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Showing posts with the label Australian Fairytales

Rosalie's Reward, a fairytale in a gold rush town setting

This is  a gem,' said the librarian at the State Library as she hands it to me ... and I am inclined to agree. ‘ Rosalie’s Reward’ begins with a poetic description of Ballaarat that evokes both mood and time. The house that the impoverished mother and child come to live in stands in ‘ gloomy silence’ while the sounds of mining are clear and eerily evocative.   ‘Shrill whistle heard so clearly in the silence that called the miners to midnight toil.’ The resurrected English style cottage garden is the perfect place for a group of fairies that the reader doesn't meet until page six of the story.  There is an energetic discussion by the fairy folk about what is prized more as a reward: beauty or gold. Not surprisingly, in a gold mining town, it is gold. Rosalie’s reward for her kindness to the fairies is being left a fortune by the dying gold miner who owns the cottage. He fortunately arrives at the cottage hours before his death to bestow on Rosalie a golden future in Melbo

A gorilla in an Australian fairytale!

How beastly! What's a gorilla doing in an Aussie fairytale? Reading Australian Fairytales, written in 1897 by Atha Westbury,  I find 'Twilight '( definately not about vampires) is a 'Beauty and the Beast'  ripoff set in Melbourne.  A gorilla seemed an odd choice for an antipodean 'Beast' until i discover  that a gorilla arrived in the colony of Victoria in 1865. This one though was truly immobilised in an action pose guaranteed to terrify the fainthearted and small children (including me a hundred years later).   The  display at National Museum at The University of Melbourne obviously fired the imagination of Melburnians and Westbury.  Read more:  Gorillas at the Museum