Cirrus@Austlit

Describing the process of writing "The House on Legs," a novel in progress featuring a Baba Yaga-inspired protagonist living in the Tasmanian bush, this essay reflects on the production of new writing through a combination of creative exploration and engagement with critical discourse. It explores the contemporary political sensitivities surrounding the installation of an ancient European fairy-tale character in a postcolonial Tasmanian/Australian context and argues that hybridized and multicultural retellings of fairy tales may provide a way to move beyond the apparently entrenched limitation of the use of fairy tales in Australian literature. (Source: publisher's abstract)

This contribution is an extract from a longer work of fiction in which the Slavic witch/crone Baba Yaga is transported into a Tasmanian bush setting and into the literary tradition of the Tasmanian Gothic. The work focuses on Baba Yaga's signature quality of ambiguity and demonstrates—through practice—the creative potential of placing a contemporary version of the fairy-tale character in relationship with the marsupial carnivore, the Tasmanian devil. Like Baba Yaga, the Tasmanian devil—demonized for much of the colonized history of Tasmania but increasingly employed as an animal mascot for its island home—has been the subject of widely variant representations. (Source: publisher's abstract).