I am always thrilled to be contacted by those who by chance find my blog. I have been blogging for three years and am hoping to complete my first draft by the end of the year. I thought it timely to re-publish what has already been published. The following is from my presentation at the University of Kassel, Germany.
In 1904 Olga Ernst, a pupil
teacher, wrote Fairy Tales from the Land
of the Wattle. Although she was just sixteen years old, Ernst was one of a
small group of writers in Australia who attempted to nationalise the fairytale
towards the end of the nineteenth century, signalling quite clearly that they intended to
affix the elves and fairies of Europe onto the Australian landscape aiming to
fill a void that was keenly felt by the children of emigrants and the
Australian-born children of emigrants. (Walker, 1988)
The beginnings of the Australian
bush fantasy genre can be linked with the desire to bring the comfortable and
familiar into the new and distinctly non-European landscape. When coupled with
a determination to use local settings
and colour in children’s stories in the late nineteenth century
writers were drawn to the challenge of imagining an Australianised
fairyland believing it was the right of all children to have their own fairies
(Niall & O'Neill, 1987).
Ernst’s
parents were German and she was born in Melbourne (capital of the Colony of
Victoria) in 1888, at a time when approximately two percent of the
population was German. There were a number of secular newspapers and journals
published in the German language and it was possible to purchase goods in shops
speaking only in the German language, in the central business district of
Melbourne.
Ernst’s family were members of the
Trinity German Lutheran Church belonging to a close social circle of
influential and highly educated scientists, artists and musicians. It could be
argued that the cultural wealth contributed by these German emigrants’
achievements in science, art and exploration in the formative years of the
Colony of Victoria was considerable. Although the Australian-born descendants
of German emigrants saw themselves as Australian first, they continued to
identify with Germany culturally (Bodi & Jeffries, 1985).
Ernst’s mother, Johanna Olga
Straubel[i]
was born in Melbourne to German-born parents while her father Julius Theodor
Ernst, formerly a senior pharmacist in the Royal Prussian Reserve Forces who emigrated in 1884. Ernst’s ancestors were pastors and teachers and education
and the arts were highly valued. They were the ‘literati’, the educated
bourgeoisie of Germany. Marianne Heyne (nee Tieroff), her great-grandmother was
brought up in the cultured world of stepmother Charlotte Greeve after the death
of her father Pastor Tieroff, (Ford, 2009).
Ernst’s
German heritage is central to her writing and my research aims to illuminate a
little explored aspect of writing for Australian children. Ernst’s fairytales
are a blend of the old world lore and a careful attentiveness to the unique
botany and geology of the bush. She did not look to the ‘old country’ (Britain)
for inspiration but admitted her fairies were plucked from the pages of her
childhood reading and interpretation of Grimm’s’ Kindermärchen. My thesis argues that Ernst reshaped the fairytale
structure of earlier writers such as Westbury (1897), Lockeyear (1891) and Whitfield ( 1898) as a result of her
cultural, social and pedagogic experiences. Writing from a unique German-Australian perspective Ernst uses recurrent narrative patterns common to
fairytales. Using the knowledge
gleaned as a member of a family highly educated within scientific,
horticultural and education fields, she weaves botanically and geographically
accurate descriptions of place and time into her stories. Thus her invented
fairytales have a stronger link with Australian place and setting not apparent
in most of the earlier fairytale attempts.
[i] Known as Olga during her
life. In the family she was referred to as Big Olga and her daughter Little
Olga.
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