Recreating a history of struggle

By Julia Perkins

ROSEBERY — A $10,000 Arts Council grant has been awarded to the "Rosebery Miners and Axemen's Bush and Blarney Festival" for a community theatre project based on Marie E.J. Pitt's poem "The Keening".

Pitt, who lived in Rosebery at the turn of the century, wrote poems about the hardship endured by the working men, women and children in the mining industry. She later joined the Communist Party in Victoria.

The project will draw on the many talents in the local community to bring Rosebery's history alive by dramatising one woman's fight for survival following the death of her husband underground at the turn of the century. The performance will be set in the Bottom Pub, which will be reconstructed according to an early 20th century floor plan.

The festival is to be held from February 26 to March 1. "The Keening" is published in The Horses of the Hills and Other Verses, Speciality Press Ltd, Melbourne, 1911.

From GLW issue 343