In July and August 2013 Meg and I travelled through western NSW, presenting writing workshops along the way.
We were invited back to Bourke, in September which was a quick turn around, to present more workshops and join the annual Poet’s Trek, which follows the footsteps of Henry Lawson and other poets. A story I wrote about the Poet’s Trek is here:
ALWAYS THE STORIES
“Story telling is eye to eye, mind to mind and heart to heart,” Paul Roe tells a small group standing on the Darling River wharf in Bourke, northwest New South Wales. Drawing on the Scottish traveller’s proverb, Roe is introducing the philosophy that’s developed around the annual Poet’s Trek that follows in the footsteps of Henry Lawson, Will Ogilvie and Harry “The Breaker” Morant.
Paul has been with the Poet’s Trek since its beginnings as a school excursion in the early 1990s. It quickly attracted a wider audience and in 2013 it’s evolving, slowly but ambitiously, into a Festival of a Thousand Stories. Whether dedicated poetry enthusiasts, lovers of outback culture, or the merely curious, there’s something here for everyone. According to Paul, every year brings surprises. This year is no different.
Lawson, talented writer and poet, had a multitude of problems throughout his life, including with alcohol. In September 1892 he was given five pounds and a one-way train ticket to Bourke by the editor of Sydney’s Bulletin newspaper. This was to get him away from his drinking routine and also position him to report back on the deep tensions between pastoralists and shearers. He stayed nine months in Bourke and district, but this inspired his writing long after. Ten or so years later he wrote “If you know Bourke, you know Australia.”
Just after Christmas 1892, Lawson and a companion, Jim Gordon, walked 200 kilometres to Hungerford, a tiny settlement on the New South Wales and Queensland border. This was across land Lawson called “the great, grey plain,” when the country was in drought. It’s headed that way now. The Poet’s Trek heads, by car not foot, to Hungerford, following Lawson’s route. The second day of the Trek visits sites where Ogilvie and Morant lived and worked.
The great, grey plain
The Warrego Hotel
After calling on the Bourke premises of The Western Herald newspaper, where Lawson worked, the trek heads off. The first stop, 70 kilometres out of Bourke, is the settlement of Ford’s Bridge, population four. Lawson spent New Years Eve 1892 here, in the then Salmon Ford Pub, a Cobb and Co changing station, no doubt enjoying the refreshments. The Salmon Ford’s gone, replaced in 1913 with the Warrego Hotel believed to be the only mud brick hotel still operating in Australia. Displays of local historical memorabilia are common in outback pubs, and there’s something memorable about hearing bush ballad’s, well sung, in-situ. Nick Lock, our balladeer, specialises in Australian and English folk songs. Our time here is brief, next stop Keribree Station.
George Essex Evans was an English born poet who settled in Queensland in 1881. Noted for his patriotic poems, in 1901 he wrote “The Women of the West”. At Keribree’s small and rather lovely cemetery, some distance from the homestead ruins, with the gregarious apostle birds looking on, Trekker Jan Lock offers a recital:
The red sun robs their beauty, and, in weariness and pain,
The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again;
And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say
The nearest woman’s face may be a hundred miles away
Poignant, among the headstones, life was hard for the children also. Twelve hours one child survived. Just months some others.
Keribree Station cemetery
Keribree gravestone
Jan Lock reading at Keribree cemetery
Travellers on the Hungerford Road were well serviced, with shanty hotels generally spaced a days walk apart. One such establishment, at Lake Eliza, inspired Lawson to verse with a poem of the same name:
We quite forgot our aching shanks,
A cheerful spirit caught us,
We thought of green and shady banks,
We thought of pleasant waters.
But like many lakes in Australia’s outback, Eliza is more often than not dry:
No patch of green nor water seen
To cheer the weary plodder;
The grass is tough as fencing-wire,
And just as good for fodder.
Here, on the dusty and sparse banks of an empty Lake Eliza, Peter Mace recites Lawson’s “The Glass on the Bar”. A bushman’s tribute to a dead mate, whose glass, the verse goes, remains on the bar out of respect.
Peter Mace reading at Lake Eliza
Working as a control room operator in power stations on the NSW central coast before retiring in 2006, which Peter described as “ninety five per cent boredom and five per cent sheer panic,” he had plenty of time to hone his recital skills. After “working up the courage,” he gave his first public performance at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in 2005. Since then he’s won a swag of awards for poetry recital, including the 2012 Australian Bush Poetry championship.
Dave Fisher’s been nursing a sore back but he, his wife Kylie and their three kids welcome the unexpected arrival of our party of Trekkers to their property, Brindingabba Station, 160 kilometres northwest of Bourke. The Fishers have been at Brindingabba since 1998, and Kylie with a passion for history, fell in love with the old mud brick homestead. She’s researched the history and established a museum full of photos and stories. Stories, always the stories. Kylie’s committed to teaching the kids through distance education and the museum is open only by appointment for the next couple of years.
After the round of recitals, and a song or two from Nick, on the Fisher’s verandah, someone asks if Dave or Kylie had ever written poetry. Dave says he’s written one, once. “You better read it for us,” pipes up a Trekker. “Ah, dunno where it is,” Dave replies, shuffling, just a little. Kylie finds it, no trouble.
But in a nursing home
In some suburban street
An old man’s mind is roaming
Along Will Walkie Creek
And if a magic man appeared and said
Turn back the clock I can
The old man would say
Take me back to Boorara
And I’ll do it all again
This is the last stanza of Dave’s one and only poem, “Boorara Station,” hard mulga country. In its lines, the old man who would “do it all again,” and especially in its reading, you feel the deep love people have for the land out here. You note the way the kids look at their dad, as he reads his poem.
Dave Fisher, Brindingabba Station
Brindingabba’s original homestead
On to Hungerford, straddling the New South Wales-Queensland border and the wild dog- dingo barrier fence. Here Lawson, having walked the 200 kilometres, stayed one day, turned and walked back. The fundamentals of the Royal Mail Hotel may be little changed from Lawson’s day. Like moths to a light, Friday night draws the locals to a pub in the outback. And after dinner, many of this night’s crowd are drawn out from the bar, and away from the attraction of semi-final football, listening with full attention, applauding appreciatively. I ask Paul why poetry is so important to people from the bush.
“Life’s slower in the bush. People have more time and, deep down, everyone is interested in stories. These are what sustain us. Whether it’s about our family, what’s happened to us, where we live, or the country, it’s the story that matters. We all see ourselves in other people’s stories. It’s there in the Poet’s Trek every year.”
We come back to this question several times over the Trek, and later.
Lots of locals have said they know the country well and don’t seen the point in joining the Trek, but afterwards they say they’ve seen it differently. But it’s not just people from the bush, it’s people when they are in the bush. Look at the numbers that turn up to Hully’s show.
“Hully” – local Bourke poet Andrew Hull, born and bred in the area – has been called the latter day Bard of Bourke. During 2013 he’s been presenting Poetry on a Plate, performance poetry with dinner, at Kidman Camp in North Bourke. Commencing with the start of the tourist season in April, it attracts an average crowd of 40, three times a week. “It’s mostly tourists, but a lot of the locals get along,” Paul says.
The Royal Mail Hotel, Hungerford
Breakfast poetry
Next morning, after breakfast with poetry, and then quickly confirming the Paroo River is usually a series of disconnected and often dry waterholes, we leave Lawson’s trail to explore some of the haunts of Will Ogilvie and Breaker Morant. Firstly, Comeroo Station, in the Sharpe family since 1919. Apart from sheep and cattle, Chris and Bruce Sharpe have a widely regarded collection of animal traps, some of which are traded around the world, and well-established tourist accommodation. A real mixed business. A couple of French-Australian families, up for two weeks camping from Melbourne, are entranced by the performances. ‘We didn’t expect this,” one says.
Bushrangers mostly seem to adopt evocative names and the next morning we call on the grave of Thomas Law, known as Midnight. Wanted for “cattle duffing, horse stealing and the murder of a police sergeant,” Midnight was shot at dawn on 5th October 1878. Here, in the welcome shade of a native cypress tree we hear “The Death of Ben Hall,” a poem by Will Ogilvie. While the subject – another bushranger’s demise – is fitting, clearly Midnight deserves a poem of his own. Midnight’s gravestone notes he was shot “’while endeavouring to escape.’” Local mythology suggests he may have been in his swag, rather than up and about, which might provide provocation for the yet to be written poem.
Midnight’s grave
Sharoon Station is the next call. Here “Bushie,” who’s lived in the area most of his life, welcomes our group to the hut that Ogilvie and Morant lived in, on and off, during the 1890s. It was moved up from the nearby Cuttaburra Creek years go. Peter Mace recites “I killed a man at Graspan,” published in 1904 by journalist Monty Grover. With Graspan, being the site of a battle in the Boer War, this is a fitting tribute to Morant. The anti-war sentiment in the poem captured in the stanza:
I killed a man at Graspan;
My first an, God! my last;
Harder to dodge than my bullet is
The look that his dead eyes cast.
After his 10 years in Australia Ogilvie lived another 60 years, but remained adamant the “back of Bourke” was where his heart remained. Ian Forbes, an expat Scotsman living in Australia for the last 30 years, was born in Kelso, the same Scottish village as Ogilvie. Ian’s been an Ogilvie enthusiast for many years and the Poet’s Trek is an opportunity to feel what it was that Ogilvie felt for this land. And here, on the add-on verandah of Ogilvie’s occasional home, Ian, in his unshakeable Scottish brogue, reads a passage from a 1997 book, “Breaker’s Mate: Will Ogilvie in Australia.” This is a highlight for Ian, but there’s more to come.
Hospitality with Bushie (second from left)
Ian Forbes, reading Ogilvie
We move on to the village of Barringun, back on the border, greeted by Mary Crawley, licensee of the Tattersalls Hotel. In her 80s, Mary’s been here for 40 years. Doesn’t touch a drop; “I’ve seen what it does to people,” she says. Mary’s busy watching the races, but easily enticed out for Peter Mace’s recital of Banjo Patterson’s “How the Favourite Beat Us.”
The Tattersalls Hotel holds the membership register of the Barringun Jockey Club from the 1890s and this records Ogilvie having an outstanding debt of one pound one shilling. Ian offers to pay the debt to clear Ogilvie’s name, but just how much would that one pound one shilling be worth now?. After just a little haggling, Mary, magnanimously, agrees to clear the debt on receipt of a crisp five pound Scottish note, which Ian undertakes to provide. History in the making, this act was reported soon after in the Scottish press as restoring national honour.
Peter Mace, Mary Crawley and trekkers
Heading south our next stop is Belalie Station, a former Cobb and Co changing post where Ogilvie had lived. Back in January 2013, at the height of the Australian summer, Ogilvie’s grandson, fresh from the depths of a Scottish winter, called in to Belalie. Something of a pilgrimage one imagines. And finally then, back across the Darling River in to Bourke, late, tired but happy, and the final stanza of 2013’s Poet’s Trek. This is the traditional open night at the Port of Bourke Hotel. Kicking proceedings off Nick Lock entertains with his ballads, Peter Mace recites his poetry. Locals and visitors alike get into the spirit, sharing the feelings, the memories, the stories. It’s always the stories.
The old North Bourke bridge
Photo credits:
Jan Lock reading at Keribree cemetery; Dave Fisher, Brindingabba Station; Historian Paul Roe at Midnight’s grave; Hospitality with Bushie – courtesy of Peter Mace. All other photos by author