In the 1990's, Jim Haynes spent much of his time up around Tamworth putting on and/or being involved in a number of bush verse events. He built up quite a group of bush poets who would get together and travel around Country and Music and Folk Music Festivals. You may have seen Blue the Shearer, Frank Daniel, John Philipson, Gertrude Skinner and Bob Miller all like Jim, bush poets and most of them, folk comedians with a good sense of humour. Bob Miller is definitely in that class and both he and Frank Daniel have found it quite easy to turn their verse into yarns, though Bob has quite a few in his repertoire anyway. Bob's from Mungar in Queensland and not surprisingly this story is about Queensland.
Bob Miller:
 “Last year, a whole batch of us performed up at Gympie, The Gympie Muster. It's like Tamworth in Queensland. There's 55,000 people go there for four days. We all camp out on this big property. It's just an unreal feeling. You all camp there, everyone's on-site and there's non-stop entertainment.
It's all been Country and Western until this year, when the poets hit town and we pulled over 3,000 people at 9 o'clock in the morning and I think 2, 900 wrote into the festival committee and told them about it. So we're going to be bigger and better next year which is great! Do the same if you like what we do. Write in and tell the boss!
Anyhow, when we left The Muster, we decided that eight of us were going to do a tour and we went to the Birdsville Races. Now if you've never been to Birdsville on Race Day, you haven't lived! It's an institution! It's something you've gotta do once in your life! If you go to America, you've gotta see the Niagra Falls or the Grand Canyon, well here you've gotta go to the Birdsville Races!
Well we lobbed in there and there's just the one pub in town! The population is 92! Now Birdsville's in the Diamantena Shire. There are only three towns in this Shire. There's Birdsville with 92 people, Bedouri's got 65 and Betouta has got one! So I performed to the entire audience of the town! Every single person, Simon! And he doesn't speak English! He's Polish! He was the only one there. He owns the pub at Betouta. It's about 300ks either side of Birdsville, nothing, just dirt roads, you wouldn't believe it, Fair Dinkum!
So we got to Birdsville, and being as how we don't mind just the odd little drop, we took a trailer load of XXXX just to last us a couple of days, y'know. And we got to know Dave, the publican at Birdsville. He told us that in those four days, he sold 91,000 cans of beer. You can't buy bottles anywhere at Race Time. It's a great idea!
 But then at 6 o'clock in the morning, we're laying in the tent and “ooff, bang, crash” we hear this roar and rumble and it's a bloody bob-cat running up the street scoopin' up cans and tipping them into a truck! It's just incredible. You wouldn't believe the noise. It's just running up the street “roar, crash, crunch” into the truck, big loads of cans!
We couldn't get to the pub, of course. There's a five hundred people circle around the pub at all times. We never made it to the bar! But the really interesting part of the story, I was going to tell you, was that we went to Big Red. Now Big Red is a sandhill. It's the biggest sandhill in Australia they claim. And all the local four wheel drivers and
Ya-hooers get up there trying to drive to the top of this Big Red. We took Johnny Major with us. Now he's a great photographer as well as a bush poet and he's “snap, snap, snap”, taking photos up and down this big sandhill and we were wrecked and we want to get back and get into another carton. Drive the dust out of your throat, so to speak! So, we come down off the bottom of this sandhill and we're all there and down the bottom is all windswept and there are these little pinnacles sticking up and I said to John, “Look here, take a photo of that, John” and I leaned over. Now, we're right on the edge of the Simpson Desert. It's the most desolate part of Australia you've ever seen and I leaned over and showed John this pinnacle, sticking up and a two-dollar bloody coin sitting on the top of it! All the top of it was beat up and scratched and they all reckoned that I'd put it there and they said, “You can't do that! You don't just find those things! Well here it is in the middle of the Simpson Desert and I find this two-dollar coin sitting on the top of a sandy pinnacle! What a great thing to do!”
|
Bob Miller, the bush poet, with a real life yarn that happened to him. Which proves the point that we've all got a story or two to tell. They are usually out of our memory, of something that happened to us or something that happened to a friend and of course they are usually the odd and the unexpected.
Incidentally, Bob Miller's got several books out, which he's published himself. He's very funny and a good bush poet. So, if you get the chance to see him live, go and have a listen. He's worth it.
|
