Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy of the Overflow"

Subject: Just on Spec, addressed as follows, Clancy of the Overflow.

It always seems more than a little sad that the youth of today shy away from history and the poetry which describes part of that history and the character of the men and women who lived in those times.

In England the plays of Shakespeare and the poems by many household names were once on the lips of many young people who had learnt them for their GC exams or by people like myself who read and listened to their parents and their interests.

I have written about the music, the opera and the symphony music, the dance band music and the crooners who sang of unrequited love. The Jazz and Blues were for me to discover supported with folk songs which tied into the life of certain communities.

The poem was made real to me through the recitation my Dad used to give, his choice both traditional and scenic were written in an age when nationhood was not despised and when our heroes were often winners on some far flung battlefield.

'The Burial of Sir John Moor at the battle of Corunna' by Charles Wolfe or 'the Brook' by Tennyson. Greys Elegy and its somber remembrance of young men who went off to fight and never returned. Moving poems that can be taken off the shelf at any time and enjoyed for their moving metre, a sort of hypnotic incantation, building images and raising  emotion.

One such poem 'The man from Snowy River' was drawn to my attention by a young Australian women who was just as fervent in her love for Australia and its history. Banjo Paterson was her Wordsworth, a poet who defined the Outback just as Wordsworth had defined the English countryside.

In the man from Snowy River we are taken for a suicide race down the mountain side in the Snowy River area near Kosciusko, trying to round up a horse which had escaped and joined the wild horses. The character of the stock men and the horses they rode depicts beautifully the frontiersman spirit of the country in those days. 

Another poem of Patterson, 'Clancy of the Overflow' was another attempt to dignify and make real the life of the Drover.

"I had written him a letter for which I had for the want of better knowledge sent to where I met him down the Lachlan years ago. He was shearing when I knew him so I sent the letter to him, Just on Spec, addressed as follows, Clancy of the Overflow".

These lines prompt one back to another age when people had the time to enjoy and reflect on lives outside their own experience.

The suicidal dash these days is the commute on the tube between Liverpool St and The Bank. Down in the smelly depths of the tunnels running under London where the concept of life is so different.
Then fast the horsemen followed where the gorges deep and black

 Resounded to the thunder of their tread,

And the stock-whips woke the echo's and they fiercely answered back 

From the cliffs and crags that beetled overhead.

And upward ever upward, the wild horse held their way

Where mountain ash and the kurragong grew wide

And the old man muttered fiercely "we may bid the mob good day"

No man could hold them down the other side.

The issue is "do they (the young) want to listen" or is their persona so captured in the artificiality of the internet, that historical reality, how ever dramatised, is deemed worthless.