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Article Excerpt
In the early 1990s I reluctantly accompanied my mother to an Australian folk music concert at a local RSL. Unusual for someone of her generation whose LP collection favoured crooners such as Al Martino and Barry Crocker, she was keen to hear the Bushwhackers live--perhaps it had something to do with leaving Coonabarabran at an impressionable age. When I found out that the warm-up act was Leonard Teale reciting poems by 'Banjo' Paterson my disaffection was complete. Yet Teale proved mesmerising, especially in that most over-exposed of all bush ballads, 'The man from Snowy River'. He held us with his glittering eye, and for five minutes I was as one with the club audience following that famous stripling on his small and weedy beast as 'he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed'. The metaphorical union of man and horse with landscape sang to me as never before.
Given the endurance of bush poetry festivals, and the occasional popularity of contemporary spoken word and performance poetry, clearly there is still an audience willing to be moved by live verse in Australia, but it's a minority taste. These days even an act such as Teale's is rare. Outside of tiny urban folk clubs, bush poetry is a distinctly regional phenomenon. Performance poetry, on the other hand, despite its often populist ambitions, is typically the reserve of inner-city cliques. In the 1920s, however, Australians were reciting verse all over the place--so much so that the humorist 'Kodak' O'Ferrall lampooned them:
Way out in the suburbs howls the wild Reciter, Storming like a general, bragging like a blighter; He would shame hyenas slinking in their dens As he roars at peaceful folk whose joy is keeping hens. 'How We Beat the Favourite,' 'Lasca,' 'Gunga Din,' There they sit and tremble as he rubs it in. When he's done they thank him! Never do they rise, Tie his hands and gag him as he rolls his eyes, Bag his head and bear him swiftly through the night. That's the only remedy for villains who recite. (1)
Here, from the modern, metropolitan perspective of the professional writer, the reciter is an outlandish form of Homo suburbiensis. An amateur with half-baked literary taste, his choice of party pieces is quaintly Victorian, comprising narrative ballads from Adam Lindsay Gordon to Rudyard Kipling, and including 'Lasca' by the Englishman Frank Desprez, in which a Texan cowboy laments the death of his Mexican sweetheart in a cattle stampede.
To serve this market, a range of 'reciters'--anthologies of poems and other texts for performance--were in constant publication until the middle of the twentieth century. Kingsley Amis in his introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter of 1978--a nostalgic collection, and among the very last of its kind--observed:
When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War, the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting. If they were not in one anthology they were in a couple of others; they were learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings; they were sung in church or chapel or on other public occasions. (2)
Kodak's satirical portrait, too, suggests that recitation drew upon a popular canon of frequently heard poems. Hardly surprising, therefore, that, as his star began to wane, the wild reciter could be mistaken for the last vestige of an age-old folk art--especially when the cultural forces which sustained him also fell into disfavour.
Recitation, based on a printed source, can in this way feed the invention of folklore. In their quest for an imagined community unmediated by commercial mass entertainment, folklorists are keen to assert a continuity in 'living' popular traditions, emphasising historical links between pre-modern and industrial cultures in ways that often override significant ruptures. For this reason, Australian folklorists' accounts of recitation can be vague, to say the least. Keith McKenry defines recitation in the Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore as: 'the art of performing verse from memory. A highly developed and widely practised folk art in Australia, it is not to be confused with mere verse reading' (3) (emphasis in original).
Fellow folk scholar Hugh Anderson observes that McKenry's is 'a comprehensive, but nevertheless not really adequate statement on the subject', (4) presumably because it rests entirely on the presence or absence of a written text. Yet Anderson does little to improve on it. 'Reciting ... must never be confused with elocution or simple memorisation,' he writes, 'and should properly be called a monologue performance, although the words have been long weighed down by preconceived notions of what performance means'. (5) If Anderson's clarification was confusing enough, he later concedes, 'How do you separate bush verse, or performance poetry, or oral monologues, or whatever, one from another?' (6)
McKenry's account reveals an uncertainty about the status of the written text: while recitation can be learned from a book it must not be read aloud. Anderson wants to ditch 'simple memorisation' (whatever that is) as a defining feature, yet much of his article is a survey of Australian reciter books. In each case, the actual role of literacy is elided, perhaps because it might throw into question the legitimacy of recitation as a folk art.
This essay traces the rise and fall of the wild reciter in Australia. In doing so it takes recitation to refer to the memorisation and public performance of printed verse not written by the performer, including the work of high literary authors, but especially that of more popular poets, and even stage entertainers. Performers might also include in their repertoire a range of prose highlights and dramatic character sketches, but it's evident that rhyming verse in a variety of traditional metres was favoured, and this will be the focus here.
Analysis of the historical sources of recitation offers not merely a nostalgic glimpse into one of the lost arts of everyday life in Australia, but also sheds light on some of the ways in which poetry was mobilised by modern popular culture and the new technologies which served it. What follows revisits the broader cultural context in which recitation flourished, outlining three factors which led to its enormous popularity: the growth and spread of elocution, the institutionalisation of recitation in schools, and its professionalisation as a performance art. As the last two are substantially a consequence of the first, elocution will be thematic in this account. Indeed, the fate of recitation was inextricably tied to that of elocution--as we shall see by way of conclusion. Only by overlooking that fact can it be made into folklore.
Will Yer Write It Down for Me?
As a spoken performative practice recitation would seem to have a straightforward relationship to orality and therefore to folk culture. Yet, while recitation may have vicariously become a folk art, it has a relatively recent history that can be traced to the development of mass literacy from the end of the eighteenth century...
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