Aboriginal understanding of the land, the stories are of a quality so different from the stories of the western tradition, that they are problematic for a western sensibility to approach. I believe that it is in the stories of Aboriginal Australians that a truly Australian fairy tale may be located. To call these narratives fairy tales is also problematic. They are I believe sacred stories that go to the heart of Aboriginal culture. Their sacred nature gives them a quality that is generally absent from the accepted fairy tale paradigm.

The terms I intend to use now, to designate the two Australian groups, are mainly ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘non-Aboriginal’. The use of terms for the two groups changes quite often with fashion and politics – indigenous, non-indigenous, First Peoples, invaders, settlers, colonists, the blacks, the whites, the natives. I have decided today to go for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal – unless I am quoting another writer who uses different terms.

Non-Aboriginal writers have longsince tried to render Aboriginal stories in English, following the western models. I suppose it is a noble endeavor. But the results have been invariably I think, travesties of Aboriginal stories. It seems, on the surface, a reasonable thing to do, to discover the stories and to tell them in English, using an English model. But you will have seen these retellings, and they are usually strangely lifeless – because the stories simply don’t translate. Can non-Aboriginal storytellers really know and mediate Aboriginal culture? I don’t believe they can. For one thing, there is so much that is specific and local in Aboriginal stories, and so much that is sacred in a way that bewilders western minds.

But the real problem is the gulf between the purpose of storytelling in non-Aboriginal culture, and the purpose of it in Aboriginal culture. I believe that simply to put Aboriginal narratives into the service of non-Aboriginal structures is to betray, dishonor and misrepresent the Aboriginal narratives. It is cultural colonization if you like. The stories so produced are detached and impoverished by virtue of their removal from their custodians. Such storytelling – Aboriginal sacred myths told as English narratives – is on the one hand theft, and on the other, a stifling, a kind of killing. Reducing a sacred oral text to a page of English with colourful illustrations.

How to reconcile the storytelling traditions in Australia? One avenue of hope lies in the strength of the Aboriginal publisher Magabala Books which has been producing Aboriginal literature since 1990, working to help engage non-Aboriginal readers with Aboriginal thinking. Another is in the appearance of the form of narrative told by an Aboriginal elder, Elsie Jones. This is The Story of the Falling Star, published by the Aboriginal Studies Press in 1989. That’s ages ago now – and I’m sorry to say that the work is not really very well known. It tells the story of the origin of a rocky outcrop in the Darling River near Wilcannia, and speaks of a bad character who warns of the catastrophe of the falling star. It is a beautiful and remarkable document, and could possibly provide a template for the production of Aboriginal stories. It isn’t simply a hybrid text; it somehow succeeds in conveying something of the sacred nature of the story in its singular design – photographs, drawings, interactive text, speech bubbles – where the image of Elsie Jones dominates the pages. It speaks of the vitality of Aboriginal stories, and it ought to be in print. Please look at it in a library. And it’s worth considering the fact that this tale which sets out to explain the existence of a particular rock formation is a very different kind of tale from a western fairy story, or a Greek myth, or a Persian legend. Its local nature and its utter simplicity, as well as its sacred quality, mark it, I think, as not really a contender in a search for a story that could express or grip an Australia psyche – supposing there is such a psyche.

From the early nineteenth century onwards, Aboriginal characters have appeared in Australian texts for children, and gradually Aboriginal narratives have also been produced. But there remains a sense of unresolved discomfort. I know I keep saying there is a long way to go – but I do think this is the case. I recommend you read Clare Bradford’s book Reading Race published in 2001 – read it for a scholarly overview of the history of Aboriginal matters in children’s books to that time. There is a very long way to go before the problems initiated in 1788 can resolve in society, and also a long way to go before they can resolve in literature.

Adult literary texts from way back have also gradually moved from white colonial narratives with Aboriginal characters to what are called post-colonial treatments of the issue.  Many non-Aboriginal writers, novelists and poets have given a lifetime’s thought attempting to reach into the imaginative world of Aboriginal sacred stories. The brutal consequences of non-Aboriginal intrusion into Aboriginal Australia are sometimes foregrounded, sometimes ignored. My point is that they are more or less always present, and they are part of the fabric of an Australian narrative – fiction or non-fiction.

From the early works of the nineteenth century, through the novels of the twentieth until today, there has been a development to the point where Aboriginal writers as well as non-Aboriginal writers are foregrounding aspects of the story that might one day emerge as an Australian fairy tale to tell to everybody, a fairy tale of which Australians can be proud. It won’t resemble traditional European stories.

This brings me to the most recent novel by Alexis Wright – ‘The Swan Book’, published in 2013 – a novel that sweeps into the reader’s mind with an astonishing grandeur. Alexis Wright is an Aboriginal writer. ‘The Swan Book’  is concerned with big issues – Aboriginal land rights, changes in climate, refugees, and the power of stories. Yes, the power of stories could be described as an issue in this novel. To attempt to describe ‘The Swan Book’ is to reduce it and mangle it  – but essentially it is this:-

The grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria are Alexis Wright’s ancestral country. This is where the novel opens. ‘The Swan Book’ is set in the future about fifty years on from 2014, when the effects of global changes in weather and climate have ravaged the country. The scene is a filthy dry swamp that is filled with useless rusting warships and is fenced off by the army – it is where a group of Aboriginal people lives, and it is also populated by thousands of black swans. The swans have come north as the climate has changed.

Bella Donna is an old storyteller woman from the northern hemisphere, one of the homeless nomads who now roam the seas. Her life was saved by a swan, and her imagination is informed by all the stories of white swans. Stories go viral in this novel, stories are in fact viruses. As a refugee, Bella Donna has invaded the swamp, and one day in a tree she finds a mute Aboriginal girl whom she calls Oblivia. She tells Oblivia all the stories, poems, legends and songs about swans. Leda, Lohengrin, Swan Lake, The Wild Swans – these are only a few of the scripts that are built into the narrative of the novel. This is a story of the mind and of the imagination – and it is vast in its reach, and is told in layers of simultaneous different dimensions. Languages mingle – Aboriginal, English, Latin, French – to form a layered, sinuous, vigorous, athletic prose in a style all its own.

Oblivia and the Aboriginal president of Australia, Warren Finch, are the central love interest of the novel. You can tell that it’s satirical and funny. Warren belongs to an Aboriginal group that has essentially sold out to non-Aboriginal values. As wife of the president Oblivia goes south where she lives as a prisoner in a tower. She will ultimately leave the tower to return to the north with the black swans.

The apparent simplicity of the plot – and I haven’t told you everything – you must read it – belies the glorious complexity of the telling. This is political satire as grand lyrical epic, told with wit and shock and eloquence and charm. As the stories are enacted, it becomes clear that stories – in their ability to move across the world, to weave in and out of each other –  stories may have the power to ensure the future of life on Earth. Faith in stories turns out to be allied to faith in the land itself – and the Aboriginal people living among the old wrecks in the swamp understand this. Stories will save everything.

There is much that fascinates me about ‘The Swan Book’, but If I can foreground one aspect here: the coming of the white swan stories, via the European storytelling refugee to the Aboriginal compound in the swamp where all the swans are black. The metaphors built into this are so powerful and obvious that it is amazing nobody has done it before. Well, maybe they have, I don’t know.

I do know that the telling of the coming of the swans and the swan stories reminds me of the story of the library at Borroloola. It is the Story of Three Thousand Books.

Once upon a time in a far hot country there lived a man called Cornelius. He was a fine horseman, a man of heroic optimism. He could tell stories, and his stories always ended with the words: ‘And one day we might be happy.’

And one day Cornelius had a dream. Listen while I set the scene. And then I will tell you of his dream.

In this far hot country, lived wonderful animals and curious fish. There were insects that built miniature cities from tall mounds of earth mixed with their digested and undigested food. And there lived also many people of an ancient race. Their skins were dark because they lived close to the sun. They hunted for food on land and sea. They sheltered in caves and huts and wore light clothing made from the skins of animals. They carried their food in baskets woven from reeds and leaves, and they decorated themselves with necklaces of shells. They lived in separate groups spread across the vast land, and they spoke many different languages, drew marvelous pictures on the rock walls, made music and dances, told many sacred tales.

One day, from the sea, came men of another race. These men were covered in bright clothing, and they carried terrible weapons and brought with them strange foods, curious ideas, peculiar animals. These men were soldiers, and their skins were white. They discovered diamonds and minerals buried in the land, and they began to build shelters from wood and stone, and they took the land with all its treasures, for themselves. Many of the dark people were killed, and a great and terrible sadness descended on the land. In the far north of the country, a little town grew up on a river, a hundred miles upstream from the sea, and in this little town there were some people of the ancient race, as well as soldiers, and other white men who came in from the surrounding land, bringing cattle on their way to the cattle stations. The little town was a lonely place. There was a store and an inn and a prison.

Now one of the lawmen was the horseman Cornelius – you remember Cornelius – and Cornelius had a dream. He looked at the town and remembered life in the place he had come from far, far away. He remembered a beautiful house where his uncle lived. At the heart of this house there was a magical place. It was a library filled with shelves and shelves of books, books telling all the stories of the world.

In his dream Cornelius was transported back to that library, and then he saw, in the prison in the town a hundred miles from the sea, a wonderful room where all those books, all those old stories were kept. A library – in the lonely town far far from home.

The dream took hold of his imagination, and Cornelius wrote a letter to the Governor of the land, asking for books. And a ship was sent, carrying the stories of Plutarch, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Perrault and the Bible and Omar Khayyam and more. Many more.

When the dream had come true, and three thousand books, leather-bound and covered in grey canvas, were all on the shelves in the prison, Cornelius invited all the people of the town, white and black, to come and read, and to take the books away, and to pass them around among themselves. There were public meetings where stories were read out loud, and where stories were discussed, and where arguments often broke out about what the stories meant. Years went by and years went by, and many of the books were lost, never to be seen again. But the stories were told, and the stories became part of the story of the land. And time went by and time went by, and Cornelius himself grew old and died.

Then – into the cracked old library came marching thousands and thousands of blind white ants who joyfully devoured the remaining books, and used them to construct their strange tall homes, mixing the chewed pages with their saliva and their excrement and the mud. Only one book remained. The story had been eaten away, but the words on the very first page said, in blood red ink: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis.

The stories – the stories of Plutarch and Virgil and Kipling and Dickens and Perrault – they had all made their spoken way out out into the far corners of the far hot country. And they lodged in the hearts and the imaginations of the people all over the land, while more and more stories came and mingled with them. And alongside those stories, quietly, ran the stories of the ancient race, like a shadow, perhaps, like a mysterious cousin, like smoke.

Time went by and time went by, and if this is a fairy tale that I am telling you, it must be a story of heroic optimism. The beloved storyteller of beloved stories wants to tell you that one day the people might be happy. As time went by the stories of the ancient race grew in substance, until they came forward across the far country as stories to mingle joyfully with so many other stories, until that far country could look into its heart, could call upon its imagination and could say: ‘These are the stories we understand, these are the stories by which we can live, these are our stories.’

The tale – but not the happy ending – I have told you is a version of what I believe is a true story of the library at Borroloola. Borroloola is a small town 50 kilometres upstream from the Gulf of Carpentaria. The ending of my tale is wishful thinking. The stories of Aristotle and Perrault and the Bible and all the other books have filtered out into the culture and the literary language of Australia. They have really changed little over time and place, but the stories of the Aborigines still occupy a separate chamber of their own. They are stories that have been classified in European parlance as stories of ‘the Dreaming’. But what is the Dreaming? One of the most satisfactory discussions of the Dreaming is in Robert Kenny’s 2007 book ‘The Lamb Enters the Dreaming’. There Robert Kenny writes: ‘The Dreaming explains how the world is formed, and how ancestral beings took their present shapes, and how and why particular peoples are linked to these forms as their totems (or dreamings).’

Robert Kenny further clarifies all this when he examines the image of the lamb in the Christian story. An orthodox Christian knows that Christ is the shepherd and the people are his flock, and also knows that Christ himself is the sacrificial lamb, and has no problem with this metaphoric and symbolic language. The Christian doesn’t consciously associate the religious imagery with the sight of a flock of merinos crossing the highway. The holy story is set apart from the shearing shed. However, in the Dreaming, the metaphor, for want of a better word, works differently, so that the totem animal or object is inextricable from the person and also from the land. The essence is not in the kangaroo totem, for example, or in the person, but in the mutuality of person and totem and land.

The dream of Cornelius was the construction of a library of stories; if there is a dream now waiting to be fulfilled, however long it takes, and whether it is possible – this dream is that one day it might be possible to tell, maybe, in some new language of storytelling, a fairy story with a happy ending – from Australia’s heart and soul. A fairy tale that enunciates an Australian national identity, that speaks to and from the psyche, to and from the Australian soul. It is a dream for the future.

SOME BOOKS CONSULTED

Bradford, Clare: Reading Race; MUP; 2001

Champion, Tom: Cindy-Ella; Scolastic; 2011

Bruce: The Songlines; Picador; 1987

Dunkle, Margaret: Black in Focus – Aboriginality in Literature for Young People; D.W.Thorpe; 1994

Gammage, Bill: The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia; Allen&Unwin; 2012

Gilbert, Kevin: Living Black; Penguin 1977

Gorman, Clem: The Larrikin Streak; Sun Books; 1990

Gwynne, Philip: Deadly, Unna?; Penguin; 2002

Healy, J.J: Literature and the Aborigine in Australia; UQP; 1978

Hughes, Robert: The Fatal Shore; Pan Books    1987

Jones, Aunty Elsie: The Story of the Falling Star; Western Regional Aboriginal Land Council; 2000

Keneally, Thomas: Australians – Origins to Eureka; Allen and Unwin; 2009

Kenny, Robert: The Lamb Enters the Dreaming; Scribe; 2010

Les Contes de Fees – A history of fairytale – Bibiloitheque Nationale de France

Meredith, Louisa Anne: My Home in Tasmania; Glamorgan Spring Bay Historical Soc, Swansea, Tasmania; 1852

Pascoe, Bruce: Dark Emu; Magabala Books; 2014

Reynolds, Henry: The Other Side of the Frontier; UNSW; 1981

Roberts and Mountford: Legends of the Dreamtime; International Limited Editions; 1975

Shah,Idries: World Tales, Penguin; 1979

Victorian Reading Books; Government Printer; 1928

Warner, Marina: From the Beast to the Blonde; Random House; 1994

Wright, Alexis: The Swan Book; Giramondo; 2013

Wrightson, Patricia: The Nargun and the Stars; Hutchinson; 1973

LAUNCH AT BUDA

Today I launched Susan Green's young adult novel Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand. The launch took place at Buda in Castlemaine. A lovely book in a lovely setting. I was reminded of a story I wrote for 'The Age' in August 2007. This is the story:

THROUGH A LOW, NARROW archway resembling a little tunnel that penetrates a huge cypress hedge, the gravel path leads up to the first view of the front of the house. This is Buda, a gracious single-storey Italianate Victorian house on a hill in Castlemaine.

It is a cold, cloudless, sunny winter afternoon, still and quiet. The hedge, aptly known as the "Great Cypress Hedge" rises and dominates in dark sculptured velvety billows, like a mysterious cloud in a strange dream. The tangled and twisted forest of dry twigs and interlocking branches inside the hedge lets in no light, suggests nightmares and adventures, small ghostly children becoming forever lost in the snarls of the interior.

A garden bed surrounded by gravel paths separates the hedge from the house, which beckons the visitor into the embrace of the two broad bay windows set at either end of the facade. Beyond the house's left-hand side, which is west, looms a giant bunya-bunya pine with its spindles of spiny, spiralling, overlapping little spiky leaves. The cypress and the pine, native Australian and distant European, are a statement of two elements at the heart of much of the work of Ernest Leviny, the head of the family who lived here from 1864 to 1981. I suggest they are a clue to the genius of this place.

Leviny, a Hungarian, moved into the house in 1864 with his wife, Bertha, who produced six daughters and four sons. Ernest is perhaps best known these days, apart from being the paterfamilias of Buda, as the silversmith who worked with emu eggs to create astonishing and intricate silver sculptures that include images of indigenous Australians, native flowers and animals.

The house and gardens are open to the public, and currently there is an exhibition of Winter Pastimes. You wonder what the family was doing throughout long winter evenings? Believe me, they were busy. The first thing you would need to do, I think, would be to stoke the fires. Nowadays if you spend your nights following, say, the narratives of Big Brother, you will end up with nothing. Not so the Levinys. They had the opportunity and leisure to pursue whatsoever they wished, and the house and garden are testament to their labours.

While the garden slept, and the daffodils prepared to burst forth in spring, the five unmarried daughters worked at their sewing, embroidery, painting, raffia, music, rugs, cloisonne, stained glass, photography, scrapbooks, woodcarving, knitting, reading, and letters and diaries. They were talented, industrious, thoughtful women.

Apart from the more serious pursuits there were also games and simple fun, as the exhibition makes clear. The exhibition itself is small, a focus on winter pursuits within the context of the broad and thrilling program of creativity that characterised life at Buda. Five of the rooms have displays in glass cases, showing such leisure objects as the ivory chess set (half of it dyed red), the magic lantern and coloured glass slides, the sewing set, the carved ivory needle case, the wooden skittles and the small toys such as the little nodding geese. But the rooms are testament to the industry and artistry, the hours and hours of meticulous attention to detail, of the family, industry that must have spanned all seasons. "Pastime" is too small a word for what went on here.

All the unmarried daughters lived at Buda for most of their lives, and throughout the rooms you will see examples of the different kinds of work in which each specialised. Hilda, who was the last to die, in 1981, was the embroiderer. A work of hers that has fascinated me for ages is Buda Blossoms, which is in the Castlemaine Art Gallery. In a flowing design of perfect stitches and subtle, dreamy pinks, greens and beiges, it exemplifies the Arts and Crafts period of embroidery in the Australian context.

In a small, custom-built bookcase is a set of encyclopedias, the internet of the day. Throughout the house are bookcases containing a wide range of literary and other works, not the least of which is the fat red volume titled Old Age - Its Causes and Prevention. Old houses such as Buda, containing the objects left and preserved from the daily lives of the people who inhabited them, are locations of a particular kind of reminder of death, a sweet and eerie haunting.

Ernest died in 1905, and Bertha in 1923, leaving the five daughters to continue living and creating in the house and garden for nearly 60 years. Some kept diaries, invaluable documents of a way of life that is also illustrated in the testament of the things they made, the things they left behind. Outside the elegant little aviary, where zebra finches, golden finches and canaries still live, is a board on which are recorded quotations from the diaries - one on the death of a canary. Such reminders of the personal lives and sorrows of the sisters bring moments into relief, spanning the years, binding the visitor to the realities of the Leviny family.

The windows are closed in the winter, but perhaps in summer they might be open to the breezes, and then the aeolian harps fitted to the windowsills of the front gallery might sound with the music that played there long ago, floating out across the path on still afternoons, heard by anyone emerging from the low, dark tunnel through the surging darkness of the Great Cypress Hedge.

TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS

My new collection of stories

MY HEARTS ARE YOUR HEARTS 

will be published in August 2015 by Spineless Wonders
http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/products-page/pre-release-offers/pre-release-offer-my-hearts-are-your-hearts/

Three of the stories will be published individually in June in Meanjin, Island Magazine and Tailings. 

Also in August, FinlayLloyd will publish my short memoir  

Fair Game 

 in their program of
'smalls' 
http://finlaylloyd.com/fl-smalls/