For teachers
Each story ends with a page of notes: two readings of it that disagree with each other, five questions with no answer key, something to make, and a four-year ladder showing what Years 7, 8, 9 and 10 each do with the same text, against the Australian Curriculum v9. They are meant to be argued with rather than worked through.
The stories are of the fable family — they are short, they turn on a decision, and they are told plainly. They are not fables, and none of them ends with a moral. That is on purpose: an Australian education authority classes "a basic message or moral" at the simple end of text complexity, and from twelve upwards a reader who is handed the point has been told what to think rather than asked.
What is not here
There are no First Nations stories on this site and there will not be. Retelling them is not the author's to do — under the Creative Australia protocols, interpretation of that material belongs with its custodians, and a non-Indigenous writer producing lookalikes also takes shelf space from First Nations writers. If you want First Nations texts for a secondary class, get them from First Nations authors: Magabala Books and Reading Australia are the places to start.
The one story drawing on another tradition — The Frog Who Measured the Sky — names its source, names the translations worth reading, and says plainly that it is a new story written against the old one rather than a retelling of it.
How it is made
Every picture on this site is drawn by the browser from a few lines of code and a fixed seed. There are no image files, no fonts to download, no analytics, no accounts and no network calls after the page loads. The words are in the page itself, so the stories can be read with the pictures switched off, and they print.
A sister site, games.mingli.world, has fifteen puzzle games for younger children, built to the same rules.
Written and drawn in Australia. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which this was made, and pay respect to Elders past and present.