Rory Harris (part 1)

Speaker 1 00:02

This is a Vision Australia radio podcast.

Speaker 2 00:18

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper, and I guest on today's program is Rory Harris, one of Adelaide's best-known poets and teachers, and very much an experienced, rather than an emerging writer. Rory has taught in schools, colleges, universities and prisons, and nowadays remains very much involved in encouraging young people's enjoyment of, and expression through, poetry. Rory has several volumes of poetry published by Friendly Street Poets, Five Islands Press, and Ginninderra Press, among others.

With Peter Macfarlane, he has co-written and edited a series of textbooks on teaching poetry for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, one of which has the wonderful title of Doing Bombers Off the Jetty. Welcome to the program, Rory. I'm going to begin with a question that I've asked other guests on this program. Where did you grow up, and what does that place mean to you now?

Speaker 3 01:26

Thank you. I grew up a dropkick from the Woodville Oval in Woodville South. I went to local primary school there and then Seaton Tech until about year 11 for leaving and then over to Underdale to have two cracks at year 12. [?  Place], because I spent a number of years going back and nursing mum in the family home and then later my father. You've watched that pocket of Woodville develop and change quite dramatically, and I've written or hinted at metaphors about that changing place. 

Without [?sending to Bolshiyon], I guess I'm proud that I'm a western suburbs Woodville South kid rather than being born somewhere else because Glenlossie Street was the last of the Glen Street and the Glen Streets always had a punched above their weight and in the 50s when I was born, Glenlossie Street was a dead-end street going into glasshouses and it was uncurved so it was a fantastic street to live in because you could have your football matches and your cricket competitions knowing that only ever two cars were going to go past your house because not many people had cars in the middle and late 1950s.

Speaker 2 02:54

[?Sansa Dilik]. Rory, what are your earliest memories of working creatively in any of the arts?

Speaker 3 03:02

Mum was a big reader and I came to reading very late but there were always books in the house and she was on me to read and I didn't start reading voluntarily until I was doing year 12. You read your novels through school but most of the times there was a gun pointed at your head and you're reading for another purpose rather than just sitting back and enjoying it. The big creative thing was discovering writers that spoke to you, and in year 12 I kept that great 17 year old journal and I would write in it with some sort of conviction and obsessiveness every night and so you were choosing to write about stuff in your own world rather than mimicking something else.

Speaker 2 03:52

So what was it about poetry that first drew you to this particular form of expression?

Speaker 3 03:59

Probably the brevity of it, and I've never written much creative prose or written articles and things like that. I don't think I've had that great stamina and I wanted it to be quick and purposeful and use images and later on they have it spoken so it came off the page dramatically.

Speaker 2 04:26

You talk about having poetry spoken, and we've had a number of conversations on this program with spoken word poets about the difference between reading a poem quietly to yourself and hearing a poem. How do you feel when you listen to a poem? How does that affect you compared to if you're just reading something print on page?

Speaker 3 04:49

I think it was [?Galway Canal], he American poet used to say, You're reading a poem aloud, you're throwing it out like a fisherman, throwing out the line and letting it hit the water. I'm old school, I came out of that sort of performance group in the late 70s. I'm not a spoken word poet. He gets the poem down off pat. And I think that's another skill at the theatricality of that, to free your arms up. You've got the script in your head, you performed it numerous times, so it crosses another threshold. I come out of that tradition where the poems always been on the page, not like the kids now reading off phones. 

That just blows my mind because I don't hold a phone very well with that technology. So you got the poem on the page and you want to get it out. Well, you got to get your breathing, you got to get your rhythms, you got to pace it and you can muck around with it. And all those years ago, when we were doing the textbooks on performance poetry, we retracted the poems that work at first or second hearing. And every now and again, we'd get criticism certainly at Friendly Street, that there was a certain type of Friendly Street poem that succeeded other than the lyrics or the whispers.

That's not to say those pieces can't be read aloud and enjoyed, but they've got to be read probably a little bit more humbly and a little bit more precious than the Grand List poems or the poems that build up to a crescendo and then whisper off. You can still get those lyrics off the page, but you need a really, really sympathetic audience and a very good reader to make their mark.

Speaker 2 06:43

Would you tell us about some of the poets who inspired or influenced you when you were younger, and also about the poets who inspire you now?

Speaker 3 06:54

When I was younger and having come to reading for Pleasure and Inspiration late, it was probably in about year 12 at Underdale High, 1972, when Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Phil and Getty were in Adelaide, and I've told this story lots and I tell it again. I was in year 12, Ginsberg was, they called it Focus, and they have these blow-up domes on Rynell Park, and a girl and I had got tickets, or wanted to get tickets to see Ginsberg perform, so we left school a bit earlier, rode our pushbikes into Rynell Park, left them by the kiosk, and then sat at the feet of Allen Ginsberg for $3. And I was writing the journal, and this was the first introduction to the poetry that resonated in hearing it. 

The next night we did the same in Sewer, Lawrence Phil and Getty. And then the next night, I went in, I think alone, because there were 10 lead poets, Kate Llewellyn, John Griffin, Richard Tibbing, Andrew Taylor, John Peter Horsham, Steve Evans, John Bray, and then Professor Brian Medlin. And I was a 17-year-old kid, still in school uniform, and Brian Medlin got to be the lecturer from the university, neck to knee in Denham, with a pair of brown cowboy boots. He had this long mane of black hair and this beard, and to a 17-year-old, under the old high school year 12, he was pretty cool.

He had rolled a cigarette earlier, started reading his poems, put the cigarette in his mouth, reached into his boot, had one of the first cricket lighters ever seen, lit the cigarette, inhaled it, and blew out the next line in the smoke. And I thought, how cool is that? I grew up in a family of smokers. My grandfather lived with us for 18 years. He smoked a pipe. Mum smoked and my father smoked. My parents went out a lot playing cards three nights a week. I nicked a few of the old man's cigarettes. I didn't have a pair of brown cowboy boots, so I put on a long pair of socks and stuck one of Dad's cigarettes in the sock. 

I got out my journal and my parents were out. My grandfather was in the top room watching TV. And in my bedroom, I was reading this journal in that declamatory style, lent down, put the cigarette in my mouth, fumbled with the matches, finally lit the cigarette and blew out the next couple of lines of the journal with the cigarette, trying to emulate Professor Brian Medlin.

Speaker 2 09:49

That's a wonderful story. I remember Professor Brian Medlin from my student days as well. Quite an extraordinary character. Rory, would you read one of your poems for us?

Speaker 3 10:02

I read this the other night when I met you, Kate, at the... reading. For Louisa....

On the day you died, the school siren didn't ring. The grass on the oval stopped growing and grief was handed around in whispers. On the day you died, silence became its own language. The telephone stopped ringing. The day's letters remained unanswered. On the day you died, teachers set their students in circles and read to them. A thickness of breath caught in a net of throats. The children were strangely quiet. A cloud covered the sun. On the day you died, we gripped more tightly to our children as we collected them, their heads in our laps with our fears. And on the day you died, we held hands all the way home.

Speaker 2 10:57

It's very beautiful and a very moving poem, and I remember from what you said previously when we were talking that it's based on a very personal experience as well.

Speaker 3 11:11

Well, I put those pieces into the efficacy of the poem. I was collecting my own kids from after-school care, and this girl Louisa was a student of the school for many years, and had been revealed to the community that she had leukemia, and her time in the school and her time on Earth was limited. And the day she died, I'd run in to get my own kids, and the staff were out in the quadrangle, taking the parents and caregivers aside to tell them about Louisa's death. Okay, you're right, the poem, but the first place it was published was in the school's newsletter.

And at the time, this poem's 30 odd years old. And 30 odd years ago, I was concerned with getting poems into the venues where they're going to work. Okay, the poem got into a school anthology that's lovely, but for it to get into the school's newsletter, the week after Louisa's death, means the poem has got more grant and got more currency as a response to a tragedy for an audience that shared that young girl's life.

Speaker 2 12:27

It's a very powerful gift that you've given to that community as well. Rory, we mentioned in the introduction that you have several volumes of poetry. One of the earliest ones over the outro was published by Friendly Street Poets back in 1982. Your poems still appear through Friendly Street, for example in their Poem of the Month series. Would you tell us about how you first became involved in Friendly Street and what this collective has meant to you over the years?

Speaker 3 13:00

Way way back after the first year of Friendly Street. I wasn't there for that first year. I was working on a forest in Mount Burr and then later on a cousin's a fruit block in just out of Caddell and I picked up the... in those days was the broadsheet appetiser with a review of the Friendly Street number one and it had a lot of those writers that I'd seen in 72 as a young school kid at that festival of arts in the focus festival, and I kept the journal. I'd been writing poems. I was cutting up extracts in the journal to sustain poems so I had lots and lots of sheets of paper and lots of books from from the journaling and writing.

So I came down to Adelaide on the Tuesday of the month in those days, and this was the late 70s and I showed up to read and I showed up on the same night the first night that Peter Galsworthy showed up on, and we sort of became instant mates because we hadn't been there before and whatever and I've been going to Friendly Street on and off for the last 40 odd years. The last anthology was published recently. I think it's number 46 and without sounding like a dinosaur I've got a poem in every one so it's the last 45 of them except the first one and I tell that with my legs crossed because it says there's much about the obsessiveness that you're gonna want.

Speaker 3 14:41

You do it twice, you do it three times and men and women of a certain age if they're obsessive enough want to do it 13 times or 14 times, and it's a private joke rather than a than a batch of iron... but Friendly Street was important because... they got poetry out of the Napier building at Adelaide University, although Andrew Taylor and Ian Reid and Richard Tipping - the first two were connected with the University of the English Department, Richard wasn't - but it was important to get poetry into a community centre like the Box Factory, and it's only ever moved twice every now and again, there's been a renovation of the Box Factory and the the longest time it was moved almost semi -permanently was to South Strand writer's centre in Rundle Street in the Malcolm Reed building, but when that was renovated it went back to the Box factory.

And so that's, its heart, it's now upstairs and not downstairs, you can't smoke, you can't bring in grog anymore, it's changed significantly, and the age has changed significantly and the time starting's changed significantly and the behaviour's changed significantly... and years ago on... we've had them on the ABC, some of the geiatrics did a show on it and about the history of Friendly Street, and way back then it was male-dominated, not that there weren't women writing and publishing but it was the late, middle late 70s early 80s. And it was vital and it was... everyone who wrote a poem in Adelaide in that time knew that the first Tuesday at each month at eight o 'clock you could go to the Box Factory in [?] street and read a poem, and it's still going 40 odd years later.

Speaker 2 16:45

It is. I think the night has changed. I don't think it's the first Tuesday. It's the Monday. It's the Monday, isn't it? And they do have the Poem of the Month. And I think you had one. 2022, you had a Poem of the Month.

Speaker 3 16:59

[?...] that each new mafia has its own protocols, and whatever you... and it's brilliant that it's still going in, but back in the long ago we didn't have Poet of the Month, that's a recent thing going on, and that that adds a community flavor to it, and you can't expect it to run like it did. What happened, one night only six months ago one of the writers who was there way way back showed up with I think number seven and they've done the reading, now it's just an open mic, two sessions, they get through about 40 parts which is lovely in a previous construction we'd have a guest reader and then an open section for the thing the survivors got a change...

Anyway this woman got up and we had a poem she'd written that got published in number seven and then I didn't it early and I put my hand up and asked if we had permission for the people who were there who were in number seven to read and a few of us were still there you know but I said, I want to do two things: I want these people to hear these poems because a lot of those people went there, number seven, the other thing I wanted to do was read out the contributors because three-quarters of them had died.

Speaker 2 18:25

Oh wow.

Speaker 3 18:26

So it's now number 46, that's 39 years ago, and that was a powerful testament and the point I was trying to make is we're on the memory of giants. The world didn't begin that night when we were born in the Friendly Street that... there was a legacy going way, way, way, way back.

Speaker 2 18:51

What a wonderful tribute, and a wonderful way to show stewardship of such an important cultural heritage of Adelaide, of South Australia that is Friendly Street. That's fantastic. 

On Vision Australia Radio you're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is the poet and teacher, Rory Harris. Rory, I first read four of your poems back in 1986 when they were included in the anthology of South Australian poetry titled The Orange Tree. One of those poems, Local Boat, Yasawa Islands, ends with the lines, We return to our sleep, curl into the contours of our bodies, wait for the next interlude, wait for our destination to appear before us. Those in our silences resting in each other's language. 

I love that phrase, resting in each other's language. It's a beautiful way to describe an intimate understanding between two people. The Yasawa Islands are in the South Pacific and one of the online bios tells us that you were a teaching headmaster in the Solomon Islands in 1990 and during your time there you wrote radio plays that were translated into Solomon Island Pidgin and broadcast on national radio there. Would you tell us about your experiences in the Solomon Islands and about working with a translator on your radio plays for broadcast?

Speaker 3 20:36

My wife and I and the two daughters were over there for a year, we were volunteers with a local top-up salary, as you did... and I met Fuji who was a Japanese volunteer, and his brief with the Japanese writers were to write a series of plays teaching everything from hygiene to the importance of this or that regarding behaviour in schools, pitched at kids... and the Solomons has a huge radio setup - because this was 1990, so the internet and stuff wasn't like it was today and mobile phones weren't around etc, so radio was really important as an educated thing and as an information thing - and I don't know how we met, but we met in the small expat community. 

And I'd written some poems about the Solomons and he asked me to write these, and it had to be about two or three minutes, and they were just voice plays teaching a particular thing or a parable or a fable with a lesson at the end of it, like it's a great, yeah, after you get it to wash your hands, it's a good idea to wash your hands before you have a meal... and so we knocked these things out, and he spoke better Solomons Island Pidgin than I did, and the Pidgin was banned in the school, he had Solomons Island the actors doing these pieces, there might have been about 10 in the show and I think I might have contributed three or four of those over that that year with them but the Ysera Islands was... that's in Fiji, and that was my first time overseas.

So, and I spent three months up there in about '83 or '82, and it was now the first time being abroad, and you just breathe in stuff and write stuff, and that's sweet. They're old poems now, but that was a young writer responding to a, you know, what I did on my holiday for three months.

Speaker 2 22:53

Well, they're lovely poems. Rory, what was it that first drew you to teaching as a profession?

Speaker 3 23:02

I came in the back door to teaching. I had a shocking year 12 result and I did a whole lot of jobs for years after that. In about 1978 I got a phone call from a very good friend called Peter McFarlane. He was the special head of English at Brighton High and he published some of my early poems, in opinion the Sarsarang and Nistiges journal, and said, come to my school, read your poems, and I think I might have read... they were done three or four readings to three or four levels, you know, year eights, nines, tens, that sort of stuff. And I went well, and Peter said, I've, come back in a couple of weeks and read to the other year levels. So I did. 

And then he said, come in and take two classes. And so I took the two classes to write. Now, I read, they wrote, they responded, they read their stuff. And before we knew it, they're all these poems. And I think an English teacher on the staff put up the 100 or 200 dollars to get them typed up, photocopied, and Pat, an art teacher on the staff, she did one of those beautiful lino prints, black and white covers, and we produced 100 copies of this book called Voices from the Beacon. And the kids got a free copy if they had a poem in it. And Matt gave me a few copies. And he started introducing me to other teachers and other academics and some big heroes, someone like Garth Boomer in the education department, and said, you can start getting funded for this.

Now, we're talking late 70s. And so using the currency of those early photocopy books or offset printed books, you wrote your submissions. Sometimes you got some funding, sometimes you didn't. And I got lucky early with a couple of literature board grants to do tours of schools on my terms. And when you're starting out, you're getting paid for performing in schools and reading in schools, because your tentative to that was those periods of time when before the funding came in, I was charging $50 a week to work in the school. The dole was $50 a week. So got you off the dole. You're making money as a poet. And that was cool. So you you're living pretty cheaply or coming in and out of home all the time. 

But you were doing it as a as a practicing poet, which sounds incredibly wanky now. But in 1978, that was pretty cool. So you stopped doing that, you've collected a few of these photocopy books, you start getting funding, and then it's just rolls along. I think the worst I did was 21 schools in 23 days or something. Because you just can't stay in one school to get funding, you got to do your tours and what have you. And after a decade, that's really, really hard to sustain. So then I thought if I'm going to be fair dinkum, then I also had this political push that most people can get an act up and go into a school and make a lot of noise and get 50 bucks a week. But if you're going to talk about authentic and genuine change, you got to hang around. 

So in '84 I enrolled in a Bachelor of Education at Salisbury and stood to the poetry in schools, but finished the degree in the four years to become a registered teacher. And there was an interesting tension. A lot of the Bolsheviks in town at the time thought I was selling out to become a teacher. And I was trying to make the point, I want to get a house, I want to raise a family, I want better buy stuff, because the life on funding from the lipboard or arts essay, as it is now with the Australian Schools Commission, you don't always get it. So in those gaps, what are you going to do? And if you've only got two subjects in year 12, there's not much you can do with that.

Speaker 2 27:36

That sounds brilliant. Thank you so much, Rory. I'm really enjoying our conversation. So let's continue with the next part in our program next week. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was the poet and teacher 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 vairadio.org for more.

Speaker 2 28:32

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