TRANSCRIPT
There's more than one way to tell a story.
Magic, myth and fantasy play a part in exploring what is often hard to say.
"With this, the structure that we have, it can sometimes name something which is unspeakable or something that's taboo or something that is really deep within someone. And people will find a universal way of bringing something out of that fairy tale that relates to their journey."
Produced in both written and oral form, fairy tales are stories that can feature talking animals, giants, fairies, monsters, dragons and numerous other fantastical elements.
They're mostly short stories and they're found in almost all human cultures.
The Australian Fairy Tale Society is a not-for-profit group that meets to discuss and write fairy tales.
Thang Dac Luong says they offer an alternative way of looking at reality.
"They're about truth telling, essentially, we can take some message from it, we can take sometimes a moral message out of it, we can interpret it in so many ways."
Thang is a writer and lawyer.
He is currently working on a memoir.
He's also the author of Refugee Wolf - a fable published in 2014.
It's a retelling of the European fairy tale The Three Little Pigs.
"I thought, well, how could I use that as a device to tell a story of acceptance of refugees. And my intention of the story was never to undermine the trauma and feelings of refugees.”
In the original European story the first little pig builds a house of straw but a wolf comes and blows that house down and eats the pig.
The same thing happens to the second little pig who has built a house of sticks.
But the third pig succeeds in surviving after building a stronger house of bricks that the wolf is unable to destroy.
Instead the wolf dies in the process of trying to destroy that house.
One interpretation of that tale is that dedication and hard work pay off as it did for the surviving little pig.
But in Thang's reimagining of the story, he paints the wolf as a refugee rather than a predator.
Like the little pig, the wolf was simply looking for a place to call home.
"I queued up behind some of the other wolves. Hovering in mid air was a big LCD screen with a message in white letters on a black background which read, 'Beware of refugee wolves that say let me in let me in.' I eventually got to the checkpoint. Pigs were processing our applications at various counters. There was another smaller LCD screen hovering there. With a message which said, beer drinkers to the left, non-beer drinkers to the right.”
His version of the story retells his family's refugee journey by boat to Australia after the Vietnam war.
"When I was growing up my father, he had a lot of trauma. And I didn't know how to process that at the time as a child. And as I'm writing my own memoir at the moment, I'm trying to understand him by asking questions. That's the thing about fairy tales - is that you can read a fairy tale and you can get a message. But if you take a deeper dive, you'll kind of understand that with trauma and things like that, as Carl Jung said 'What you resist will only persist' and can only grow. So with my writing, I looked back and I tried to be sympathetic to my father. He had a lot of issues."
The society holds regular meetings for its members.
This one's at the Don Bank Museum in Sydney.
It isn't a museum in the traditional sense, rather it's the oldest house in North Sydney, looking much like it probably did when it was built in the mid-1800s.
"You've got this lovely 19th century cottage. You've got a functional enough kitchen, we've got the dining table, it's got all this atmosphere. We've got a lovely little stone fireplace here, and to my eternal regret for heritage reasons we're not allowed to start a fire which would have been great. But you've got the atmosphere. We've got a little cauldron there and the pictures of the horses and the transport."
The cottage once had commanding views over Sydney harbour, but these days it's hidden away, surrounded by highrise office buildings.
Our guide on this tour of sorts is President and co-founder of the Fairy Tale Society, Jo Henwood.
She and other members are discussing the Doomed Prince - an Egyptian fairy tale where to this day, the ending remains unknown.
"What's the moral of the story?"
"It depends because we don't know the ending. It depends on which ending we choose to tell."
"And which ending do you choose to tell?"
A fairy tale often mixes elements of magic and tragedy.
Jo Henwood says a lot of fairy tales are coming-of-age stories that involve what we would now describe as dysfunctional families.
The Doomed Prince is no exception.
On the question of how Australian fairy tales differ from those in other parts of the world, Jo Henwood says there are no clear answers.
"We're a nation of immigrants. So you've got all sorts of different lenses and different ways of seeing it. And there is no one Australian voice, which is why we have art that creates so many different mirrors for so many different sorts of Australians to see themselves within the stories.”
Australia's complex Indigenous history makes defining what an Australian fairy tale is even more complex.
Many early Australian fairy tales commonly merged Aboriginal people with mythical creatures.
And some researchers believe that many Indigenous stories remain unknown because they aren't really fairy tales.
Instead they are secret or sacred stories that cultural protocols command only be retold in certain circumstances.
Thang Dac Luong says creating new fairy tales, or reinterpreting old ones, offers a gentle way of looking at Australia's complex past.
"I think it's a safe way, because we're trying to imagine what a society could be like, if we were to open up discussion in a reasonable way. We want to include voices, and we want to acknowledge people who had difficult life circumstances. They might have had trauma, and things like that. And I think it's a nice fit. It's a kind of cloak or a veil, if you like. And then when you lift the veil, you're able to then see through."
The society is creating a database of original Australian fairy tales, fairy tale adaptations, interpretations, and criticism.
Jo Henwood says regardless of where stories originate, they can have a certain magic and power about them that cannot be found in fact-based story telling.
"When we're looking at Australian fairy tales looking at our perspective, our stories, there are enough clues within the stories created so far away so long ago. But they've got that power. And because the psychological layers are there, they are universal, as well as extremely local.”
And you can listen to more episodes in the Change Agents podcast series wherever you get your podcasts.
