ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Jack Thompson is determined to keep alive Australia's voices of the bush. And he is having some success. The actor has just recorded his first DVD of bush poetry after his readings on CD sold more than 50,000 copies.

Speaking from the Darwin Festival last week, where he gave a reading, he said: ''I was floored when they told me. Within two months of the release of the bush poems of Banjo Paterson it was in the top-selling CDs in Australia - that's all music, that's rock 'n' roll, classical and everything. Eat your heart out, Gaga. Look out Gaga, here comes Banjo Paterson.''

Thompson, 70, is a familiar hand whose films include The Man From Snowy River and Baz Lurhmann's Australia, but he admits to some apprehension when recording his DVD. ''I was a bit nervous at first but it was great because, as any actor knows, being live is the actor's medium because you get this wonderful response from the audience - at least you hope you do. And we did - they laughed, there were 'oohs' and 'aahs'.''

He is confident the works of Paterson and Henry Lawson will survive. ''I don't think there's any doubt they can - it's a bit like some music, it just carries on. It still has the same appeal. If you bring these poems to life, and they do come to life when they are read aloud because they were initially meant to be read aloud, I think they survive the changes of fashion of generations very well.''
He is often affected by the emotion in some of the poems written almost a century ago.

''There is a Lawson that really got to me - it's called After All and it is a poem that he wrote when he was about 28 to try and persuade his fiancee, Bertha, to marry him. There is something about it, this very shy young man and troubled young man that Lawson was. He was profoundly deaf from the age of 14. His reassurance to this young woman, he felt that life was after all worth living. It's a really beautiful piece.''