Australia's Best-Known Folkloric Text and its Several Fates

Abstract

Mrs K. Langloh Parker's 'Australian Legendary Tales' (1896, 1898) is being reissued currently as a collaborative effort between the Folklore Society in London and the world-supplying Wordsworth editions in England. The former group had invited me, as an Australian-domiciled member, to contribute an 'Introduction' for them to this first British reprint in a generation of a classic which has had more than a score of reprints/versions, particularly in Australia, in the last hundred years. Unlike the 1953 version, edited and selected by Henrietta Drake-Brockman, and published in Sydney and discussed below, the new edition is to be that of the original in its contents, order, and freedom from well-meaning but often somewhat extraneous background material. In short, the plain text again speaks for itself. Because of the 'new dawn' in Aboriginal culture, the long overdue reclaiming of their heritage by the indigenous peoples and the fact that indigenous storytellers and interpreters of legend are now being published by special Black Presses, it is likely that this Parker material will not be issued again by any general Australian publisher after the present Centenary of Federation year.