Reprint of an old blog post.
Somewhere a long time ago, I started reading. I don’t remember learning to do it. Others told me I was about three when I grabbed the Bumper Book that had been a Christmas gift and said imperiously, “I’ll read it to you!” This meant that I started first grade at five with a reading level of a 3rd grader. This is not meant to take any bows for something that couldn’t be helped except that I was one of those lucky children who looked down at black marks on paper and realized they made pictures in your head.
That five year old had a radio and the hits of the time being what they were, Bing Crosby put other pictures in my head with Far Away Places with strange sounding names and somehow that song got married to the poems of Banjo Patterson and a place way far away from California named Australia.
The one poem by Banjo that stuck with me more than any other was Clancy of the Overflow. I wanted to see those drovers at work on the wide spaces, and a curiosity turned into an obsession. I had to go to Australia. In the meantime if there was a novel or history book about the place it got read (If you want a list, it’s a long one). Then there were the movies from The Sundowners to Australia. Just to add in more music, along came the amazing Peter Allen and the man who played him in the Boy From Oz, Hugh Jackman. Add in the wide range of art has had me scrambling for images from Albert Namatijira, one of the first recognized aboriginal artists to modern works by Nathan Mundraby (He’s on Facebook and you can watch him in action on You Tube).
Along the way I have been disabused of any romanticism about this now very modern country, but the history and the spaces are still there and I still want to go. In the meantime some of the poems and songs by or about Australians.
Leave it to Peter to write a song that will make you homesick for a place you have never seen.
So 70 years after that three year old learned to read, I still really really want to go to that far away place. I’ve removed a lot of items from the bucket list, but that one remains.
