Many Voices

This is all that remains of the Welsh Church built more than a hundred years ago in a little township south west of Ballarat. The congregation here spoke and wrote and worshipped in Welsh. So many languages spoken on the goldfields; Chinese, Italian, Welsh, Gaelic, German were all significant languages. 

Now they are all subsumed into English.

Just recently someone is putting up little signs in the local and ancient Wadawurrung language which has been spoken here for tens of thousands of years. I would love to be able to speak even a little of this first and original language.

Mary Finnin in the State Library

Last week  (yes, I've been a bit behind in writing up the action around here) I set off at 6.30 to spend a day in Melbourne.

First I met Jess at the A1Bakery in Sydney Road for Lebanese coffee and hot, fresh-baked flatbread with zatar. So fragrant and delicious! You would never guess from this photo that there were in fact a lot of people in A1. I have a real knack for people-free photos.

 

 

Jess kindly gave me an Iphone training session so I can start to use the old Iphone I've been given.
 Then he went off to his lab and I went off to the State Library.

The best place in the city.

Paradise.

If only I could live in the dome and browse on books every day.

I spent the day in the rare books & manuscripts room reading Mary Finnin's poetry, and lazing a bit in the autumn sun on the lawn out front, with the rest of Melbourne.

Isn't this the most steam punk of sphinxes?

Spring poem to chant for Proserpine

What shall she have,

Earth's youngest daughter?

Green combs of willow wands,

Mirrors in the water.

Where shall we go

To do her birthday honour?

Clematis above the rocks

hangs her silken banner.

Heath lights tapers through the bush -

White, and red for morning;

All the tight-balled wattle boughs

Overnight are turning

Each into a golden fleece

Rich as Jason plundered, 

Where across the shining weir

Winter floods had thundered.

Reedy singers call her home,

Little Proserpine,

Cuckoo's flute, dark bittern's drum, 

and wren pipes fine.

Old as moss in glacier lands -

Earth's youngest daughter -

Clean as worship in the hills -

New as lambs and laughter.

Mary Finnan wrote this poem. She  was born near Geelong in Victoria in 1906. She was an artist, teacher, unionist and Red Cross worker. Her poems aren't in print now. I'm going to the State Library soon to look at some of her books.

I've known this poem by heart since I first found it in an anthology of 'bush poets'.

 Proserpine/Persephone's story is a myth that has always resonated for me, as a child and later as a mother. 

 The story of Jason's quest and the plundering of the golden fleece is a good one to tell in goldfields country. 

Outside Geelong is the little town of Ceres where my mother's family lived and farmed in the 19th century. Ceres is Proserpine's mother, of course.

White plum tree

It is the white Plum Tree

Seven days fair

As a bride goes combing

Her joy of hair.

As a peacock dowered

with golden eyes

Ten paces over

The Orange lies.

It is the white Plum Tree

Her passion tells

As a young maid rustling,

She so excels.

The birds run outward

The birds are low.

Whispering in manna

The sweethearts go.

It is the white Plum Tree

Seven days fair

As a bride goes combing

Her joy of hair.

John Shaw Neilson

Spring blossom makes me want to sing and chant all those lovely poems I learnt as a child.
John Shaw Neilson's poems are very singable. He's one of my favourite poets, a local Victorian, always a poor man - often working on the roads. His poems seem simple but grow richer and stranger as you reread them

.

Hallaig

 'Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig'

 

When I saw the Gaelic words in the Old Ballarat Cemetery last Sunday I remembered a poem called Hallaig by Sorley Maclean, a modern poet who writes in Gaelic as well as English.You can find Hallaig in both Gaelic and English here on the poet's website.

There are still deer around and about Ballarat - these ones were at Mt Egerton - but I don't think any families here still speak Gaelic.

Vermilion Pears

The Reader

All night I sat reading a book,

Sat reading as in a book

Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars

Covered the shrivelled forms

crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,

A voice was mumbling, "Everything

Falls back into coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,

the melons, the vermilion pears

Of the leafless garden."

The sombre pages bore no print

Except the trace of burning stars

In the frosty heaven.

                                                   Wallace Stevens.

Delightful

Here's a lovely old book I found.

It's a bit battered, but has wonderfully thick creamy paper.

and I think has been well-loved.

John Masefield was a poet who is now unfashionable, but he had a real gift for chantable verse and for telling good stories. He wrote two magical books for children, The Midnight Folk and this one, The Box of Delights. I think I can see his influence in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising.

There is a affectionate account of his work here, and a rather more cautious one here - he is VERY unfashionable after all. He wrote well about the sea and sailing, being a working sailor himself .

January 2010

The grapevine and I have both been scribbling away this month.

I 've been back at work a few weeks now. I haven't gone far or seen many people. It's been a quiet time.

I found 3 metres of cotton material for $2.50 in the Wendouree Op Shop to finish off the Carnivale quilt. I did wash it but I haven't ironed it, as you can see.

And I found this dress. It's just like my favourite dress when I was 17, but this dress is only a couple of years old. Memories drift around it as it hangs on the door.

I read a favourite book for the third time.

I finished a basket of birds (I gave the red and pink ones as Christmas presents), found a new cup and saucer, started a new diary, got my pencils out.

And I've been watching/listening to Bush Slam. In two minutes I'll be in front of the TV as Sam Wagan Watson and Kate Fagan make and perform poems at Yarrabah. Try Hotel Bone if you haven't read Sam Wagan Watson yet - there are youtube and other sites to hear him read etc. if you like this.

Today's rainbow

I've been seeing so many rainbows this winter. Here is yet another absolutely ordinary rainbow, shining above the absolutely ordinary houses in my street and glowing through the plum blossom above my gate.

I found Les Murray's poem, An absolutely ordinary rainbow and read it again. If you haven't read it yourself yet you can find it on this website http://www.lesmurray.org/ .