Fairy Tales Told in the Bush

Chapter 2: PREFACE

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About This Book

A collection of short fairy tales retold for children in a bush setting, blending imported folk stories, original creations, and local oral origin narratives. Each piece delivers compact, fantastical episodes featuring enchanted objects, transformations, talking animals, and simple moral lessons about honesty, curiosity, and consequence. Framed as orally told stories with accompanying illustrations, the pieces alternate between whimsical adventures, origin myths, and gentle parables crafted for young listeners.

PREFACE

Of these Fairy Tales told to children in the Australian bush, “The Magic Gun” and “The Underground River,” are original, but the others have been brought from the old country, not in book form, but in the memory of a lover of fairies and children.

“The Origin of the Yarra Yarra” was told to the writer by old King Barak, the last King of the Yarra tribe, a few days before his death.

These tales, as told here, charmed the writer in the “Sixties” when Melbourne was a place of bush and swamp. They now charm little slum children in the so-called “slum parts” of the city of Melbourne, “The Palace of Truth” and “The Magic Gun” being always asked for when stories are to be told.