The
Silver Tongued Ferals ------What
hinges people to poetry in the
Australian outback mining town of Broken
Hill, a thousand kilometres west of Sydney? The environment is harsh;
the living laidback in the face of drought and diminishing industry.
However there is a definite list towards every art form, miners turned
professional artists like the internationally acclaimed Pro Hart and
Jack Absalom, sculptors, photographers, potters, quilters and poets all
living in their own isolation.
------A group of
feral poets began
performing at various community gatherings. A core emerged that took
poetry to a two hour professional show titled Verse
and
Worse.
The strength of the performance is the diversity of
voices, genre and presentation.
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-----As
the only female member of
the group the guys accept (teasingly) that I am the silver
tongued and they are the ferals. We
scribble,
compose and recite, to communicate beyond conventional communication.
We scratch beauty from the mining residue that surges through our town;
black mountainous piles follow the ore body of lead, zinc and silver
that once gave Broken Hill the distinction of having the richest lode
in the world.
------We
tell our souls through verse.
Sometimes we ignore our environment; write about oceans, rain forests,
skyscrapers and city life, but in the end we are pulled back to arid
landscape so raw it tantalises every creative image, every intangible
feeling. |
------As
performers we take our poetry to the locals and
tourists alike, feed them the lyrical, the amusing, the melancholy, the
outrageous. Our stage is sometimes glamorous, more often basic,
improvised from beer crates and wool bales; our theatre, a tin shed in
a caravan park, a country pub, a tourist bus or under a gum
tree.
But the response is always the same. People listen. They smile, cry,
break into raucous laughter and often question the validity of the
word, the phrase, the sentiment.
------Many leave
with a new
understanding of poetry. There is an outpouring of contemporary
Australian verse that links the rural to the urban, a social structure
wherein the literary voice is an essential part.
------Over the
last
couple of years the publishing arm of Silver
Tongued Ferals
Inc. (a non
profit organisation) has produced a dozen books for
members of the literary community. A service offered to further the
written word in all its forms and composition.
------So why do
we
write poetry? Why do we perform it? Not for the accolades, definitely
not for any monetary gain. Each one of us has their own reckoning, for
me it is a cleansing one day, a fire that must be fed the next. We all
leave indelible traces, fragments of immortality in the red desert sand.
Barbara
De Franceschi
seraph10@bigpond.com
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