These 55 stories were originally published in 1962 and 1987 which were either adapted from Walt Disney's movies or made up. 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." You'd think that British/English/UK mythology would be much more prominent among states originally settled by the empire (there is probably a history thesis in there somewhere about how perhaps its a form of rejection of the British Empire, or possible even that sometimes one's own culture can be invisible while others' stands out and is 'interesting'). Indeed, a massive knotted fig stands as a place of refuge and a visual correlative anchoring the five nested stories to the Australian landscape. 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.

The stories themselves are fittingly strange and compelling as all mythology often is. I confess at times I found myself lost in names of ancient kings and strange interrelationships between early peoples (wait what was the difference between Picts and Scots, Saxons and Britons again?) this is a common feature of myth, although I often find myself questioning what is more important - a memorable relevant and compelling narrative - or "Accuracy." 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 The second account was written by Flinders with a view to posterity and placed more emphasis on the so-called threats than on the simple acts of friendship. Another intriguing point made in StoryLand is the way that mythology is used throughout history and currently to bolster and justify political action. Its a very strange quirk of stories, that can be quite confusing if you're not ready for it. For example Jeffs points out that the stories of the pre-Scots and Irish while being similar to the pre-British also had emphasis and tweaks to give legitimacy to their own peoples (e.g. the Brits myth was that the pre-Irish were hostile invaders, whereas the future-Irish had myths about their ancestors negotiating for free lands)

The Sydney Morning Herald

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. The stores that Jeffs has chosen to make up this collection have been split into four chunks, In the Beginning, where she retells the story of how Albion got its name from and the naming of the Humber and the Severn. In the prehistory section, some of the selected stories include how Conwenna saved Britain and the Dragons that Lived Under Oxford. Merlin and Arthur feature heavily in the Antiquity section and the stories in the Middle Ages section bring us right up to the Norman invasion.

These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud among them. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary. We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, spanning the length of Britain from the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall; mountains and lakes such as Snowdon and Loch Etive and rivers including the Ness, the Soar and the story-silted Thames in a vivid, beautiful tale of our land steeped in myth. It Illuminates a collective memory that still informs the identity and political ambition of these places.These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now half-remembered: Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud among them. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary. We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Wayland’s Smithy, spanning the length of Britain from the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall; mountains and lakes such as Snowdon and Loch Etive and rivers including the Ness, the Soar and the story-silted Thames in a vivid, beautiful tale of our land steeped in myth. It Illuminates a collective memory that still informs the identity and political ambition of these places. 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. 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 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. Firstly, it is largely a collection of myths from other sources. She draws heavily from authors like Geoffrey of Monmouth to the point where I wondered why I was reading this book at all when the original(ish) source for the stories is readily available. However, she does offer good analysis in her stories and her writing style is far more approachable than her sources, making her work infinitely more approachable to casual readers. 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.Despite the praise Storyland has garnered elsewhere, including being shortlisted as a Waterstones Book of the Year, I was lukewarm about it. 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.'' 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. 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? An elegiac historical novel of a horseman’s daughter who dreams of owning her own plot of land in the Omani desert, Bitter Orange Tree is framed in the regretful, melancholic memories of her granddaughter, at university in Britain. Alharthi, however, makes this a stirring tale of a woman who battles every social and religious constraint; she dies alone but revered. The juxtaposition with the narrator’s reflections on modern life and the speed of change is brilliantly judged in Marilyn Booth’s agile translation from Arabic.