More Australian Legendary Tales

By:   Katie Langloh Parker
Illustrated by:   Tommy Mcrae
Imprint:   ETT Imprint
Country of Publication:   Australia
ISBN:   9781923024236
ISBN 10:   192302423X
Pages:   130
Publication Date:   01 September 2023
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Catherine Eliza Somerville Stow (1 May 1856 – 27 March 1940), who wrote as K. Langloh Parker, was a South Australian born writer who lived in northern New South Wales in the late nineteenth century. She is best known for recording the stories of the Ualarai around her. Her testimony is one of the best accounts of the beliefs and stories of an Aboriginal people in north-west New South Wales at that time. However, her accounts reflect European attitudes of the time. In 1879 they moved to his property, Bangate Station, near Angledool, on Ualarai lands by the Narran River. Langloh Parker's holdings consisted of 215,000 acres (87,000 ha) running some 100,000 sheep and cattle. He found time also to work as magistrate at Walgett.[6] Over the following two decades she collected many of the Ualarai stories and legends which were to fill her books and make her famous. Australian Legendary Tales (1896) and More Australian Legendary Tales both has drawings by Tommy Mccrae, the first published Aboriginal artist. The books were well received by the public and scholars at the time: reviews commended her direct transmission of what elders had told her, unadorned by imaginative additions. Tommy McRae (c.1835–1901) was an Aboriginal artist who lived in the Upper Murray district of Australia. McRae was a Wahgunyah man whose country stretched from south of the Murray River to near the junction of the Goulburn and Murray rivers in Victoria. His first language was Wiradjuri.]McRae recorded the establishment of pastoral settler society in his country while he was a labourer on pastoral stations in northern Victoria and NSW. Producing and selling books of drawings, several of them were purchased from McRae by travellers. These contained illustrations of traditional Aboriginal life, including ceremonies, hunting and fishing, with individuals and animals predominantly silhouetted in landscapes of sparse trees and earth. McRae's work was included in the first edition of K. Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales (1896), from original drawings sent to the editor Andrew Lang by his brother in Corowa. The artist was uncredited in the work, but the correct attribution was discovered when later investigation of Lang's papers found an inscription with the original drawings.