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Across the decades, on both sides of the Great Divide and at campfires and barbecues, in pubs and public halls and class-rooms, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and C.J. Dennis have been recited, selectively quoted, and parodied. Their most popular works have migrated into Australian folklore; hardly surprising, as what they wrote largely derived from the tradition of bush ballads and bush yarns. Theirs have become our stories, familiar, reassuring of our cultural roots and attitudes. To some extent, they are a kind of comfort literature.
What you notice, listening to Thompson, is that he delivers the past, while acknowledging that it is the past. He is not trying to revive it. And that is just how Paterson and Lawson wrote all those years ago – back in the days when the world was wide. Paterson’s narrator sits in his city office, thinking of Clancy; Lawson, of his father’s mates. It is a kind of nostalgia; not the yearning, keening kind associated with the Irish and Scots, though that was possibly part of its origins, but a sentimental nostalgia which serves as a main channel to our patriotism.
To my mind, the producer gets it wrong in Volume 1. Paterson’s bush poems don’t need introductory sound effects – cows mooing or birds calling or whips cracking or whatever is pertinent to each piece being read, as though we cannot imagine that world for ourselves. A bicycle bell to herald Mulga Bill, good grief! We should be allowed to drift inside our minds back to those times and spaces; the noises work against the imaginative register, they don’t assist it. I suppose the thought was that these discs might be taken up in school lessons. Those intrusive sounds remind me of radio broadcasts during my primary school years an awfully long time ago, for that is exactly how it used to be.
Thompson chooses to ignore the emphases of Paterson’s internal rhymes, and consequently also overrides the end rhymes, in the manner of reading modern verse. He follows Paterson’s lead in this. It is clearly how you have to read the opening line of ‘Clancy of the Overflow’. But Paterson didn’t expect that to be the practice across the board. His ballad metre rests on those intern-al emphases, and that is where his key images and phrases are placed (‘the vision splendid’). To ride roughshod over them is to lose track of the intended cadence, and makes the sense more difficult to follow – makes it more difficult, in fact, to listen.
The bush selection is of all the well-known recitation pieces, the comic ballads, followed by more serious, aka ‘poetical’, verses, where Paterson unhappily adopts an elevated and paradoxically unnatural vocabulary (runes, leafage, frondage). This kind of writing is dated, whereas the bush ballads are timeless, suspended in the national collective memory. The war poems in Volume 4 are more touching because not so contrived for effect. Their effect comes through simple direct language and imagery. That collection ends with ‘The Ode of Remembrance’ and the first notes of ‘The Last Post’; which is to concede that the listening experience takes us beyond Paterson to another of our channels of patriotism.
Lawson’s stories allow Thompson rather more of a performance. He brings off well the sudden understanding of the boy in ‘The Drover’s Wife’. In a companion dog story, ‘We call him “Ally”’, he gets carried away, and develops a voice like Constable Plod. ‘The Loaded Dog’ always reads well; Thompson ends it with a quiet avuncular chuckle, hinting at a sort of Uncle Remus figure behind the stories. Listening to its farcical climax, you are amazed at Lawson’s lack of sympathy for the dogs. Farce is commonly cruel, but Lawson was not. Somehow the switch of focus to round off the story emerges as just a tad evasive.
The pleasant surprise in this set of CDs is Thompson’s reading of C.J. Dennis. His Sentimental Bloke comes up close, confiding his most intimate feelings to the listener. It works very well indeed. In this instance, Thompson’s practice of running over the rhyme words does not interfere with the sense. In fact, you are impressed by Dennis’s skilfulness. He is more accomplished than you remember, and Thompson’s reading manages to increase our appreciation of him. I dips me lid.
Discs mentioned in this review:
The Bush Poems of A.B. (Banjo) Paterson
read by Jack Thompson
Fine Poets Collection: Volume 1
$19.95 CD, 44 minutes, 9369999010928
The Campfire Yarns of Henry Lawson
read by Jack Thompson
Fine Poets Collection: Volume 2
$19.95 CD, 71 minutes, 9369999010935
The Sentimental Bloke, The Poems of C.J. Dennis
read by Jack Thompson
Fine Poets Collection: Volume 3
$19.95 CD, 49 minutes, 9369999022198
The Battlefield Poems of A.B. (Banjo) Paterson
read by Jack Thompson
Fine Poets Collection: Volume 4
$19.95 CD, 36 minutes, 9369999025861
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