What is the name of the tiger in The Life of Pi by Yann Martel?

We made it back to Brisbane in time for the floods this time.

Great photo by Lil Foet, from Flickr, South Brisbane on the 6th January, 2013

Not that our house was flooded, it was long ago placed carefully on a hillside and I'm grateful.

We did lose power however. One of our neighbourhood trees in Dorchester Street stopped holding on for a second or two in the wild wind and that was all it took. The powerlines tried to catch it and, with some help from an optus cable and at least four poles, they did, but the power leaked everywhere until some kind person or machine turned off the switch and plunged us into darkness and refused us entry into the world of the Australian Open Singles final story.

Oh well, I had worked out who was going to triumph in that particular hero's journey when ex-cyclone Oswald took his revenge.

Perhaps more meaningfully, I did get to realize how dependent on electricity I have become - no power, no fridge, no computer and no TV and not much awareness of the trauma a whole lot of people went through with the 'cyclonic event'.

We did get to enjoy lots of candles and to realise how humid Brisbane can get even the wind is 'cyclonic'. The treat last night was getting out the little green ukulele after our dinner by candlelight and playing and singing songs to each other.

Earlier we had sought refuge in a nearby cinema, air conditioned of course, and were suitably entertained by 'The Life of Pi'. As Pi and the tiger were surviving great storms in the Pacific in a lifeboat, Oswald was wreaking havoc further south and, tragically, drowning two Asian backpacking farm labourers in the Lockyer Valley.

'Life of Pi' is a quite wonderful story, magically created on screen from Yann Martel's Booker winning book. I was also suitably entertained by the main point of the story, ie 'God is the more interesting story.'

After that fertile conditioning in the air conditioning, I was most certainly ripe for the subject line of an email/facebook/blog post I bumped up against this morning when we finally got power back - 'Tall Tales - the strength of storytelling'.

It wasn't bad and wasn't brilliant, well it lacked a bit after 'Life of Pi in 3D' and the wild Oswaldic winds. It was really an essay on why business people should tell stories. It has some nice points. One of the quotes from Alison Esse is, “Storytelling is the original and most powerful form of learning and sharing knowledge.”

That led me to thinking about

'When did storytelling evolve?' 'What came first, oral stories or visual stories?'

I looked online and, although it is a pretty murky area of research, it would seem that it was most likely to be oral storytelling. The first cave paintings were only 30,000 or 50,000 years ago and it seems likely that human speech has been around for a couple of hundred thousands of years.

So storytelling came first. Sorry writers and painters and sculptors and directors.

It also took me on a journey to another post on another electrically powered blog called - 'Your brain on narrative: evolution and the story rope' by Andrea Pitzer.

Which leads me to the story rope. I hadn't heard of them before but teachers probably have.  They're a bit like charm bracelets. Imagine a 'rope' of plaited wool and inserted into it in a line is approx 7 studs - one for a character, one for the setting, one for the problem, two or three for complications and a bright sunny one for the solution.

The one in Andrea Pitzer's article has a ginger bread man, a house, a cowboy boot, three small stars and a sun, respectively.


I wonder what symbols the storytelling rope for the 2013 floods would need? I think we could reuse the sun at least.

Oh the tiger was called Richard Parker. I probably should say tigers. Want more? Only go here if you don't care about tiger or tigers.

Kuril, West End Crossing Boundaries and Ashgrove Young Explorers

Had a really enjoyable workshop at Ashgrove Library with the Young Explorers of Ashgrove History.

Uncle Nurdon Serico shared his knowledge of the local country and of the Turrbal people.

He reminded us of the Turrbal name for Ashgrove - Kallindarbin and of the fact that Waterworks Road was once an Aboriginal pathway leading to Mt Cootha and to the Bunya festival in the Bunya Mountains.

I remembered the Kuril Story that Vanessa Fisher told and painted for the Crossing  Boundaries project in 1997- 98. Here's the link. It's been archived on the Pandora site these days but it's still all there.

It was a great project. It would be good to do it again sometime, get some different stories and compare results.

Ashgrove local history stories and yarns

I had great pleasure telling my 'Clothes Props Man' story to children and adults at the Launch of the Creating Young Local Historians project at Ashgrove Library on Saturday.

Local History is all about stories really. Sure some people get bogged down in detail of dates, addresses and exactly what was said at times but really they are just getting bogged down in Narrative Structure or at least one part of it.

The other delightful story we had at the launch was the story of The Children's Coach. For some years around 1937 at St Finbarr's School in Ashgrove the kindergarten children were delivered by a horse and cart owned by the nuns.  Miss Pat Fahey was there at our launch to share the story about being one of the children photographed sitting in the buggy. She's the one sucking her thumb.

She reckons that it was probably because, although the horse plodded up the hill in Jubilee Tce where she was picked up, it used gallop along at a great rate along Waterworks Road and they all had to hang on.

If you would like to see what Pat looks like now have a look on our YEAH blog.

Really looking foward to our first children's workshop in the library on Saturday at the Ashgrove Library. Uncle Nurdon Serico is going to come along to tell us a story or two about Turrbal enjoyment of the area.

We'll have some games, technology, more stories and fun, so if you know of any children living in the greater Ashgrove area who would like something really different to do on Saturday here's the link to the information.

http://youngexplorersashgrovehistory.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/launch-of-creating-young-local.html

We'll be publishing stories, local history information, podcasts etc on the YEAH blog so you might like to follow our progress.

Daryll

This Old Man He Told Stories

Wonderful day today of performing at kindergartens - Samford Community Kindergarten and Chapel Hill Community Kindergarten and running off a DVD of the ANTaR forum on 'Sovereignty in the 21st Century'.

I'm really enjoying adding more ukulele to my storytelling as well. Today we went for a choof down the track with 'Down By the Station, Early In the Morning' and that led into my 'Little Blue Train takes the children to the Zoo' story. Because the children at Samford have been exploring a space theme lately, I also improvised a story that started with 'This Old Man He Played One' song. When we got to 4, he played knick, knack on the door, the door creaked open and I asked the children 'who or what came out'. One girl said a ghost, so, of course, we all screamed and ran and ran and ran all the way to the space station and took off on the Lunar Explorer Mission as fast as we could.

You wouldn't guess who we ran into on the moon? Give up? It was that dreadful space pirate Captain Hook. He stole the treasure and blasted off to Mars. Did we get back? Of course we did. Came back to earth just in time to sing 'this old man he played five'. Good fun.

Chapel Hill's Kinders were dominated by boys and the energy was .... masculine, well 4 year old masculine. I did notice that the girls were having the most fun though. We finished with The Clever Turtle. At the end of the show, the children had a choice of strumming the uke while I did some chords or playing on the djembe. What value.

Stories are so much fun for all ages. It is important that we remember that as we embrace and work with the national curriculum.

Bringing stories alive and joyful Ted

Really enjoyed running a  bringing stories alive storytelling workshop for some very talented and dedicated kindergarten teachers today.

Wavell Heights Kindergarten is one of those very professional C&K kindergartens that add so much to our Qld society.

Enjoyed this Ted talk tonight.

Fair is Fair - World Folktales of Justice and Snow White

Have been reading some more of 'Fair is Fair - World Folktales of Justice' by Sharon Creeden. I bought this August House Publisher collection of folktales around the subject of justice at the NSW Storytelling Conference and have been dipping into it at regular intervals.

There's quite a range of stories both from different cultures and about different issues. One I enjoyed was 'The Two Otters and the Fox'. It's a short folktale from India and Indonesia about otters who are fighting over who should get the bigger share of the fish they've both caught. They ask the fox to solve the question for them and, of course, he makes off with the biggest share. The otters are left with an unexpected moral - fighting leads to losses.

This story can be used in so many ways, about bullying for example, but what came to my mind, I must admit, is the current fighting by the Australian political parties over refugees. We all lose by that fight, especially the refugees. More importantly though the political parties lose respect.

Another story in the book is 'Mr Fox'. I used to tell it a lot when I first started telling stories but I stopped. It is a pretty gruesome story. Sharon Creeden compares it to the serial killing of Ted Bundy. He was certainly gruesome. I still don't know if I want to tell it. It does have a brave hero, Lady Mary, and justice is done but it is capital punishment.

I find myself turning off TV a lot lately because of all of the murderous crime stories. Who needs them? I know I don't. What effect do they have on viewers? I don't know but I suspect that the balance is not positive. So should I tell Mr Fox or not? And in the words of a panto I saw as a child, 'That's the burning question. Let's have your suggestion.'

Who's seen 'Snow White and the Huntsman'?

I enjoyed it. Thought it was good storytelling in general. I liked the way they played with the Snow White story and brought in all sorts of other references from other folk tales, legends, movies, genres etc. - the three drops of blood on the snow, the rose, the witch and the ravens, the white hart and many more.

Snow White was quite Joan of Arc-ish riding into battle. If she was a contemporary country or nation which one would she be? What about the scarred women with the head scarves in the village by the lake? Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam?

The troll was cool but it was a bit of an anticlimax when he just slunk off. It demonstrated Snow Whites compassionate power but really they missed a good opportunity there. They went for  mono-cultural or mono-specific heroes. The closest thing to a non white human team members were the dwarfs and they were clearly white human, just a little quirky in a easily loveable way.

I thought it was interesting that, while there was lots of killing in the movie, most of the means of dying were not directly presented. I guess this was a way of making the killing more acceptable. It certainly worked.

Back in Bris, Little Tots and the Single Story

Back in Brisbane after corporate storytelling trip to Perth. It was a bit quick and I didn't manage to catch up with Perth storytellers. (Sorry about that WA storytellers.)

The session with Honda Australia salespeople and managers at the Burswood Entertainment Complex went well. It was good working with a local jazz band, John Bannister and The Charisma Brothers, as well. One thing I like about these corporate awards nights is the smiles on peoples faces as they are acknowledged for their hard work.

Really enjoyed our visit to the Art Gallery of WA. The Warholl to Picasso exhibition is definitely worth it and the general gallery collection is quite special. Good to see some old favourites again like Lin Onus's 'Maralinga'.

In my corporate storytelling presentation to Honda, I've been making the assertion that, 'If you want to oppress a culture one of the easiest ways to do it is to stop the people from telling their stories and especially stop them from telling their stories in their language.'

So today I was pleased to hear that idea expanded on in a Ted talk by ‪Chimamanda Adichie: 'The danger of a single story.'‬  She won me over very quickly with 'I'm a storyteller and I'd like to tell you a few personal stories about ...'  In her talk Chmamanda argues very eloquently about the effect of our tendency to simplify our perceptions of peoples and culture into - 'single stories'.

She says, among many other things, - 'Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person.'

She finishes her talk with:

'When we reject the single story, when we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.'

I like that.

Told three different stories to some Little Tots children at Stretton today. So many different faces and cultures, all hungry for fun and stories. We had both but I do see that it is easy to slip into one type of story.