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My
inspiration for taking on writing bush
poetry began with my love of Australian
history and folk lore and in my thirties
I undertook the task of tracking down my
mum's family the Callaghans. As my
mum's dad died in 1940 at the age of
thirty six, he left my grandmother with
four little girls under the age of
eight. My grandmother remarried,
so over the years contact with my
grandfather's family waned. The
task of finding them all took some eight
years, but proved to be very rewarding
and built up in me a deep respect for
all those early pioneers. Since
then, I have also researched the Sewell,
Marquard, McDonald and Webster
families.
There
were so many wonderful stories related
to me and I felt there had to be some
way I could keep them alive. I began to
listen to the larrikin bush yarns and
poetry of Keith Garvey and thought,
"That's it!"
and began to write my
first poems, which became the contents
of my first book, 'Tales of Uncle
Jim'. Since then I have written a
collection of eight books and it
has been my goal to keep alive our
wonderful heritage, the Aussie character
and the Aussie bush humour,
recording in narrative rhyming verse, or
bush ballad, and not only recording it
on paper, but on albums and also live
performances, which, I feel, bring the
stories alive. Today, I am one of
a number of bush poets, who in John Laws
words are ... keeping the dream
alive.
P.S.
I decided to take a page out of Stan
Coster's book and have taken the plunge
and begun singing my ballads as well.
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