I'd call this a little album,. Max. Do we all it historical comedy?
Neat.
Doug
On 14-Jun-05, at 7:19 PM, cooee wrote:
> Shamrocks in the Bush (4 June '05)
>
> If you have a spare day in Canberra, get Jeff to pick you up, and take
> you
> west past Yass, with his books at your elbow - local histories and the
> poems
> of Banjo Paterson.
> ‘How Gilbert Died’ needs to be recited as you approach the old police
> horse
> paddock where Gilbert’s grave is marked with white stones and a legend.
> He was one of the bushrangers in Ben Hall’s mob, and of course he was
> betrayed...
> Every child on the Watershed can tell you how Gilbert died.
> While you stand about impressed and perplexed, Jeff from behind a tree
> tootles a sad old Irish melody on his wooden fife (carved from a mulga
> stump
> from some local shearing shed by his friend Terry McGee).
> At Binalong we recommend the Devonshire teas at the Old Royal
> Guesthouse,
> Bookshop and Café.
> Nearby is Galong Castle, built by an Irish ex-convict called Ryan.
> Transported from Tipperary for helping burn a barracks or something,
> he did
> well with sheep, and at his death owned more land than all of
> Tipperary.
> The Catholics have added a brick college to his castle, and the
> resident
> priest said we were welcome to look round.
> We skipped the long walk to the shrine dedicated to a French saint.
> We drove to the next hill where the graveyard sits beside a derelict
> rail
> line.
> Enclosed on all four sides by a stone wall, Ryans and Corcorans (also
> from
> Tipperary) compete for posthumous dignity with tall marble angels by
> Rosconi, for long the region’s top monumental mason.
> The regular excursion of the annual ‘Shamrock in the Bush’ historical
> conference culminates here.
> Jeff from behind a monument tootles a sad old Irish melody on his
> wooden
> fife (which he’s also played in Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, he
> mentions),
> while the Irish-Australian historians watch the sun go down behind the
> angels and the grazing sheep and the far hill.
> Further on, at Boorowra, a spacious town with 42 historic features and
> three
> ‘Shamrock Trails’, the old St Patrick’s Catholic Church of 1855 is
> notable
> for Good Friday 1865 when ‘a portion of the ceiling fell on
> worshippers’.
> The second St Patrick’s (1877) has windows from Ireland depicting
> saints
> Patrick, Bridget and Columbia, and Daniel O’Connell the Liberator.
> Without Jeff we would have experienced none of this.
>
> Wednesday 15 June 2005
>
> Max Richards, Melbourne
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
I can always
go back to
fertilization,
kimonos, wrap-
arounds and
diatribes.
Lorine Niedecker
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