ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century has seen a burst of fairy-tale activity in Australian literary writing, publishing and scholarship. The Australian Fairy Tale Society was established, and its activities have served both to marshal existing resources and stimulate new research, much of it with a historical focus on early attempts to forge an Australian fairy-tale tradition. Two of Australia’s literary journals, Griffith Review and Text, have devoted special issues to fairy tales in Australian writing. In Australia, where history is broken into two utterly unlike components by the cataclysmic events of colonization/invasion, the words “once upon a time” are anything but innocent. During his writing career, Alan Marshall forthrightly wrote and spoke up about the poor living conditions of Australia’s first nation peoples, and in the late 1940s he spent a period of time living in Arnhemland collecting indigenous folktales. Fairy-tale writing, art and scholarship are presently proliferating in Australia and this seems unlikely to abate.
