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What's your favourite fairy tale?


Invited to join the conversation on fairy tales on Life Matters on Friday with Jack Zipes, eminent fairy tale researcher and Kate Forsyth, author of one of my favourite books, The Wild Girl, I was challenged to name by favourite Australian fairy tales by a Glen Iris Primary parent who had listened to the conversation on my return to school. Life Matters
Of the classics I choose Cinderella, fascinated by the way inanimate objects such as pumpkins turn into golden coaches and the importance of finding some-one with the 'right fit' for a relationship (if only by the tangible and symbolic search via glass slipper). 
My Australian choice is a small book of which there is only one known copy in the State Library, Victoria: Rosalie's Reward; or the fairy treasure. It has some of the elements of the Cinderella fairy tale: an impoverished child abandoned (through financial necessity) by her mother, a Prince who rescues her and a group of fairies who do the work of the traditional single fairy Godmother. 
Rosalie’s Reward begins with a poetic description of Ballaarat that evokes both mood and time. The house stands in ‘gloomy silence’ and the sounds of mining are sprinkled throughout the text. ‘ Shrill whistle heard so clearly in the silence that called the miners to midnight toil.’ Fairy tale motifs are changed to reflect the Goldfield's society and include: being in limbo - Rosalie is left by her mother who has to earn money by being a governess; familiar character motifs - the hero (Rosalie who pours water on the tangled dying garden, saving the fairies and zephyrs), the handsome prince (an old Scottish Miner, about to die, is an non-magical rescuer aided by the fairies); and a very socially appropriate hero’s reward. In this Australian fairy tale, the palace is a mansion in Toorak, a wealthy suburb of Melbourne. 
The fairies in Rosalie's Reward live in the rundown flower garden of a cottage near the Ballaraat goldfields and have an energetic discussion on whether they should reward Rosalie's kindness with beauty or gold. Unsurprisingly in a town created by the Gold Rush it is gold. The ' rescuing prince' appears it is in the form of an old (and rich) miner who fortunately arrives hours before his death to bestow a golden future in Melbourne on her. We leave the story content that Rosalie lives 'happily ever after', 'set up for life' by her Prince, a woman in control of her own financial future.
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