Great Australian Stories: Legends, Yarns and Tall Tales
Author: Graham Seal
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 23 November 2009
Price: $32.99 AUD
Format: Paperback 199 pp.
Graham Seal is Professor of Folklore at Curtin University and a leading expert on traditional Australian culture.
Graham Seal says Australians have a story-telling culture that began with the First Peoples of this continent who have a long tradition of handing down stories through the generations.
Indigenous Peoples tell stories to help them follow ancestral pathways; creation myths of the Dreaming explain human origins; the landscape is a criss-cross of legendary stories that individual clans know as their own; and they have an array of stories of beasts that stop children wandering off.
When Europeans arrived, they began to tell incredible tales that in many instances were an amalgam of settler experience of the Australian bush and indigenous traditions.
Yarning around a campfire or hearth is the essence of a storytelling culture. It helps people make sense of the world and their place within it. Part of the appeal of Australian storytelling is the liberal sprinkling of profanity and distinctive Australian words and images: digger, redback, drongo, wharfie and swaggy.
The stories in this book range from Lasseter’s Reef, to Thunderbolt, Crooked Mick and the “world’s greatest whinger”. The latter when asked “How are you”, will answer: “How bloody hell would I be? I haven’t tasted a beer for weeks and the last glass I had was knocked over by a clumsy bastard before I’d finished it”.
Under Alien Cats, Seal examines the record of big cat sightings as recent as the year 2000.
The Emmaville Panther has often been sighted near Tenterfield in north east NSW, the Grampian Puma has often been seen in south west Victoria; and there have been many sightings of the marsupial Tasmanian Tiger even though it has been extinct since 1936.
In 2001, as Jan and I traveled through Far North Queensland, we stayed in Kuranda where we were told that the Newbury name is well known in the area. So I went to the library to check it out. I found little to corroborate the information but there was the story of a Mrs Newbury who lived out in the scrub. She once bought an electric jug from a door-to-door salesman but later, she complained she could never get it to work.
In the end, she was told she needed to have the electricity connected for it to boil water. This type of character in the folklore of Australia earns the label “drongo” (the name celebrates a racehorse of the 1920s that became famous for losing).
Heroes is a heading in this book. It surprises me that Ned Kelly is missing but the Australian Digger gets a lot of attention from Gallipoli on. The Australian soldier provides a rich array of legends and yarns that demonstrate their wit, lack of pretension and refusal to kowtow.
Under Sportsmen, there is the ubiquitous Bradman but also Dawn Fraser, Cathy Freeman and Evonne Goolagong. In the Aussie tradition, there are four heroes who were done wrong to—Thunderbolt, Ben Hall, Les Darcy and Pharlap; the first two by police and the latter two by Americans.
The stories about Hall portray him as a decent man wronged by circumstances and the law. A line in a ballad says: “He never robbed a needy man”. When Hall’s child was born, the baby was said to have been covered in spots in exactly the same places as the shots that killed his father..
Les Darcy was a Maitland (NSW) boy who from 1915 won twenty-two fights in a row in Australia and he was the Australian middle-weight champion. He went to America but they were so frightened of the man from Down Under they wouldn’t give him a fair go.
Darcy died of septicaemia at the age of twenty-one. Many Australians believe he was done in deliberately. When his casket was brought back to Sydney, an estimated half a million people turned out farewell him. There is a memorial of him in Maitland.
Pharlap won the 1930 Melbourne Cup and having a heart as big as Pharlap’s is the ultimate accolade. Pharlap went to America and days after winning an international race in April 1932 at Agua Caliente in Mexico, he died (Seal does not mention that Pharlap won this race). It is widely believed Pharlap died of arsenic poisoning administered by local criminals.
Reviewed by Paul W Newbury
This entry was posted by pnewbury on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Book Reviews.
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