Help for croc & Glenny?
Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2013 8:36 pm
This is a bitter sweet post I’m afraid. Our good mate croc is in the fairly advanced stages of the incurable Motor Neurone Disease; a mongrel of a thing that slowly munches away all of your muscles. On the up side, it allows your cognitive processes to stay fully functioning, so you do keep all of your marbles. At this stage croc is still walking…& talking, albeit with somewhat slurred speech. (Just pretend he’s tanked.)
The reason for this post is to firstly advise all of our good mates of croc’s misfortune, but to also ask for your help. I was chatting to Irene, & remarked that our dream of establishing a bonza bush poetry venue on our adjoining block was now unreachable. Irene saw it as otherwise & encouraged me to send out an SOS to our poetry mates. ‘‘Why not have a ‘working bee?’ Glenny’’ she said. ‘‘Ask our mates on the site.’’
Well, I thought that was a nice thought, but was so caught up in wrangling with the medical system for h e l p!! & endless paperwork etc that I didn’t give it enough further thought. And then Mal McLean visited us, & said… he would come! (Bless him.) So now my creativity has kicked in well & truly, (& I think the idea has sparked croc up…would give him something to keep living for, something he can feel involved in, something to look forward to… away from his recliner chair…where he is right put out that he can’t head for the bush fire disasters to chip in.) Here are my ideas.
Try to establish an inaugural poetry event in croc’s honour. Maybe ‘‘The Reptilian Writer’s Award’’(?) Yeah. That’s crook. So get thinking for me. I’ll seek funding for a written comp only, for this first year. After we have exhausted you from the working bee, we’ll have a bang up barbie with all comers to take the stage. No performance comp…no pressure…just a bunch of mad poets airing ‘their wares’ & having a great time together. Don’t matter a fig if you’re a seasoned performer or a newbie; we’ll love the lot of you. If enough poets do agree to come along, I’ll hit the local bush telegraph saying ‘The poets are coming to town!! If you want to enjoy their antics…you gotta chip in!!’’ I’ll see if our local bakery (which is the only wood fired one in Oz, to my knowledge) will help to cater, but you’ll haveta bring your own booze.
I will try to compile croc’s poems into a book, so we can have a book launch as well. Thanks to Frank Daniel hauling them out of his archives, (bless him) I have collected quite a few. It may only be a booklet for this year, but in the future I hope to expand it with some of croc's hilarious rants as well. If any poets will contribute a little of their product I could organise a raffle & door prize, hopefully including other ‘stuff’ from our very generous community.
There is top notch free camping down at our gorgeous Dawson River, with amenities, only 5 minutes from home here. (where parking is plentiful.) For further adventuring we have the incredible ‘‘Isla Gorge’’ nearby, & only a half hour away is the semi ghost town of Cracow, where Fred Brophy (tent boxing king) has his amaaazing country pub, & the old gold mine has been re-established. (Nice camping there too.)
The area needing to be established as a bush poetry venue is only the back half of our adjoining vacant town block. It is heavily treed & highly fenced with massive bush sheds, & the antique caravan that I’d like to paint up all gypsy like, for the ‘green room’, with a little platform attached for ‘the stage.’ (I already have a yellow ‘‘ Danger’’ sign I got from the dump, to hang above the performer’s heads.) So it is only a relatively small area needing a good clean out, & ultimately a set of gates. (And a bobcat bloke owes me a day so I’ll hook him into it.) It will probably be a pretty shaky & unusual start to an ongoing poetry event…but you gotta start somewhere, eh? I think that any future events here would be very well attended as this community is extremely friendly & supportive of all events. I was thinking that probably around April would be the time to hold this ‘event’, when the weather is cooler?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Warm Regards to you all…our unique mates.
Glenny
The reason for this post is to firstly advise all of our good mates of croc’s misfortune, but to also ask for your help. I was chatting to Irene, & remarked that our dream of establishing a bonza bush poetry venue on our adjoining block was now unreachable. Irene saw it as otherwise & encouraged me to send out an SOS to our poetry mates. ‘‘Why not have a ‘working bee?’ Glenny’’ she said. ‘‘Ask our mates on the site.’’
Well, I thought that was a nice thought, but was so caught up in wrangling with the medical system for h e l p!! & endless paperwork etc that I didn’t give it enough further thought. And then Mal McLean visited us, & said… he would come! (Bless him.) So now my creativity has kicked in well & truly, (& I think the idea has sparked croc up…would give him something to keep living for, something he can feel involved in, something to look forward to… away from his recliner chair…where he is right put out that he can’t head for the bush fire disasters to chip in.) Here are my ideas.
Try to establish an inaugural poetry event in croc’s honour. Maybe ‘‘The Reptilian Writer’s Award’’(?) Yeah. That’s crook. So get thinking for me. I’ll seek funding for a written comp only, for this first year. After we have exhausted you from the working bee, we’ll have a bang up barbie with all comers to take the stage. No performance comp…no pressure…just a bunch of mad poets airing ‘their wares’ & having a great time together. Don’t matter a fig if you’re a seasoned performer or a newbie; we’ll love the lot of you. If enough poets do agree to come along, I’ll hit the local bush telegraph saying ‘The poets are coming to town!! If you want to enjoy their antics…you gotta chip in!!’’ I’ll see if our local bakery (which is the only wood fired one in Oz, to my knowledge) will help to cater, but you’ll haveta bring your own booze.
I will try to compile croc’s poems into a book, so we can have a book launch as well. Thanks to Frank Daniel hauling them out of his archives, (bless him) I have collected quite a few. It may only be a booklet for this year, but in the future I hope to expand it with some of croc's hilarious rants as well. If any poets will contribute a little of their product I could organise a raffle & door prize, hopefully including other ‘stuff’ from our very generous community.
There is top notch free camping down at our gorgeous Dawson River, with amenities, only 5 minutes from home here. (where parking is plentiful.) For further adventuring we have the incredible ‘‘Isla Gorge’’ nearby, & only a half hour away is the semi ghost town of Cracow, where Fred Brophy (tent boxing king) has his amaaazing country pub, & the old gold mine has been re-established. (Nice camping there too.)
The area needing to be established as a bush poetry venue is only the back half of our adjoining vacant town block. It is heavily treed & highly fenced with massive bush sheds, & the antique caravan that I’d like to paint up all gypsy like, for the ‘green room’, with a little platform attached for ‘the stage.’ (I already have a yellow ‘‘ Danger’’ sign I got from the dump, to hang above the performer’s heads.) So it is only a relatively small area needing a good clean out, & ultimately a set of gates. (And a bobcat bloke owes me a day so I’ll hook him into it.) It will probably be a pretty shaky & unusual start to an ongoing poetry event…but you gotta start somewhere, eh? I think that any future events here would be very well attended as this community is extremely friendly & supportive of all events. I was thinking that probably around April would be the time to hold this ‘event’, when the weather is cooler?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Warm Regards to you all…our unique mates.
Glenny
I am in the middle of getting settled with casual rosters for two positions, so it was all too hard!!
)
)Thank you love & good luck in Tamworth. xx