Rory Harris

ID 0:02

This is a Vision Australia Radio Podcast.

Kate Cooper 0:04

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced creative voices in our community. I'm Kate Cooper, and our guest on today's program is the poet Rory Harris. We spoke with Rory in August of 2024 about his work as a teacher of English and as a poet. In today's program, we explore the relationship between Rory's life as a poet and his life as a committed Christian. I recorded this conversation with Rory near the place where, as we'll hear, he likes to worship. 

Rory, welcome back to the program. When we spoke with you last year, we talked about your life as a teacher of English, your poetry writing - we didn't really touch on your identity as a committed Christian who writes poetry and has published now for 35 years in Studio, a journal of Christian writing, obviously among other journals and publications where your work has appeared. Would you begin by telling us your story as a committed Christian?

Rory Harris 1:32

Good afternoon. Kate. Thank you very much. Look. I was a cradle Anglican. I was baptised and confirmed, and then, obviously you attended Mass on Sundays... until, in my case, my father said, Do you still want to do this? And I said, Not really. So I stopped going. All those years later, I applied for a job at St Paul's College at Gillies Plains, those days, Christian Brothers College, ESL classes. And I wasn't really part of the the mainstream school. I had these kids, and that's all I had with these ESL kids, four days a week in the classroom and Fridays, and we went to places like Victor Harbour, the Rocking Horse, Matta... and what have you. 

And my throwaway line was on, I'm teaching Storm Boy, so let's go down to Storm Boy country. We're teaching this. Let's have a look at that. Then a year or two later, I get taken in to teach senior English, so I'm more immersed into into the culture of St Paul's, and now, for better or worse, the principal of the time, a wonderful man called Peter Shanahan, offered me my first permanent job as a school teacher. And I said, Thank you very much. And took it, but the fine print bit of a paper target teachers in Catholic schools at the time had to pick up some units in religion. I think it was called Accreditation B, and there were a couple of in house courses run by the Catholic Education Office of fabricton. 

And I thought, well, you can do that. And at the time the NESA down at Underdale was running, and they've been for years, the Graduate Diploma in Education, religious education, majoring in Catholic studies. And I thought, Well, there's going to be more grunt in that than in a an in-house course. So over three years, I finished this Graduate Diploma, Education, religious education, majoring in Catholic studies. And I thought, Well, that's... got that Catholic stuff sorted. 

But while you're in the school, you're working with brothers, you're working with committed people in education, in particular Catholic education, who were so damn inspiring. So yes, there's faith, but it's faith exhibited by human beings in your orbit who were just so inspiring. In the winter of 1990 I had my first film published in Studio, a journal of Christians writing, and over years since then, I've had numerous anthologies with them and numerous publications with them. 

And it was interesting that reading that old list of contributors, there's people who may or may not identify as Christian, but they were getting an audience in a Christian journal, and the editor, Paul Grover, who's been doing it for years, was very, very broad church. And I think that's the metaphor. The characters I was inspired by were very, very broad church. And so for an irregularly attending Anglican, he did his course. I had the theory. I had some sort of academic parchment qualification. But I'm working with these wonderful people and being energised in the school to to help out running retreats, to help out in the liturgical life of the school. And in the last five years of my 15 years there, I actually looked after re curriculum. 

And so you had this theoretical knowledge, the theological knowledge, you were working with kids, and you were a lay teacher, but there was a richness of theory in the practice. So that sort of bucket of stuff informed my theology and informed my practice as... an English teacher and a Religious Education teacher in a Christian brother school. So that's in a roundabout way, how I became a mass-attending Catholic - years ago.

I actually converted, but that's a long story, because at some stage in my teaching career, I was quite a religious education coordinator at Christian Brothers College, and it was pointed out to me that maybe If you wanted a career as a religious leader, it might be a good idea to become a Catholic, rather than hide behind this cradle of Anglicanism. I had been for years.

Kate Cooper 6:10

So from having converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, you are now someone who doesn't work in a Catholic school. You'renot required to go to Mass. But by choice, you do go very regularly. What inspires you now?

Rory Harris

That's a terrific question. I actually celebrate mass weekly at the Philip Kennedy Centre, which is a Southern Cross home, I visit an old chum of my wife, and we go through the Sunday Mail Travel section, and we point out places she's been to years ago. I'd leave there and go down to the Sacred Heart for mass at 11 at Semaphore... but one of the strong Catholics who comes in and helps the old people out, said, There's a mass. It's Philip Kennedy at 11 o'clock. So why the hell are you going down the Semaphore when you could be celebrating this with Father Tony, and there was a lot involved moment. 

So I go into the chapel, and it's a fantastic service. Father's a brilliant priest, and you're worshiping with a whole bunch of old people, which makes me feel terribly young in a in a community environment. Yes, there's, you know, the tabernacle, yes, there's the altar, yes, there's that, but there's a retreatiness of experience with the people. And there's an old fella, he sits to my left ahead of me, and at that time of Peace be with you. After the Lord's Prayer, he throws his arm out, and we just graze fingers. 

And I look, I'm an old man these days, but it's that intimacy. I don't know his name, I don't know his story, but he's got the generosity of spirit to make a human contact with that and there's a couple of local people who live in the facility, who aren't infirmed, who do the first readings, who do the acclamation, the Gospel Acclamation. They do the first of the faithful, and they do the respiratorial Psalm. So Father has got a strong community, a community of support. And for me as a parishioner, worshiping at pivot Kennedy for an hour or so every Sunday, you feel part of something that's bigger than you. 

This is the first poem I published in the Studio, in the journal of Christians, writing number 39, winter of 1990 and give you some idea of how broad Paul Grover's church is regarding what's in a journal of Christmas writing...

Order at almost two you realise your habits, the clicking of seat belts before you leave the car, the cleaning of table tops after the evening meal, various encores before bed and the throwing of kisses to the gallery. You exit, midget actor, you bow, ordering the house from your smallest position. 

Now the second one does offer that engagement with faith of a sort. This one came out in number 42, the autumn of 1991. Each morning... the school assembles to sing each voice in air a chord of faith, this daily choir of children. What I find interesting with that one is, you know, the word faith has been mentioned, and I guess in a journal of Christian writing, you'd expect faith to to either be there in print or assumed in in the text, looking at the... list of contributors. There's some well-known people who went on to to write and publish various anthologies of their work and collections of the work, who may or may not be Christians. 

But I think the power of it is when Paul and the committee made the editorial decision to publish them, there was something there imbued with what the magazine's on about. And I don't think many of them would have been called Christian poets - I have once in print, and it was on the idea that I make my faith public at various times at various readings, or they know that I'm a Catholic or working Catholic schools, or that I attend that regularly. 

And the only other person who's been given that endorsement is Tim Winton, and he puts his hand up for that with a fair bit of bonhomie and a fair bit of publicness that this is his family situation. This is what he writes. And he identifies as a brilliant Australian writer who happens to be a Christian. He's not a Christian writer, but he's an Australian writer, a great Australian writer who's a Christian. 

The other one I read is, I think it was called Australia's greatest religious poet was Francis Webb. And I used to use Frank Webb's pieces to begin prayers, because part of the enterprise that in a Catholic school is you have a daily prayer with the kids, and we'd have a weekly prayer meeting before the David bulletin and say Frank Webb's stuff became someone's forgotten there on on the roster. My job is to make sure there was a prayer done. So always had a pocket full of Frank Webb poem to fill the gaps when someone forgot to read the roster.

Kate Cooper

you raised a couple of points that I wanted to ask you about. First of all, what's the difference between being a writer, or, in your case, a poet, who is a Christian, and being a Christian writer? You used that term in your response before, a Christian poet or a poet who happens to be Christian, that I like the second of a poet who just happens to be Christian.

Rory Harris 12:33

Look, I'll read three pieces from the most recent Studio, number 162, 2024 and again, their poems now about my grandchild. But again, it opens up how broad Paul Grover is in his construction of what it means to be a journal of Christians writing. I just realised too, a general of Christians writing used to be on the cover. It's no longer on the cover, but it does come in on the title page. 

Nose, chew, wrapped all breathe, the trees drip. You are blanket folded, wool, wrap the nose poking holes in the day at three Ye, let me pet you asleep. My hand over your milk tight belly rising and falling through tides, through impossible questions. Story, my hand on your rising belly at the end of the day. The End of story, you are gurgling warm milk, holding on to infancy. Our breathing is rhythm perfect. You have disarmed the day, returned the seagulls to the sky, your windmilling arms finally at rest, your rat-ta-tat-tat. Footsteps on the boardwalk, silent. 

Now it's interesting there too about my granddaughter. The one I read earlier is about my second daughter. So Paul has got this thing about the universality of kids, be them daughters or granddaughters. 

So you fold yourself against the wind, and even wearing my T shirt in sizes too big, you complain about the cold, and when you stand a full sail unfilled, you hold fast streamers of blond hair behind you as a sun would warm the New World. 

Now I read those three pieces a couple of months ago at Friendly Street, and I prefaced it with an account I was doing the one of the middle writer sessions with the South Australian English Teachers' Association years ago, where they've employed young adult writers of fiction, a few poets, and run for sessions at the Convention Centre, all framed up with a big... an introductory speech by someone famous. I'd done the reading in front of the halls, and I was taking the questions, and a girl put her hand up and yelled out, Rory, my English teacher says that you've been writing the same poem for 30 years, to which I replied, Go and ask your English teacher, Have I got it right yet? 

So when I read those three pieces, which I've just read to you from history, there was a sense I get they're all about the same kid. You reuse and re reignite images that you thought might have worked or didn't work, and you're having another go. But I love that candidness of the kid and the idea that her teacher said, Oh, Harris has been doing the same poem for 30 years. Well, have I got it right yet? Am I still going to be doing it for another 30 years?

Kate Cooper 16:00

On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is poet and Christian Rory Harris. You mentioned before about writing for your granddaughter and earlier for your second daughter in studio, and that thread of writing about family is a constant in your poetry. So having read a lot of your poems, you're not writing the same poem, but you are touching on the continuity of themes, the continuity of family, of love for family, and of seeing the beauty in the everyday things that your children and your grandchildren do to that extent. Would you argue that writing about family in that way is also at the core of what makes you a Christian?

Rory Harris 16:57

Yeah? Yeah, there's this... everything about God is in the ordinary. And there's a book called that, and it's in those glorious moments, like, you know, the first step of the toddler,or an experience you see from a kid, and then you got all those images of innocence and growth. Yeah, there's that God is in the ordinary. We celebrate the ordinary. Celebrate those moments. Then you tell everyone we're made in the image of God. Now that there's a fantastic idea for a teacher, because you pull two doors apart who are hidden, swinging each other. But when you think you know, they are made in the image of God. They're doing dumb stuff so that take a step back, reflect on it. 

But the principal of the time would often get kids who have given a teacher a hard time, had a chat to them, and we had that wonderful thing called restorative justice, where, you know, you got to look at the situation, see from the various points of view, what were the alternatives you could have done and and try and synthesise a different way of behaving than the one you got sprung doing. And... I would get these kids up and then have a chat with parents, guardians and all that sort of great, collegial, relational stuff, and blow me down next big school mass, these kids will be your ethic nemesis.

And you've got that wonderful tension that this kid's presenting a teacher with the body of Christ blessed by the priest, and this kid might have just said something very rude a couple of weeks ago to that teacher, and the teachers got the opportunity to accept the body of Christ given by the kid, or not accepted. Well, accepting it says a great story. By not accepting it, it's an abysmal story. And I like using the Icarus as a living thing to try and adjust the kid's behavior, putting him in the position of, it's almost a sacred position, and then putting the teacher in a position of forgiveness, of accepting this from a kid who's just 234, weeks ago, maybe being very unpleasant to him, that's powerful theology. And it's not only powerful theology, it's powerful humanity. 

And that's goes back to what I said originally about engaging religiously. For me, at my vintage now is your relationship.

Kate Cooper 19:38

What you're describing is also closing the circle in a way, so the child handing the Eucharist, receiving forgiveness, also that puts an end to whatever the behavior was. There's no continuity of resentment. There's no continuity of fear, of what might happen later. It brings it to a whole...

Rory Harris 20:03

Yeah, that's fantastic. When Richard Flanagan, now, I read that book, and I loved it, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, I grabbed three pages of it, and one day I had to do prayer at CBC, and I read out the three pages where the men who had survived Changi had come back to Tasmania, and they're looking for the fish and chip shop that one of their mates romanticised. They've gone on the grog. And they get really angry, and they destroy the front window of it anyway. The next day, they come back and apologise, and the owner invites them in, cooks them the mill. They sit down and share story, and they find out that the other Sonia was in another campaign in World War Two. 

Anyway, I didn't really tell a lot of just on it, you actually read it off the page for prayer. And I said, here are the men confessing they've done something dumb, and we confess our sins before Mass, then we have the Liturgy of the Word, the story of these men coming back to celebrate this fish and chip shop that a dead mate would romanticise, and then we have, we have the showing of food communion. And I said, I don't know, and that. And I broke it down into the three or four parts of the Eucharist in a Catholic service. 

And I was trying to get across to the staff, here's a brilliant novel. It's just picked up. The Booker, both friendly and aware in that account that he was following, confessing the sharing a story, the preparing of food, the taking of sustenance, and getting on with your life, because that's a universal story, and we do it, or the church does it regularly, in a thing called the mass, and Flanagan has done it so beautifully in a secular way, in a novel about prisons of war coming back to a dead mate's hometown to see if it was good as As the stories he was telling in Changi were and again, when I said it earlier, that's not only great theology, that's great humanity.

Kate Cooper 22:28

And you said that earlier when you were talking about using Francis Webb's poetry, sometimes in the mornings at school. So through that example, through the Richard Flanagan example, and through your earlier example of using Francis Webb.

Rory Harris 22:42

You're not always using religious texts when, when you're teaching children how to think about faith and about humanity, but there's a universal sacredness. The one I use from playing Webb, I think the palms called four days old, and Webb's, you know, in a hospital, and his doctor hands him a young child, a newborn child. But there's a great line in it where Webb says it's so tiny and not the immense we kneel towards. And that's as powerful one of the questions that people ask when they're wanting to inquire more about someone's religious beliefs is what faith means to them.

Kate Cooper 23:32

Now, in different ways, through your answers, I think you have responded to what faith means to you, and particularly the notion of common humanity. Are there other ways you would describe what faith means to you?

Rory Harris 23:48

The data on some of this stuff, certainly for young adults and senior secondary kids, and we used to run a course in this with year 12 religion, the data suggesting that kids aren't putting their hand up for organized religion or going to Mass. That's not new, but this data is suggesting that kids are more spiritual than we were at their age. And there's other data, and this came out of the Catholic Record, a very conservative Catholic academic journal that kids coming through Catholic education may not be mass attenders from being cradle Catholics through the generations about their activism in their faith through social justice. 

And there were three case studies done with kids who were Catholic, and they jumped ship and moved around a fair bit, but the common thing in their adult life was that they were engaged in volunteerism and they were engaged in social justice stuff, which began in most cases, in their seniors so many years in Catholic schools 100 years ago. It. When I was organising year 12 retreats, we had a retreat. And this goes to a very hard of your question. We had mass, and then he went to the Churchill. We had about 18 year 12 boys. 

And I did this thing. I had the next captain came back to talk about life by St Paul's. I had Oxfam come in and talk, a secular organisation. I had [?her sweet] Centre, where I used to call the door as a charity. Someone from there came in, and later on, I had brother Peter Fauci talking about ecological theology. And I was really happy to get that mix of an ex- school captain who was saying, Okay, post St Paul's, I'm doing this. I was getting the organisations that were church-connected or secular connected, and then getting someone like Peter Bucha. The school can learn a lot from the other agencies around and I think the other agencies can learn a lot from the religious organisations doing what small elder go school could work. 

And I think then it is a dialog that can happen there. And whether a kid exits a Catholic school and works for Oxfam or Amnesty International, or goes back to those vendors where he prepared meals or did this or worked in a helped out in a facility, as long as they're out in the world, engaging, I don't get terribly hung up whether it's the religious world or the per secular world, as long as my mantra in year 11 as coordinator was, I want you to be alive to yourself, alive to your mates, and alive to your God. 

So what you're talking about, really, is faith in practice, what faith looks like enacted. But that's not to deny that it's personal grace and his personal power. We used to celebrate Mother's Day, and I used to read that poem, that wonderful poem by Christine Church, it's called Our Mother in the Trees. It's a secular poem, but it's full of the love of motherhood and the love of a mother for her kids, and it's the same love of Mary at the base of the cross, there's the mother waiting on the hill while her son is crucified and dies. 

You know that's that's powerful, again, this powerful theology, but it's also powerful humanity and the power of love, and then the redemption, that redeeming power of love we used to do. We have that standard trick on a year to a retreat for the boy at the end of it, and they've had two nights, not much sleep, lot of theology, a lot of footy, a lot of swimming, a lot of walking, and we'd give them their last lecture about look after your mum, and they'd write that letter to their mum. 

And for the kids who weren't the community, and we're talking 16, seven year old boys, for these mums and caregivers to get a letter from their son, well, it might have been the first letter they got since when they when they were in year one, and that's powerful stuff that that they can engage with that. And if that, if that's the best thing that comes out of a year towards retreat, fantastic. That's great.

Kate Cooper 28:33

That's a lovely place to leave this conversation. Rory Harris, thank you so much for coming and speaking with us about being a Christian and being a poet. Thank you.

Rory Harris 28:45

Thank you, Kate.

Kate Cooper 28:47

Our guest on emerging writers today was poet and Christian Rory Harris. 

This program is produced in our Adelaide studios and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia radio, VA radio on digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes. Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia radio podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio.org for more.

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