Introduction to the Special Issue: Transplanted Wonder: Australian Fairy Tale

Abstract

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2022), pp. 3–10. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201. What makes an “Australian” fairy tale? Does this designation refer to marvelous narratives with a distinctly Australian bush setting? Or to fiction by Australian authors that is set in a European “once upon a time”? Is such a categorization as the Australian fairy tale even possible? Maurice Saxby once referred to early Australian examples of the genre as “so-called fairy tales,” dismissive of their limited connection with folk traditions (46). However, the literary fairy tale is not always derived from European, or folk, tradition. Moreover, recent attention to decolonizing fairy-tale studies and the fairy-tale canon has emphasized “the specifics of distinct cultures” and has called for resistance to “the twin urges to universalize traditional narratives at the expense of their specific historical and sociocultural contexts and to generalize the European fairy tale as an ahistorical global genre” (Haase 29). While British settlers made attempts to replicate European tale tradition in Australian settings, the fairy tales they produced could never precisely mirror those that evolved through centuries of oral and literary telling. In recent decades this uniqueness—once perceived as a failing—has become a strength of Australian fairy-tale texts. In this special issue, literary scholars and creative writing practitioners examine the way the genre was transplanted to take root in Australia through the process of white settler colonialism and how it has developed to take on its own inflections and possibilities as it has been adopted and adapted by a diverse range of writers, artists, and filmmakers. Reflecting a tendency in the field to center European traditions (Bacchilega 38), there has been surprisingly little scholarly attention devoted to Australian fairy tales until comparatively recently. Lisa Fiander suggests that greater Michelle J. SMith and eMMa WhatMan