![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Creep, creep, creeping
May. 27th, 2004 05:34 pmI’ve always loved fairy-tales and mythology, but for the most part, I feel separate from them. It’s only a story, after all. Traditional fairy tales with snow and wolves and bears and such are from a distinctly different world to central and south-eastern Australia where I grew up. At school we studied the beautiful tales of the Aboriginal Dreamtime too, part mythology, part history, but, although the landscape and features are more recognisable, the culture that created them is vastly different to mine as well.
And then… I went to an old, country school run by the last of the fire and brimstone nuns, a holy terror with a metre ruler. I went to her funeral a couple of years ago, the first (and only) time I have seen a bishop and fourteen priests officiating together. Lurking in the school library was a collection of ancient school-books, which, naturally, I read. And in the Grade Two reader was a true Australian folk tale, that put the fear of God into my six-year-old self and simutaneously scared the bejesus out of me.
Poking around in the university library yesterday, I found that book. Reading the story again, I could see why it scared me so much as a child: pet dismemberment and undescribed, silent stalkers will do that to a youngster. The landscape is familiar. The repetition just kills me, all that creep, creep, creeping. And I’m sure armchair psychologists could read aspects of it as the fears of European Australians writ large. But enough of that. It’s a fantastic story that deserves to be better known. Go on, scare a young child you love today.
( The Hobyahs )
And then… I went to an old, country school run by the last of the fire and brimstone nuns, a holy terror with a metre ruler. I went to her funeral a couple of years ago, the first (and only) time I have seen a bishop and fourteen priests officiating together. Lurking in the school library was a collection of ancient school-books, which, naturally, I read. And in the Grade Two reader was a true Australian folk tale, that put the fear of God into my six-year-old self and simutaneously scared the bejesus out of me.
Poking around in the university library yesterday, I found that book. Reading the story again, I could see why it scared me so much as a child: pet dismemberment and undescribed, silent stalkers will do that to a youngster. The landscape is familiar. The repetition just kills me, all that creep, creep, creeping. And I’m sure armchair psychologists could read aspects of it as the fears of European Australians writ large. But enough of that. It’s a fantastic story that deserves to be better known. Go on, scare a young child you love today.
( The Hobyahs )
