Adrian Glamorgan taps into the power of storytellers to unleash our adult and child imagination with more than just a hint of a "Once upon a time . . .

You can tell fairy tales to children, as Bronwyn Maddock does to her five year olds in kindergarten classes. Their eyes light up like the peaceful candle they sit around. But I've also seen a café theatre chock-a-block with adults hanging off every word Brian Hungerford utters, in his blustery, husky voice.I've seen grown ups' eyes open wide when Jenny Hill gives an all-age mythic story performance, while children in the audience sit still, silent and expectant for an hour beside their delighted mums and dads. Nurse Julie Goyder has used the 'everyday act of storying' to remake meaning out of Alzheimer patients' shattered memories. Jasmin O'Hara's Celtic mythology participants now rediscover their own life purpose in their retelling of an ancient story. And we are told that in the times before, stories criss-crossed our continent and kept all living things well and in harmony throughout, thanks to the Dreaming. Tell me a story, it seems, and I can imagine the world.

Brian Hungerford says that when he was growing up, "There was no such thing as serious storytelling. It would be insulting to tell a story to adults. I wrote radio plays - 42 of them, for the ABC." Brian ended up working for the United Nations in Third World countries where they used storytelling and informal drama to promote agricultural techniques. "I watched the storytellers in Africa, they had distinct techniques. People who write are often judged by their description. In storytelling, people describe a character just as a 'beautiful girl'. Everyone's got different imagination that they bring to it. You see your own sense of beauty in a story."

Brian distinguishes his own trade from how it's often treated in a library, when a story gets read from a book to little children... "With the best motives they're trying to inculcate reverence for a book, but it educates people away from storytelling." Brian now tells stories from all sorts of traditions (Celtic, Spanish, Japanese, Romani and personal stories). He is an encyclopaedia of storytelling. He might relate how Little Red Riding Hood was a story of hapless wolf seduction in 15th century France, or how in Sumeria it was the questioner who wore the red hat, and Grandma with her shamanic wolf skin cape would relate answers from the Other World, chant it, and a coven would attract a man by it, so he could be eaten.

Usually without prop, sometimes with his uillean pipes, Brian will perform before audiences of any size up to 10,000. "It depends on culture," he says."Here, 20 seems like an audience. In Asia, they'd say no one was there." Australian men are often reluctant to come, brought along by wives. "It's not what 'normal' people do," Brian says. "It seems like 'kid stuff'. By the end of the night these men'll be the strongest part of the audience."

He teaches his art. "Storytelling is the easiest thing to do quite badly. People try to elocute. They learn it off by heart. It becomes unlistenable, unless it's done by a good actor. For some people, it's difficult, but everyone has it. The myth stories are the right side of the brain, the feminine and creative side. When Jack comes home with three beans, his mother always chucks them out the window, she doesn't plant them in a row. That would be left side thinking. When Parsifal inherits the Red Knight's horse, it bolts, he has no control, it goes everywhere. Eventually Parsifal learns to sit up straight. The horse is his imagination."

Bronwyn Maddock, a Waldorf kindergarten teacher, believes imagination gives children the ability to create inner pictures of the world. As we grow older, imagination enables us to take initiative in the face of hopelessness, and fosters compassion when we can stand in another's shoes. The best stories create "wonder in their faces, anticipation, reverence and joy." The art is important because "stories allow us to learn about different sides of ourselves. Telling stories more than once gives the child a chance to live into all characters. You can help a child through a difficult time. The adults around them may seem to be floundering, but the characters in the story are steadfast.

Try it with a child in your own life. For a baby a song might be the start of story: "A parent's commitment and love is heard through the human voice," says Bronwyn. Stories can happen at bedtime, around the dishes, and on long car journeys, where a never-ending story can be told. Books are useful, but "recognise you have a wonderful gift in yourself and start there. Children love to hear about your childhood. Start with very innocent stories of your journey through childhood, like losing your first tooth, your first ride on a horse, or your first birthday party."

Stories apply at all life stages, she says. "With people who are dying, it's about listening. Use your skills to draw them out. Get them to tell their story to honour them. In dying there can be fear as to what's ahead. To hear their own stories and characters can take them out of their fear." One of her favourite storytellers was her grandfather. "He told of a time you could imagine but could never know. Like speaking about the Aborigines. You knew they lived there but not in your time. He was the link."

Bronwyn nominates Jenny Hill as one of her favourite storytellers. I'd already been enthralled by Jenny's performances at Victoria Hall in Fremantle one rainy Sunday. She uses fairy tales, folk tales, adventures, humorous yarns. Combining her love of visual arts, live music, simple props and lighting, Jenny can take the engrossed audience on a journey of pleasurable storytelling. "I see more than I say. It's like a massage of colours and living pictures, not a fixed image like on the screen. The audience has to create it, and can bring to it what's it's safe to bring," she says. Even hardened adolescents can go doe-like sometimes.

"Children and adults get into another universe where anything's possible. They can be the hero, they do the journey, they play the tricks. They go into a space, 'once upon a time, when horse could talk and…'

Jenny admits that apart from among indigenous people, where it is well-practised and profound, storytelling in the rest of Australia is still to come into its own. She herself came to storytelling relatively late, in her early 40s, from a literature background ("though I used to read all my university texts out loud!") and feels now after 10 years of working in the field she still has much to learn. Jenny works with adults, including teaching storytelling, but gets most of her work with schools, appropriately enough, through "word of mouth".

Jasmin O'Hara is a mythologist using her own native Irish myth and story to access the Australian imagination. "Take Oisin and Niamh as a couple. It is about the internal masculine and feminine story of relationship and entrapment. People can be too bound to the physical place, or lost in the other world. Applying these stories can help people develop balance in their lives," Jasmin says. She still remembers the one or two Galway storytellers who'd come house to house with rambling stories that could last four or five nights.

"Stories reach further than psychology. They tap into another dimension not under rational control. It's only through imagination we're going to solve the major environmental and human relationship problems ahead."

Her workshops are a "sojourn into the right brain, where memory for all time is stored. It's an antidote to left brain worship. People who are too bound to the left brain may one day fall into the right brain and never get out. They become lost and overwhelmed.They are unable to return from their voyages. But we cannot stay indefinitely in the Other world. Like Oisin, we may turn to dust on our return to the mundane world. We may crumble as we hit solid ground. Much better to make friends with the Other world, learn how to leave and enter with grace and blessings." She has become convinced that our left brain fetish is related to the epidemic of dementia.

It's strange how many storytellers made a connection with dementia, one way or another. Dardanup writer Julie Goyder has just been short listed for the WA Premier's Book Prize for her work on Alzheimer's Disease and the Everyday Act of Storying, called We'll be married in Fremantle (FACP). While nursing in aged care, a 90 year old man she calls 'Joe', took a shine to her. "I reminded him of his fiance. He asked me to marry him, and on a whim I said 'Yes'. It changed his life. Because I listened to his story fragments he was able to recreate himself. We would connect in a human way. I'd never thought Alzheimer patients could connect with the present, yet he could remember me each day with 'there's Julie.' It seemed to redignify him." Apart from enlivening her patient, it changed her. "I have an eight year old boy now, and from the time he was born, I've loved listening to him. If it wasn't for the Joe story, I wouldn't have listened well, I wouldn't have realised how important it is to be heard."

As Jenny Hill told me, "When you sense imagination it's quite enlivening. It feels healthy. You get integration, quality, a weaving together of feeling and thoughts, drawing on something you already know. It has the power to give laughter, sadness, joy, and questioning."

Here's a true story, related by Susan Sontag: Jews are driven to a remote place to be shot by a Nazi firing squad. A poet reaches over and reads the palm of one of his fellow condemned, saying: "You will live a long life." Inmate after inmate thrusts their hands in front of the poet, who finds one after another they will live long and happy lives. Bewildered by this sudden attack of longevity, the German guards order the men back on the truck. The poet dared to imagine.