The Bush Poets Live
Kookaburra Recordings through Festival Records
Available on CD and cassette
Reviewed by Denis Kevans
I have heard, performed with and met poets on this CD. Murray Hartin and Mark Gliori I heard at Maleny Folk Festival and Glen Innes Australian Bush Music Festival. I pick them out because their writing, with Charlee Marshall's, goes a little deeper, even has psychological insights.
Murray tells the story of the huge Murray Cod, "the Moby Dick" of north-west rivers. This cod is so big that when they haul it out it causes a drought throughout Australia. Tiddaluk the frog did the reverse in a "dreaming" story.
Mark's story of the scone and cake ladies who oust their ousters, tent pisspots, is a winner for the women. Mark's other poem, about two lovers trying to canoodle over a green ants' nest (those mobile surgical snips), is side-splitting.
Charlee Marshall is a writer of classical nuance and delicacy, even when he's writing about a bushman who's disembowelled by a chainsaw, has a transplant of a ewe's "guts", goes on sinking fence posts and then "has a lamb" six weeks later. If this is not "rabble-aissean", I don't know what is. Charlee's "Something in Me Jeans" is another classic, of sure poetic understatement and real tact. Charlee's imagination, like Murray's and Mark's, is something rare in present day poetry.
Gertrude Skinner, an 80 year old, has the audience in fits with "Avocados" (aphrodisiacs?), "All For Free", "Hot Pants/Cold Feet" and "The Bushman's Wife" (the hard facts). Gertrude is a lovely lady who has sold thousands of copies of her work.
Marion Fitzgerald I hear for the first time. Marion is a Footrot Flats bush humorist. The constipated cat (catastrophe?) and the cow complaining about a clumsy milker have the audience cackling. She knows her subject, and she knows her audience.
John Philipson recites Charlee Marshall's prize-winning poem "Teach A Kelly to Die", and Bruce Simpson's "Bronze Swaggy" first, "The Murrenji Track". Both terrific poems, and recited with much feeling, and meaning, in the bush manner.
Jim Haynes, the excellent compere, tries too hard "to write like a bushie". Jim's two good poems were bad-tasted by his parody on reincarnation. Jim wanted to bring New Age ethereality down to reality, and describes flowers on Grandad's grave, passing through a cow and coming out as something which "looks and smells like Grandad". Though bushies can be rough, they also, like Charlee Marshall, show a lot of tact. Don't want to be negative, Jim, but cowshit Grandad leaves me cold.
[Denis Kevans is, of course, Australia's Poet Lorikeet.]