I had written him a letter...

Here's a kangaroo we saw in Bradford Street. Eeek!


She's being quite good and writing her novel every day, but at this time of year there are so many things to do during the evening - people to see, food to eat, laughs to be had. She goes out at night a bit. She doesn't always take me but she tells me about it afterwards...

The Mews, a quality restaurant here in town, has open mic nights on Mondays and she went along with Zoe, just for a laugh. Earlier in the week, she'd said something about wanting to maybe do something... read a poem, whatever... but in the end she couldn't find one of her own poems that she could bear reading out loud to an audience, so she opted for the one piece she's known by heart since she was small -- A.B. (Banjo) Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow. What some of you may not know about Miriam is that she has a bit of an on-going love affair with the bush and some of its older colonial mythologies. The bush ballads, the stories of Henry Lawson... all that stuff. And having lived in the bush as a kid, she developed a sense for it. She has what has come into common parlance as 'a strong sense of place' in relation to the less inhabited parts of her native country. In an environment such as Provincetown Massachussets it's easy to understand why the known image of Australians might be a bit clichéd or painted with broad brushstrokes. The Australia that Miriam loves and embraces when she touches down from trips away or gets homesick on foreign shores does include Crocodile Dundee, Steve Irwin, Secret Life of Us and Porpoise Spit but that's not all there is. It's too big, to complex, to put into words, but it suddenly struck her that Clancy of the Overflow might be a way to shine a light on another facet of what it means to her to be Australian.

So Zoe shared her open mic slot... welcoming Miriam and making her feel grand. Then, lights in her eyes and a stammer in her voice, Miriam launched into this... one of her favourite pieces of verse. And guess what? They loved it :-)

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, “Clancy, of The Overflow”.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
’Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”
. . . . .
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
. . . . .
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal—
But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.

Cheers, m'dears :-)