This blog is a response to requests for me to run in-depth discussions on the Granny Jones Australian Tarot deck, copyrighted to Rebecca Jones. I have worked intimately with this deck since it was published in the early 1990s, and I was instrumental in a number of people owning it: once I realised what a find it was, I promptly bought every copy available to me and distributed them to friends and associates, as well as recommending it widely in articles I wrote and on the internet in Tarot-related communities.
The deck was originally published by Kangaroo Press in a boxed deck-and-book set; but the book was very simplistic, and a huge disappointment to me. It didn't discuss the quirky - and often overlooked - symbolism in the deck, the personalities obviously drawn from real life in the deck, and the philosophy underpinning the deck. None of that interesting stuff was touched at all - the book was merely an expansion of the keywords that are to be found on every card, which are the least interesting parts of the cards.
I spent a year working with the deck. Then two years. Then five. By now it would be a little under twenty years that I've had a great love of this deck. My original copy is still with me, carefully wrapped, carried everywhere in my handbag. It is unfaded, untattered, unbent, unstained. It looks almost new. And the longer I spend with it, the better I like it.
On a yahoo email community called "Comparative Tarot" in the early days some years ago, as the whole group discussed individual cards each month drawing on different decks, I discussed Granny Jones' cards, then compared them with the same card in one of my other decks in the same discussion, a process of analysis and clarification that organised and deepened the unique, individual knowledge I had already built on this deck without really realising it.
And now I am a regular community member at Aeclectic Tarot, an Australian Tarot-based website with a huge membership, and as well as revealing myself there to be an avid collector and lover of Tarot decks, I have also come out as a serious student of this important, underrated, effective and very un-serious deck.
This blog has been started to allow me to discuss the cards one by one, to allow others to comment on the images and my words, and to become a sort of informal teaching-space and fan club for this fantastic deck.
So what can I tell you about the deck in introduction? Perhaps that it was designed By an Australian woman, a resident of Tasmania, whose portrait as "Granny Jones" appears on all the backs of the cards and many more than half the images of the cards. The artwork is naive in style, black-ink outlines and pastel infills. This gives it a simple, even child-like visual style, a style that belies the deck's great depths. It is set mostly in a cultural matrix that any contemporary Australian would immediately recognise, with the odd nod to the past and to the future.
The deck is populated by Granny Jones herself, her many cats, her husband and his two dogs, and an assortment of other people who pass through from time to time. There are simplistic keywords on the cards, which I used to deliberately ignore and which I haven't even noticed in many years, and which may be useful to someone just starting out. In addition to this, the deck has its own visual language, its own set of symbols which the accompanying book completely neglects to discuss at all, and which are really easy to overlook, leading people to believe - wrongly - that it is a sinple deck, without any depth to it.
This blog is about to correct this impression.
