Woggan-Wandong ` The Meeting of the Fey and Ghost Spirits Series.
Dreaming Billabong, Series
the WIP Novels by Kathryn Shell.
Book One
The innocence of children and power of ghost spirits, thwart the cattle
king in his purge of living reminders of the secrets of dreaming billabong.
Book Two
The
dreaming and fey spirits assist two children end a violent corrupt payback
culture that has harmed the town and four generations of their family.
Author: Kathryn Shell www.kathrynshell.com
Inspiration
“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there firm as weeds among rocks. ... It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated. ...”
Charlotte Bronte, the great 19th century novelist. (1816 - 1855)
The Meaning of 'Dreaming Billabong.'
I need to explain the work 'Billabong,' to my non Australian friends as it is an Australian word, not commonly know elsewhere.
Billabong is a word that typifies the dry inland Australian continent in which "dead rivers" are found. These fill with water seasonally and are dry for a greater part of the year, sometimes years and sometimes become huge flood basins which when they recede leave riverbeds that have changed course, cutting off new small pockets of water filled billabongs.
Billabong is an Australian English word meaning a small lake, though it is specifically these oxbow lakes, the sections of still water adjacent to a river, cut off by a change in the watercourse that are formed when the path of a creek or river changes, leaving the former branch with a dead end, that are billabongs.
In Australian indigenous culture - called the 'dreaming' or to the European settlers the dream time, is the creation story. The original Australian's believed that the Rainbow Serpent created the land and many believe he lies at the heart of the billabong. Many believe in the spirits in the billabong and many early European settlers of Australia believed they saw ans were even attacked by a Bunyip who rose from the billabong. The Bunyip being a derivative of the local clans word Bunjil or thier 'big hairy man' who would be like the yetti or your 'big foot' mythology.
So the words Dreaming and Billabong have strong meanings within Australian Indigenous culture and I want to spread some understanding of that culture though my blog and novels along with the culture of the many people from Europe who settled in Australia up until the time my novel begins. http://www.dreamingbillabong.com has stories of the dreaming as well as inland of Australia where my novels are set, as well as my NaNoWriMo experience.
It is easy to leave comments in my bog and I welcome then :-) Thank you.
I will endevour to reply in your blogs.
- Billabongs are referred to relatively often in Australian literature.
- Banjo Paterson's famous folk song "Waltzing Matilda" takes place beside a billabong.
