Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain

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At one point in the journey, Flinders writes that they had to make a hasty retreat from shore because they feared there were cannibals in the area. Later, at Canoe Rivulet, he says they were escaping threatening Aboriginals. Indeed, a massive knotted fig stands as a place of refuge and a visual correlative anchoring the five nested stories to the Australian landscape. As Terry Pratchett said, “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human” and we as a species have been telling stories for thousands of years. And until the advent of paper, these were an oral tradition, told between individuals who passed them on in turn. The stories that have come to make our own mythology have in their own way defined who we are now to an extent. In those stories, you can find dragons, giants and other creatures that have not walked these lands in millennia. This is a book I will return to multiple times, both for its beauty and subtlety and for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the world it reflects.' Otago Daily Times

I drew from things that had happened in real life, to fictionalise, but I didn't choose the most commonly known events. In the 1900s there were a lot of terrible mining accidents in the Illawarra but I thought I would set my 1900s story in a dairy. I wanted to have women as a focus, as this was a time when women were gaining some sense of their own power, and a dairy was a useful setting.''Storyland begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants, covers the founding of Britain, England, Wales, and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans. Jeffs is at her best when she’s sifting through the soil of ancient mythology for nuggets of truth, trying to uncover what fact may lie within a myth. It’s a hard job, like uncovering the microscopic grain of grit which formed the pearl inside an oyster. The study of the truths which lie within myths is known as Euhemerism. The best example is the myth of the Cyclops. Ancient Greeks discovered the skulls of mammoths lying buried deep under their fields. When these huge skulls were excavated, they appeared to have one giant eye in the middle of the forehead – it’s where the trunk would’ve been. However, Ancient Greeks, unaware of long dead beasts called mammoths, assumed these were the skulls of a giant with one eye – and up grew stories of the Cyclops. Likewise, the legend of the Gryphon – that strange bird-monster of mythology – began in central Asia where the fossilised nests of dinosaurs were found by ancient peoples, together with eggs and the bones of creatures that seemed like giant, monstrous birds. Compelling, thrilling and ambitious, Storyland is our story, the story of Australia. 'The land is a book waiting to be read' as one of the characters says - and this novel tells us an unforgettable and unputdownable story of our history, our present and our future. Meet dragons and giants, goddesses and kings in these tales, which bring to life the ancient myths and legends of the British landscape. Sail with Trojans, ride Scottish stags and watch Stonehenge rise.

Every year in our little Red Shed, we'd have an end-of-year company meeting where we would ask, 'What do we want for the company next? What do we want personally? For four years in a row I said, 'I want to write a book next year'. Finally, I went away and wrote one."

How They Broke Britain by James O'Brien is full of anger - and not much else

Secondly, this book also hits one of my biggest pet peeves: despite claiming to be a “new mythology of Britain”, it is almost entirely focused on England. Though Wales is represented, the stories chosen from Wales are mostly those that were later incorporated into English myth and therefore little exclusively Welsh material is present. Scotland is even more poorly represented, as it only gets a small handful of stories - this is likely due to Jeffs odd choice to exclude Ireland, which thereby excludes Scotland given how much the latter’s medieval culture was informed by the former. Despite the praise Storyland has garnered elsewhere, including being shortlisted as a Waterstones Book of the Year, I was lukewarm about it.

Jeffs provides an interesting take on the legends of Britain, not simply collecting them but retelling them to form a cohesive mythic history of sorts. She is a good story teller, and her art is impressive, but the book has its issues. The third voice is Lola, a young woman who runs an isolated dairy with her two siblings and comes under suspicion for harbouring a runaway. It's the year before Federation, at the turn of the 20th century, and illegitimacy and Aboriginal blood ties are a social curse to be endured. I discovered this book at the end of the incredible ‘Stonehenge’ exhibition at the British Museum. The contrasting dream-like woodcut cover illustration drew me in like a moth to a flame and when I discovered it was a book about myth, history and the British landscape I thought it would combine all my interests and spark some inspiration in my art practice. Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes. Studies of ancient DNA have linked northern Spain and Portugal to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall – old Celtic lands. Our myths contain hints of something deep that we’ll never understand – stories about migration from east to west, of a staging post in Spain, of settlement in these islands, thought to be the very end of the world in ancient times. It makes the mind wander. What brought these people all the way here? Might perhaps the survivors of a shattered civilisation – even Troy, which we know today did exist as a city and was destroyed in the Bronze Age – have made their way here more than 3,000 years ago to build a new life? Is that what these myths – layered by millennia of retelling – whisper?The novel is an attempt to think about how those things that shaped us in the past, might relate to the present and the future. I was thinking about writing a family saga, but then decided to begin by looking at when the Europeans and Aboriginal people first met. I write best from place, and I live in the Illawarra, so I looked for stories from my own area.'' We know that the people who first settled these islands did indeed come from somewhere to the east. Ancient DNA tells us that. So, is there some cultural memory echoing within these myths that Jeffs tells? Are these legends a remnant of ancient migration? Do they tell a story about the very mixed blood which runs through our mongrel veins? In 1796, a young cabin boy, Will Martin, goes on a voyage of discovery in the Tom Thumb with Matthew Flinders and Mr Bass: two men and a boy in a tiny boat on an exploratory journey south from Sydney Cove to the Illawarra, full of hope and dreams, daring and fearfulness. These 55 stories were originally published in 1962 and 1987 which were either adapted from Walt Disney's movies or made up. It begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants from an age when the children of Cain and the progeny of fallen angels walked the earth, to the founding of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans.