B ACKGROUND READING FOR THE MAGIC GUN. Robyn Kellock Floyd Questions posed by Jo Henwood AFTS Ring Maiden How significant is this story as an early example of an Australian fairy tale? From the 1850s Australian fairy tales appeared in newspapers and a small selection of dedicated fairy tale books were published. Children’s authors in Australia began to adapt the fairies of traditional European oral, and literary tales. The quest to compile national collections in Europe and England was seen as important with the Grimms and Harland collections being two examples. With no oral tradition the descendants of white settlers borrowed plots and magical beings, commandeered the Australian environment, most notably ‘the bush’, and sometimes the Bunyip, and created fairy tales that attempted to imbue an Australian essence. The intent of these authors to give Australian children their own Australian fairyland was clear. List of some of these books written before 1904 ca
Should Ernst’s works (or any oral or literary fairy tales) be reprinted, revised or modified to meet the needs and preferences of a twenty-first century audience? We know t he re-working of fairy tales is common. When the Brothers Grimm published their first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen [ Children and Household Tales ](Grimm, 1812) containing eighty-six numbered and collected fairy and folktales they could not have foreseen the variety of adaptations of the tales two hundred years later. Hundreds of versions in different languages, audio books, cartoons, anime, horror and interactive worlds now exist. It could be argued that Grimm’s Fairy Tales should not enjoy continuing popularity in an era where the riddle of Rumpelstiltskin’s name could be easily solved using a search engine (Gollob, 2012) but they continue to be adapted for our era. In 2012, in readiness for the two hundred year anniversary of the publication of the Grimm’s first collection, a number of new fil