These 55 stories were originally published in 1962 and 1987 which were either adapted from Walt Disney's movies or made up.

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. What do people around the world eat for Christmas dinner? How do cranberries grow? One of our foremost science educators, Moate fills this book with genuinely interesting facts and a host of festive activities to brighten up dark afternoons – who knew that with just a bit of folding and some glue, an old magazine could turn into a Christmas tree? A desire to share the stories and get people excited about them was the beginning of it all. I was fascinated by how the illustrations in the Brut legend followed the narrative action but they were very concise illustrations and communicated so many elements of an episode so efficiently. I really enjoyed that challenge of persuading people through pictures that these were stories to pay attention to and to enjoy.” Indeed, a massive knotted fig stands as a place of refuge and a visual correlative anchoring the five nested stories to the Australian landscape. 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.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.

Storyland has been shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the Voss Award. The first tale follows the account written by Matthew Flinders from the perspective of Will Martin, servant to Bass. The second is narrated by Hawker, an embittered convict ''lifer''; tilling corn fields on a run of 1300 acres who lusts after an Aboriginal girl. 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.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.'' These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape, and the yearning to belong, inhabited by characters now half-remembered: Arthur, Brutus, Albina, and more. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning, original linocuts and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary, Storyland illuminates a collective memory that still informs the identity and culture of Britain and its descendants.

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 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.'' Despite the praise Storyland has garnered elsewhere, including being shortlisted as a Waterstones Book of the Year, I was lukewarm about it.

Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes.

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." 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? There are refugees from Troy, giants from Africa, travellers from Greece, Britons fighting Saxons, inevitably Arthur, Merlin (in lots of stories), Joseph of Arimathea, lots of Vikings, Scots, Picts, Stonehenge, curse, treasure hunts, even Nessie. As ever the stories can be brutal and are often magical. Christianity intrudes in the later stories. 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.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.