‘The great French jelly heist: The power of myth and legend’

Every nation has its myths and legends, some even have archetypal figures whose exploits may influence the formative minds of the next generation of young children. I suppose it’s part of the varied experience from which some form of common national identity might be forged. Generally speaking, such myths, legends, tall tales and the like seem designed to extract those characteristics that a society likes to imagine are the best of itself. The better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln described it in 1861.

For example, the annals of the United States, the country that put the idea of national myth onto the silver screen, is dotted with them. Among them are such fabulous figments as giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, apple-pie pixie Johnny Appleseed, and railroad martyr Casey Jones. Americans like to see themselves as little guys who overcome the odds and thus uphold the founding legend with their simple, homespun values. The fact that Al Capone, ‘robber baron’ Jay Gould and ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon might have held greater sway over the reality of American life than any mythical figure of the imagination, has no bearing at all on what a people wants to believe about itself and what it will do to sustain that belief.

While Americans have probably developed the idea of national myth-making more deeply than any other people, they are by no means unique. The Soviet Union was a classic case of a myth, that of the workers’ paradise, enduring in the minds of millions when the grim truth of famine, purge and show-trial, was there to be seen almost from the outset of the Soviet experiment.

And the Irish, another good example, have Finn McCool and St Patrick whose mighty deeds against overwhelming odds blend into and sustain the national self-image of a doughty people of a small island standing up against powerful neighbours.

Even Australia, at the far extremity of the Anglosphere, has its myths and legends. They are universally of struggle, not only against arbitrary authority, in the case of Ned Kelly, but also against the harshness of a barren continent to which our modern myth-makers were so unceremoniously transported. Once again, its purpose can only be to weld otherwise disparate people into a shared view of where we came from and where we are now.

The fact that our myth has no more relevance to the suburbanism of modern Australia than the self-reliant frontiersman has to the management-speak of modern America, is irrelevant, for that is the unifying power of myth. But it is not only nation states and peoples that need myths to hold together centrifugal forces that must be checked for the greater good. Families do, too, and I believe they are just as valid in cooling the temperature of potentially hot-house settings.

Every family has them, the funny, sheepish stories that are trotted out to oil the wheels of family relations. One that I remember from a close family living near Liverpool (New South Wales) went down in their family lore as ‘The Night the Swimming Pool Walked’. It tells of how my friends, whose home was on the down-slope side of neighbours with a large, above-ground swimming pool, coped with a small catastrophe.

They had been watching this pool nervously for some time, noticing it move and buckle as the ground beneath it swelled and contracted, before, on the fatal evening, a loud crack was heard. Whereupon, my friend, who liked to see himself as the head of the family, rushed out into his back yard and with a commanding shout, ordered the unfolding event to “Stop!” holding up his hand in the cop-on-the-beat’s peremptory hand signal — just as a torrent exploded out of the collapsing pool and (so the tall tale grows) taking both dividing fence and a rueful Dad with it. It was, in its own way, a microcosm of any dam wall collapse in the Third World, and so it entered that suburban family’s annals of myths and legends.

My own extended family has its own myth, which is trotted out from time to time, for the purpose, I assume, of applying some super glue to the edifice of family togetherness. Our family myth is known as ‘The Great French Jelly Heist’. It began as a tale of simple fact: a close relative, then a young school pupil, had made what was called a French jelly in her home economics class at high school. Unfortunately, she had to endure two hours on the swaying school bus before she could get the wobbly green, coconut-flecked dessert safely home. She nearly made it, but 15 minutes from alighting with her prize, one of the yobbos from a nearby seat grabbed it from her and threw it out of the bus window onto the dusty road.

Since then, that story has had several metamorphoses, waxing and waning, until it reached its latest incarnation whereby the dessert was flung out the window, not to moulder in the dust, but to be caught by a motorcyclist cruising with intent alongside, as part of an elaborate plan, not only to thieve this most desirable of objects gastronomique, but to deny the poor kid her big moment when she arrived home in triumph.

Weird, eh? But we still laugh about it, especially at the efforts to embellish the tale to keep it alive; and I can already imagine that the bike rider who ‘caught’ the jelly and whisked it away to his hideout, must have a hoot of an implausibly plausible backstory which can easily be incorporated into the narrative, further enhancing the point of the myth: The strengthening of our family bonds.

Well, it’s no more weird than imagining J Edgar Hoover in a Davy Crockett hat casting his apple seeds across the Golden West or Joe Stalin as a starry-eyed worker in an Andy Capp cloth cap. Or, for that matter, imagining the stuffy Sir Robert Menzies, Knight of the Thistle, as an outback swaggie picking burrs out of his sporran. They’re myths that all serve a common, very real, unifying purpose that we might be lost without.

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