Editorial - Australian Folklore: A Yearly Journal of Folklore Studies - An issue featuring aspects of the present outreach of Australian Folkloric Writings

Abstract

For many years it has been the policy of this annual journal to reflect on developments in influences impacting on Australian folk culture - from the more immediate 'Pacific' field, and so to indicate some of the ways in which our predominantly Australian research and linked interests in lore and custom are likely to acknowledge and, if appropriate embrace aspects of these different but impacting cultures. Necessarily the greater themes are then and subsequently to be indicated and duly explored by such studies as we are able to solicit, assess, and, if appropriate, publish. Thus we have a cluster of such research essays towards the beginning of the present annual volume. Pleasingly these external fields are deemed significant in many research/ tertiary Schools and Departments, from whence an ever greater proportion of our investigative pieces come. Accordingly we have recorded a number of folkloric exercises from the immediate north of Australia, and, variously from Indonesia, and South East Asia, even as we had an unexpected paper from South Africa. However, this work will not drown out the research voices handling our more traditional lore and language. As the present issue indicates at several points, one of the most obvious features of our research, our publishing and of the teaching in our field in Australia has been a developing concern for the proximate countries; those of the South Pacific, and of the south east of Asia, rather than with the regions of the British Isles and so the less emphasis on the legacies of / issues here coming here up to the 1930s, and so, to consider rather, a turning to the European and other countries so heavily represented in the post 1945 migration to Australia, or those in East Asia impacting on Australia in the second third of the twentieth century. As it stated some way ahead in the present volume, the 'The New Net goes Fishing' in other waters - a nice Maori idiom for stories and writings from the era after 1945, when New Zealand, too, had a world view of other peoples than the traditional British settlers, enforced or free.