Wednesday 30th July - old stories - new stories

Had a great session today out at Samford State School with one of the year 5 classes. It was a workshop in how to create new stories for telling.

Of course I started by telling a story. One of the things I found interesting was that they chose 'a Scottish story' when I offered them a choice of Australian, African or Scottish story to start with. I told them a version of one of the traditional selkie stories 'Thomas Rhuag the Seal Catcher'. (Thank you to Moses Aaron for first sharing the story with me. I loved telling the story as 3-up with you and Nicole at the SA National Storytelling Festival.)

After that I told an Australian story - one created at a Literary Festival in Springsure some years back - 'The Gingie Silos'. The good thing about telling this one is that students realise that they might be able to create a dramatic tell-able story themselves.

Once our year 5's realised that, we were away creating a brand new story about something they knew a reasonable amount about - their local area.

One thing that I enjoyed was drawing on my own childhood experiences having picnics in the Samford Valley. It really made describing the local setting both easy and a way of sharing the experience of creating the story with the class. We became a creative team because we shared knowledge of that setting.

I'm looking forward to hearing what adventures the four different teams came up with.

Sourcing Tall Stories and Yarns

As a storyteller with a website called 'Storytelling In Australia' it's not surprising that I get an email from time to time asking me about 'tall stories' and 'yarns' and where to find them. Here's one from Van below.

G'day Daryll
I found your name and email address on the 'net. I hope you do not mind this contact.
I am 63, live in semi-retired fashion on the Central Coast of NSW, and I have just finished several "swag" tours attached to a round-Oz motor bike trip. Great!!

On the swag tours I had to mix it with, typically, a smallish bunch of Australian old-timers such as myself, and a bunch of young'uns from overseas. Again typically, the oldies know the first line of half a dozen songs and bugger all tall-stories, and I'm not much better so I make up stories. The young'uns absolutely LOVE it. But because I am fairly limited in imagination, my stories are less exotic and enthralling than ones I know I have heard [but not remembered well enuff to tell].
So - this email is to see if you can help stear me in the right direction. Can you suggest an author, or even a book or two, which runs short st0ries - both fair dinkum bullshit and fair dinkum stories?

Also - there was a fascination with the Aborigines, and to my never-ending shame, I was unable to tell these people anything, in story form, of the Aboriginal legends and stuff.
Can you help any?
All the best....Van [Davy]

Van, it sounds like you're having a great time and I applaud you for your effort in telling stories around the campfire and making them up as you go as well. It's such an important part of the Aussie storytelling tradition.

However there are plenty of good tall stories out there that are worth finding. When I'm travelling I'll often stop in second hand bookshops and go through the Australian Folklore section looking for books like Bill Wannan's 'Great Australiana - Folklore, Legends, Humour, Yarns'. Bill published quite a few great books. There's an obituary for him on Warren Fahey's site at http://www.warrenfahey.com/articles/wannan.html that gives some more of his titles. A couple of good ones are:

- 'Come in Spinner :A Treasury of Popular Australian Humour' and
- 'Bullockies Beauts and Bandicoots: Australia's Greatest Yarns'.

Look for other people like Bill Scott and Patsy Adam-Smith eg,'The Shearers'. Also don't forget about some of our bush ballads. A lot of those old songs are stories in their own right. An old collection but a nice one if you find it is 'Favourite Australian Bush Songs' compiled by Lionel Long and Graham Jenkin and 'The Bushwakers Australian Song Book' is a good collection.

Yarns are good value as well. They're not tall stories as such but laid back stories about events and people and day to day life. Some of Bill Scott's collections are great, for example, 'The Australian Yarn'.

Now just to show that yarns are stilll being created and collected there's an interesting little collection on line at http://www.clickart-gallery.com/yarns/ where you can download a pdf of collected yarns from around Australia.

Another tip is to look for local collections of stories or histories about particular towns or regions. They will often have good yarns in them and sometimes tall stories.

You probably should have a couple of 'Crooked Mick' from the Speewah stories in your repertoire as well. You can find a couple here http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis@ozemail.com.au/mickrail.htm thanks to the Macinnis family.

Indigenous stories are another question. Especially because we are in Australia, I believe we need to respect Aboriginal stories and especially the Dreamtime stories. There have been quite a lot published by Indigenous authors and what I would suggest that if you read one and think - 'that's a great story, I really want to tell it' then get in touch with that author through the publisher. You see that particular Aboriginal author would only have published if the story was his or her's to publish. Really though, the best people to tell Dream Time stories are the traditional owners of those stories. When you try to tell them away from the country and culture they are about, they lose their power.

Well there you go. There's some suggestions for you. Keep having fun on the swag tours. Any suggestions of other titles from anyone else is welcome.

Regards

Daryll

Stories & Songs from the Inala Yarning Place

Met with Aunty Vi McDermott, Aunty Edna Bond and Barry Malezer today to show them the draft of the DVD booklet insert. So far everyone likes the booklet. Colleen from 3E has done a really good job on the layout.

When we showed it to Getano later on he liked it but went over it pretty carefully. We've got a couple of corrections to make.

Getano uploaded the roughcut version of one of the new songs to YouTube. It sounds good but the video will be heaps better on the DVD. We should be launching it in NAIDOC week all going well.

Back from Ali-Curung

For the last few weeks Karen and I have been in the Northern Territory working and having a short holiday. The work was the Picture This digital storytelling project in Ali-Curung, a remote Aboriginal community in Central Northern Territory. Although it is only 40 kms off the Stuart Highway it is about 5 hours from Alice Springs and 4 hours from Tennant Creek.


We were working out of the Arlpwe Art Centre collecting digital stories for publication and heard some wonderful and sometimes quite amazing personal stories. The first storyteller was Mr Bird, an 80 something year old hard working boomerang maker. He sat in the men's area at the Art Centre and told his stories about working to help set up the township when it was called the Warrabri Welfare Settlement.

One of the Art Centre's workers, Valerie Nelson, told us stories of about her grandmother passing on stories to her. We recorded the story of the painting of Aaki (Blackberry Juice), a dreamtime story, passed on from her grandmother. Her father, Mr Nelson, told us the story about how he survived, as a child, the Conniston Massacre of 1928.


The Ali-Curung Country Gospel band asked us to record their songs on the 'verandah' of Lenny's house. They were so pleased to get a a DVD of their songs that they take out to remote settlements and outstations.




Maureen O'Keefe told us funny stories about the old ladies she grew up with and took us out looking for bush tucker and medicine.









We learnt so much
in two short weeks about life
in Ali-Curung, it seems strange
now to be back in a city
with traffic and broadband and
water restrictions.

Discovering Digital Stories intro

2 What specific storytelling strategy do you use and why?

Well I'm back to answering Jill's set of questions (see http://austories.blogspot.com/2008/03/value-of-stories-irish-connection.html). The short answer is that, like most storytellers, I use lots of strategies.

Probably one of the most important is to think well about the audience and guess what sort of stories and what sort of storytelling style they would like. I then attempt to provide stories and style while watching to see if it is working and changing delivery if necessary.

Young children, generally speaking, want to have fun and want to have their energy validated and matched so my storytelling style for young children is quite energetic right from the start.

Older children can find this a bit embarassing so I generally start in a more subdued style with them and gradually slide into more expression and energy. Generally speaking, I believe that all people, young and old, want their real selves (energetic, creative, intelligent, fun loving etc) to be validated. The majority of young children just don't have any 'distress' laid in that gets in the way of enjoying it yet.

So with young children, I will often start a storytelling show with some humour so they have a good laugh and so I can let them know that they can have fun during my show.

The other important part is picking stories appropriate for the age group. This usually means stories that mean something for them. This can be stories about where they live, either locally or nationally, or stories about important issues to them, for example, overcoming dangers (Three Billy Goats Gruff) or exploring boundaries (Three Little Pigs) or even stories about children their own age. Two examples of this last category which also fill some other needs are stories about my own childhood in Maroochydore and in Brisbane. One is about going fishing with my Dad and the other is an adventure with my first pet - a kitten called Socks.

It is interesting to note that although I can tell both of these stories to adults as examples of stories I tell to young children, older children really squirm if I attempt to tell them.

So there you go Irish Jill the answer is 'lots of strategies'.

Photos from the Inala Concert & Recording Session