Edition 42
Once Upon a Time in Oz
- Published 3rd December, 2013
- ISBN: 9781922079992
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
We all have the same dragons in our psyche, as Ursula K Le Guin once said. Fairy tales tell us it is possible to face these dragons, these ogres of our darkest imaginings, and triumph over them.
Australia is a story as well as a place. The Aboriginal place was telling itself for at least those sixty-thousand years, while outside Australia existed only in the imaginations of people in the northern hemisphere, a Great South Land below the equator. The shocking, defining moment in 1788 when the First Fleet landed fractured the backbone of the story, and set off a whole galaxy of further plots and subplots that continue to play out.
Wherever people go they carry their personal and cultural stories with them. We have inherited the stories of Europe, the tales of the brothers Grimm and the Bible that came in the memories and books of settlers over the past two hundred years, and we are increasingly integrating the stories of other cultures and civilisations in this region.
In Once Upon a Time in Oz, Griffith REVIEW holds up an enchanted mirror to explore the role of fairy and folk tales across cultures in this country, and creates new ones. For many, coming to Australia meant leaving centuries of fairy tales, myths and legends behind and falling painfully onto the hard and naked ground. How did immigrants re-weave a cushion of stories encompassing the new narratives of place? What are the tales that preoccupy, entertain and guide the culture today in the land of Oz? How did they make their way here? What has happened to them over time?
Once Upon a Time in Oz presents new stories by renowned writers including Cate Kennedy, Arnold Zable, Ali Alizadeh, Tony Birch, Marion Halligan, Margo Lanagan and Bruce Pascoe. Other writers including Kate Forsyth, Michelle Law, Jane Sullivan, Lucy Sussex and John Bryson examine through essay and memoir some of the mysteries of storytelling. And David Rowe takes us ‘Down the Abbott Hole’ in a cartoon essay. Once Upon a Time in Oz features Carmel Bird as contributing editor.
Edited by Julianne Schultz and Carmel Bird.
In this Edition
Dreaming the place
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...
The myths of Azaria, so many
A YOUNG TRIAL lawyer will soon come to understand that some stories are likely to be believed while others are not, and the factor which sets them apart is not to do with fact or with falsehood. Around a time when Lindy Chamberlain was well...
Strung with contour lines
‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’tbelieve impossible things.’‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the...
Two tales of the sea – The mermaid story
LONG, LONG AGO, there was a time – a long time – when people believed they would find a utopia on earth. A piece of heaven. A garden, an island, a spot of perfection where all would be well. They believed that God's perfect...
Slow and steady
WHEN I GOT back to the Ministry the electricity was still down. Our open plan office was a cavernous space, quiet now without the hum of the air conditioning and the clickety-clack of the one desktop computer. The bags I carried came under scrutiny...
Hairy tales
ONCE UPON A time in Wyoming, I watched a pack of wolves hunt and kill. I stopped the car and got out because a row of people were standing by the road, staring out over the scrubby hills of Yellowstone National Park. At first...
Metafur
LONG AGO, WHEN the world was just as unfair as it is today, villagers gathered at nights and told each other stories. By the light of the fire, they spun and chattered and passed on stories that had been floating around for centuries, or...
The myth of Charlie McMahon
THERE’S A MAN and a musician who’s been behind the scenes and across this country for many a year. You could even say he helped Australia grow up a bit. Through it all he’s carried many weary struggles and still wears a steady grin....
Told in the bush
'THAT'S A GENUINELY rare book you have there,' said the second-hand book dealer. 'I've never seen it before.''It came from my mother's side of the family,' I replied. 'She kept her children's books.'The object in question is genuinely unprepossessing. The cover is red board...
Stories as salvation
I WAS ONLY a child when I faced death for the first time.Aged just two years and four months old, I was savaged by my father's doberman pinscher in the back garden of our home in the Artarmon veterinary hospital. I was tossed like...
Return of the rings
IN THE MID-2000s, my elderly parents died within eighteen months of each other. First Donato in his mid-eighties and then Lidia, who was younger by twelve years.We siblings were left with their wedding rings.None of us wanted to claim those rings. So Lidia and...
Child
DAWN IS RISING in a pink and grey shriek of galahs. Child, already out of close warmth of swag, tugs my hand. Campfire needs stoking but in the shiver of morning there is something more urgent. Five hours' drive the day before and we...
Old women’s business
MY PARENTS, OR 'your parents' as we siblings call them, had very conflicting ideas on child rearing.My dad's idea was to feed us, smack us and send us out to play. He trusted us to grow up without too much help. I remember going...
Happily ever after
I DON'T REMEMBER much about my twenty-first birthday besides being heartbroken. A few weeks before my birthday, my boyfriend and I split up, and I was too preoccupied with the fallout to celebrate anything. We'd been together for nearly three years and were each...
A touch of silk
DURING THE 1970s and '80s I taught meditation in a dozen or so countries throughout East Asia and the Pacific on behalf of my guru. Although dressed in plain clothes, in most respects I lived and worked as a latter-day monk. After a three-year...
Three bunyips
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with a bunyip was in a School Paper, the monthly supplement to the Victorian School Readers: Eighth Book (HJ Green, Government Printer, 1928) still current in Victorian primary schools in the 1950s and '60s. It was Andrew Lang's version from The...
Interview with
Carmel Bird
Carmel Bird has written many books of short fiction, essays and novels, as well as manuals for writers. She co-edited Griffith REVIEW 42: Once Upon A Time in Oz, and her essay 'Dreaming the place' provides an introduction to many of the themes and...
Interview with
John Bryson
John Bryson is a former solicitor and barrister, now journalist, lecturer and fiction writer. His best-known work is Evil Angels (Penguin, 1985), chronicling the trials of Lindy Chamberlain over the death of her daughter Azaria, snatched by a dingo from a campsite near Uluru...
Interview with
Cecilia Condon
Cecilia Condon is a Melbourne based writer and actor. She works at the Wheeler Centre for The Emerging Writers' Festival and you can find her blog at shmockery.com. How does your approach to writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry differ? I know that you write across...
Interview with
Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her most recent collection of stories, Like A House on Fire, was nominated for the inaugural Stella Prize earlier this year. In this interview she speaks with Madeleine Watts about her writing process, her...
Interview with
Michelle Law
Michelle Law is a Brisbane writer whose work has appeared in Women of Letters (Penguin, 2011) Growing Up Asian in Australia (Black Inc, 2008), Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World (UQP, 2013), and numerous Australian literary journals. She is an...
Interview with
Danielle Wood
Danielle Wood is the author of a novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, a collection of short fiction, and the biography of Marjorie Bligh. She also writes fiction for children with Heather Rose under the name 'Angelica Banks'. In this interview she speaks...
Interview with
Arnold Zable
Arnold Zable is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and memoir. In this interview he speaks about the process of writing, the place of trauma and the past in his work, and his story 'The attic' in Griffith REVIEW 42, an excerpt from...
The good mother
NOW THAT YOU think about it, you realise you've known her your whole life. On the magazine pages and billboards of your childhood, she was fair as Rapunzel with a trim shoulder-length haircut. You were indifferent to her, back then, barely registered her presence....
The attic
SHE DOES NOT want to be seen. 'What is there to see,' she says. 'I am old.' She prefers to converse by phone. As she speaks she grows more resolute. She rages against the state of the world: 'So much hatred. So much fighting.'...
Big Yengo
The second-last edition of our summer-reading series sees us return to Bruce Pascoe's 'Big Yengo', from Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time. In this piece of short fiction, a father is moved to see his son, now a man, so at home on the...
Two tales of the sea – The boat story
The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.– Michel Foucault THE FACT THAT the entire country had lost its grip – lost its heartbeat...
A castle in Toorak
THE BOUNCER WAS cute. I gave him a wicked smile, he frowned, looked us up and down slowly, and let us in. I knew he would. We looked good, our clothes were right, we were young and pretty. Me more so than my sister...
Light dawns
And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caughtThe Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.– The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám EDWARD PATTEN, BORN in England but still eligible in the first decades after India, independence to be made Bishop of the Church of...
Snow White and the child soldier
'LISA THINKS SHE'S the hottest girl around.''She's so up herself. She doesn't even have a Facebook page.''Guys! Guys! Who's the hottest girl in this school?''You're the hottest girl in this school, Charlize.''You've got like the sexiest legs, Charlize.''So why do boys pay so much...
A glimpse of paradise
I WAS HEAD over heels about Steven, and that’s the truth. And having such a spectacular house didn’t hurt either, so far removed from my one-bedroom apartment that it was hard not to show my covetousness for it right from the start and make...
Snake in the grass
Selected for Best Australian Stories 2014I BAKE ON the smooth clay of dried creekbed. Soak in light the colour of sandstone. Sun-heavy air. Heat-hushed noon. Stillness, silence, warmth are the things I love. I'm a length of sun-powered muscle, arrowing one way, looping eternally....
Black swan event
THE FIRST THING Dawn heard every morning was her brother stretching his wing. The soft whooping travelled down the hall and woke her from whatever doze or dream she lay in. Through the first bird-calls, or the wind hissing or the rain rattling or...
The ghost river
When he was about to begin the river story Moses would stamp at the ground with the heel of his boot and call out to the birds in the trees, ‘listen hard now’. He’d clap his hands together a couple of times, make a clicking noise with his tongue and the birds would lift off from the trees in the distance and move a little closer, to the wattles lining the riverbank. ‘Back in the old time, before the humans,’ he would begin, ‘this girl, the river, she didn’t stop her life where she does now, at the mouth at bay there. There is no bay in the time I’m talking with.’
Featured Contributors
Michelle Law
Michelle Law is a Brisbane writer working across fiction, nonfiction and screenwriting. Her work has appeared in Women of...
Bruce Pascoe
Bruce Pascoe is of Bunurong and Yuin heritage and a member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative of southern Victoria. He...
Carmel Bird
Carmel Bird's books include the novels The White Garden, Crisis and The Bluebird Cafe. Red Shoes is a novel...
Tony Birch
Tony Birch has published the short story collections Shadowboxing (Scribe, 2006), Father’s Day (Hunter, 2009), The Promise (UQP, 2011), Common People (UQP, 2017)...
