Australian Storytelling - 20th-century Stories

20th-century Stories

The Depression years of the 1930s brought the itinerant storyteller;the swagmen who carried the stories across the vast continent as they walked from town to town looking for work. Many of the swaggies became practised oral storytellers as, night after night, they camped on riverbanks and yarned by the fire. Well-known Australian storyteller Nell Bell remembers "my grandfather telling me about his mates, fencing contractors in northwest NSW, and my grandmother as she churned, telling me tales of leprechauns and willy willies. There were the Chinese market gardens at the top of the street with tales of emperors and peacocks; the tramp who lived under the bridge and told me tale after tale and the metho drinker with tales of America and the Outback. These were real folks, a purely Australian tradition."

One of the itinerant storytellers from the depression years was Henry Lawson, who was born on the goldfields—the son of a Norwegian seaman. He roamed the bush with the swagmen. Fame, though not fortune, came to him through his poems and short stories and when he died in 1922 he was honoured with a state funeral.

Many Australian stories, such as Lawson’s "The Drover’s Wife", developed in the distant and harsh conditions of the Australian bush where men and women would "wonder and fear". Sharing stories helped ease loneliness and homesickness, brought back memories of comfortable times and places and generated a feeling of togetherness against the wild unknown. The stories were told around the fire while the billy boiled; the fire and the stories combining to offer a feeling of security.

The war years (1914–18 and 1939–45) added another dimension to Australian folktales. New heroes began to emerge. From the First World War emerged the Anzacs and the story of Simpson and his donkey, and Sister Vivian Bullwinkel to name just a few.

After World War II the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and many other different ethnic groups have each added rich dimensions to Australian storytelling. Post-war affluence brought new mediums of entertainment and new ways of telling stories and the oral tradition was overlooked for many years.