Sister Agnes' Fairy Tales Told in the Bush

Sister Agnes’ Fairy Tales Told in the Bush (1911?) is an unusual collection of early Australian fairy tales, not least because its author (Agnes Row) was a deaconess of the Community of the Holy Name. It's also unconventional because of the degree to which it depicts, and engages with, First Nations people and stories. William Barak, the last traditional elder of the Wurundjeri people (the owners of the area now known as Melbourne), told the story of the city’s river ‘The Origin of the Yarra Yarra’ to Sister Agnes and he also appears as a character in an original story, ‘The Magic Gun’.

This tale is unique for its attempt to merge convict history with First Nations peoples in ways that attempt to shape national mythologies. The tale begins with ‘Old King Barak, the last King of the Yarra tribe’ situated at the historical First Nations farming community, Coranderrk, telling a boy named Tom Jones the story of the Magic Gun. Tom discovers that Barak possesses a gun that once belong to the historical figure, William Buckley. 

Buckley was a convict transported to Australia for life who escaped and lived among First Nations people in southern Victoria from 1803 to 1835. He is reported to have learned to speak the language of the Watourong people, and even to have married and had a daughter, until he eventually surrendered to colonial authorities. Sometimes dubbed the ‘wild white man’, Buckley became a legendary figure for his lengthy evasion of the authorities, and the remarkable nature of his story of living among First Nations people for three decades.  

The remainder of the story focuses on what Tom does with the gun after he steals it from Barak. Nevertheless, the connection with the escaped convict Buckley establishes the significance of mythologising white settler engagements with—and the submission of— the natural environment. While Barak is the means to obtaining the gun, any connection with First Nations people or ways of living on Country are insignificant as compared with the magical gun that enables white Australians to triumph over the animal and mythical inhabitants of the bush.

Tom pursues a kangaroo until he can shoot at it such that the kangaroo ‘was nailed to the tree as securely as if he had been held by several pairs of hands, while the nails were driven in’. When Tom feels insulted by the mocking call of a kookaburra, he uses the gun to split the branch upon which the birds sit and trap them. The gun also provides a means by which the small boy can negotiate the river with little knowledge and experience of the environment. Tom follows King Barak’s advice to use a pen-knife in the gun to carve a canoe from a tree, instantaneously providing the boy with the means to navigate the river and circumventing the absence of Indigenous knowledge.

To this point, the story resembles adventure fiction set in Australia in the period in its depiction of a male character deftly conquering the natural environment. The fairy-tale aspects of the narrative come to the forefront when Tom encounters a Bunyip, a creature which, in Pan-Indigenous interpretations, according to Mo Quirk, is ‘amphibious, typically dwelling in billabongs and other shallow waters but also capable of violence on land. It has dark skin and is nocturnal, preying on creatures which roam too close at night, with a particular appetite for human children’.

The bunyip sits under a bridge and has ‘glaring eyes and big horns’, but rather than it providing scope for Tom to experience a marvellous encounter, it is depicted as yet another aspect of the Australian environment that can be swiftly destroyed via the gun’s magic. When the gun with the pen-knife attachment fails to make contact with the bunyip, Tom quickly loads it with the nails and shoots it repeatedly until ‘fire and smoke came from every hole made by them’. The Bunyip is a terrifying ‘horrid flame-belching creature’ as it pursues Tom in his boat and then on foot, reflecting the tendency of early Australian children’s literature to emphasise the threats that the environment posed to children.

While the tale ends on an ambiguous note as to whether Tom’s adventure has been merely a dream, Tom’s eagerness to show his father the kangaroo skin and birds caught in the tree suggest he is certain of his adventure with the magic gun. The fairy-tale form is utilised in order to shape emergent national mythologies and legends through the possibilities of the marvellous as a means to overcome settler anxieties.