A few days a ago, I had the privilege of having an article appear over at Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo blog. In the article I wrote a little of the back story to go with some of the poems in my new collection – The New Asylum.

This week, I find myself preparing set lists of poems to read at a couple of book launch activities that are coming up, and for my own amusement, I thought I might audio record them, to help me sharpen up before reading to audience in a few days time.

It occurred to me that you might enjoy hearing some of the poems and I can share just a little of the back story, again, with you. Three poems today.

first breakfast

This poem tells the tale of a young mother who has to utilise her scant free time during a 13 hour shift to make sure her children are provided with the basics and ready for their day, before returning to the drudgery of the wards for the rest of her shift.

would you consider

As a young man, I swore I would not go the way of the rest of my family (and most of the town), by working my life away in the mental institution. I swore it!

In the end, though I think I may already have been a mental health creature, and ended up happy to accept any work in the institution, let alone becoming a nurse.

pecking order

One of the things that was not explained when my group began our student nursing training was the rigidity with which the various hierarchies operated. You were expected to magically understand all the necessary proprieties and to respect them.

My group were very poor at proprieties.

As an aside, my mother was an untrained member of a nursing staff group termed Ward Assistants. This group was low on the totem pole of nursing, but I vividly recall my mother cautioning me not to behave ‘like those other students’.

What she meant was that I needed to show respect, and at times deference, to the Ward Assistants because a) they knew what they were doing while other nursing staff generally did not, and b) they did most of the nursing work and c) if I failed to show due respect it would reflect badly back onto my mother.

Welcome to the institution, sit down in a corner, be quiet, and watch the show.

The paperback edition of The New Asylum becomes available online in just a couple of days. Pre-orders are being accepted now, I believe. It’s a unique journey and I don’t think you’ll regret having a copy on your shelf.

Within Australia? Contact me. I do mail-order.

The BFOR Blog Tour

Throughout August and into September 2019 the UK based Books for Older Readers (#BFOR) Group is having a blog tour, visiting the pages of some of its members and taking a peek at articles and book reviews, or extracts from work done by or suitable to bring to the attention of members.

The group comprises both readers and authors, and the BFOR web page can be found here, while the Facebook group is here. Check them out.

Today it is again my turn to post an article that might be of interest, and I have chosen to provide some thoughts and extracts from Small Town Kid collection, today.

Small Town Kid context and settings

Small Town Kid is a free-verse memoir about a boy growing up in a rural Australian town during the 1960s and 70s.

On thinking about the collection, it occurred to me that there are, in fact, a number of discrete though overlapping contextual settings. For example:

Time
Place
Freedom
Naivety and awe

Time

The 20th Century was a time of enormous change, with the latter half – my half – propelling us into the age of computers and electronics. To the moon and back. And yet, while this was stirring all around us, and stirring us at the same time, we still bought our meat from the local butcher, or perhaps the rabbit-o, and it still came to us wrapped in the daily newspaper.

butcher’s paper

thursday

gather the papers
and lay them out flat
then carefully make
a tight roll

tie the bundle
with a length of string
and a butterfly knot
hoist the load
onto a shoulder
and start walking
up to ford street
and spencer’s butcher shop

the butcher-man
in his stained blue-stripe apron
smiles
and cracks a little-kid joke
in the cool shopfront
that smells the particular smell
of fresh meat and sawdust

he puts the bundle
on the scales
to measure by weight
the value of the popular press
in recent times

sixpence
for a couple of pounds of paper
and the news
becomes the wrapping
for another feed
of tender young chops

rabbit-o

a line of nails
head high on the paling fence
a sharp knife
and fast hands
are the basic requirements
of the rabbit-o

a hundred pair of bunnies
after a night of spotlighting
or setting traps
need speed
in the emerging sun of morning

gutted and skun
in thirty seconds each
skins are stretched wide to dry
inside out on wire
red meat is placed on white ice
fast
to avoid the risk of spoiling
before delivery to customers
as the day heats up

would you like a pair missus
they’re fresh this morning
your husband did some work for me
and I want to say
ta

Place

The location for these poems is predominantly the small town in which I grew up, Beechworth in the north east of Victoria, although the journey stretches as far as Melbourne – the capital city of Victoria. If you care to read my own introduction to the town, I wrote a piece a couple of years back that you can find here. The article has some pictures and links of significance.

The events and incidents that are described are things that a young child can see and encounter from such a place, and it would be tempting for me to include a soft poem of sunset or other beauty, but I will leave those in the confines of the book – the scenic Gorge, the fetes and parades and bonfire nights.

Today I prefer to to recall that, at that time and in that place there was a culture in the smaller country towns for male youth to gather in gangs and visit neighboring towns for a brawl on Weekends. Violence rendered social.

fight

tension builds
from sunday

through a week
of minor huddles
that materialise
and dissipate
on street corners

and where the local lads
the ones with wheels
and those merely
in attendance
half form tactical groups
for a moment

to plot
make arrangements
for the coming friday

anticipation melds
with the planning
of ways to set the scene
for the great
get-even
with the smartarse fools
from the other town
who have no right
to claim ascendancy

self-respect screams
for vengeance

next friday

there are thirty
or more
around the two
at the side of the street
in the granite gutter

chosen site
for the confrontation

knuckles and knees
punctuated by
the soft dull thud
of a metal pipe
striking home

among raw grunts
and muffled kicking
the stranger is downed
according to plan

the esteem
of the town
undergoes a restoration
with each connecting strike

the sound of the blows
in the eerie near-silence
is a pulse beat that reaches
to touch the young witness
running for home
with his eyes fixed
wide open

Freedom

My memory is of a latch-key childhood, of sorts. My parents both worked long days in the local Mental Asylum, so the pattern became one of having the day to myslef, and most of my firends in the town were in a similar position.

I believe this was largely true of city cousins, also. It was simply a time when kids had the day to themselves and were required to turn up for the evening meal at the right time, or when summoned from the back door.

It was freedom to make our own daily decisions and then to live with the consequences, as well. There was this one occasion I recall, when it seemed like a good idea to set off in pursuit of a meeting with a girl . . .

sweet maureen

I rode my bike
for sweet maureen
from beechworth to yackandandah

fourteen miles
of love-smit pedalling
down the hill
of the rising sun

a million miles an hour
not fast enough
but my breath
was taken away

I was drawn
down the road
descending like a bullet
from the barrel
of my rifle

drawn to ride
to sweet maureen

Naivete and awe

Momentous events that I can recall seem hardly worth mentioning in this day and age. The impact of having a sewerage treatment plant installed and the whole town connected was profound. Outside toilets and the nightman were replaced by indoor plumbing! Amazing.

Similarly, the impact of television becoming common can’t be overstated. It was huge. My father tells that he bought our first television (with money that should not have been used for the purpose) because his children were wearing out the carpet at a neighbors place, viewing the Mickey Mouse Club show every night.

That first television was attached to the wheel of a bicycle and the wheel rolled around to attain the correct signal wavelength.

discovering tv

if you walk
along the streets
in the heat
of the summer evening
you may note the blue glow
and irregular pulsing of light
that illuminates each house

muted voices
come from patios
and lounge rooms
to compete with the crickets
and cicadas
of a warm night

lights are off
and whole families have moved
out onto verandas
bringing chairs
and three-bum vinyl sofas
or sitting on the concrete

whiling away
flickering dark hours
and mesmerised
in the sensation
of discovering tv

Share your thoughts

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and a few poems extracted from Small Town Kid.

I’d like nothing better than to hear your thoughts and comments about the time you grew up in. Was it very different?

If you care to watch my reading of a few poems from Small Town Kid and Devil In The Wind (my second collection), pop over to my YouTube channel and check them out.

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Publications

Devil In The Wind (May, 2019)

Devil In The Wind captures the voices of victims and survivors of the catastrophic Black Saturday bushfires that took place in Victoria (Australia) in 2009. See the full blurb here.