I just finished reading a 1994 reprint of
A. W. Reed's 1965 book,
Aboriginal Fables and Legendary Tales, and I have mixed feelings about it.
As the title makes clear, this is a collection of seventy-three tales from the native people of Australia. All are very short, averaging two pages in length, and most deal with why some aspect of the world is the way it is today. Several explicitly reference the
Dreamtime, or famous creatures such as the
Rainbow Serpent or the
bunyip, but the majority deal with individuals who, because of their actions, become animals that are found in the Australian wilderness today.
It's in the retelling of these stories that I find myself of two minds. A. W. Reed clearly wanted to preserve the cultural context of these tales, making sure to maintain native terms used in these stories, such as
corroboree,
woomera,
gunyah, and of course,
billabong. This is an instinct that I can not only understand, but sympathize with.
However, the lack of explanation for these contexts works against greater understanding of the tales herein. I don't just mean that there's no notations regarding terms that non-Aussies probably won't be familiar with, but also no indication of which tales are from which aboriginal tribes. The practical impact of this is that (barring instances where the name of the tribe is mentioned in the story, which is rare) we not only don't know which tales are from which people, but in several instances we end up with several incompatible stories for the same creation myth, such as when we have two different stories about how the tortoise got its shell within pages of each other.
The author's introduction makes it clear that he wasn't unaware of this problem, pointing out how there are several instances of stories having been passed between tribes, to the point where they're now identical or told only with minor variations between them. I'm sure that's the case, but is it really an excuse for giving
nothing to connect the stories to the people who tell them? The more I read this, the more I recalled
how much I appreciated the efforts of another author who, when writing a translation of a Chinese text, bent over backwards to give us notes and explanations. Would that had been the case here!
Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy what was here; I absolutely did. These tales are, in many cases, comparable to
Aesop's Fables for their pith, though in many cases the moral isn't quite as clear (or even necessarily there at all). I just wish more had been done to inform us not just about the things we don't know, but the things we don't even know that we don't know.
