Nature calling Don Watson as well as (Jozef Imrich and Eva Petrova ;-)

The point of language is to convey meaning.  Ideally, it should do so accurately.  Not  all  writers honour this ideal.  According to some of my sisters, such as Lidka,  Don almost invokes similar non fictional antipodean myth-making passages as those selected by her youngest brother in a Slavic folkloric and nature calling context ;-)

“Many idioms are seen, if they are tested by grammar or logic, to express badly,

and sometimes to express the reverse of, what they are nevertheless well

understood to mean. Good people point out the sin, and bad people, who are

more numerous, take little notice and go on committing it; then the good people

if they are foolish, get excited and talk of ignorance and solecisms, and are

laughed at as purists; or, if they are wise, say no more about it and wait ....”

"He strode, she swept.” The opening image of Don Watson’s maternal grandparents in The Bush is unforgettable...Son of a Florentine sculptor, the precocious Bernini, aged 20, set himself a modest challenge: Carve the human soul soul in marble »

Nothing could be better done than his description of that which he knows best –the home farm that was cut from the dominant Gippsland bush in living memory and swept clean daily by his maternal grandmother ready for his grandfather, to stride out upon, to complete its conquest. Watson covers all triumph and failure, and maps the territory of our continent with wry description and  a classless eye. On the whole, he skirts around the edges yet strikes at the very heart of what we like to think makes Australia great … a ‘freshness of spirit’ is a potent phrase.

Dave Gelly was amazed when he came across potent folkloric tunes:

"At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I found myself listening open-mouthed to a Russian woman playing the piano accordion while making wordless vocal sounds into a microphone. Her name was Evelina Petrova and the sounds varied from whoops and bird-like twitterings to a kind of demented lamentation. God knows what it was all about, but it had me transfixed."

What could sound less appealing than Russian accordion music?  I say imagine the devilish imp which sometimes runs around Stravinsky’s borrowings from Russian folk music, hook it up to an accordion, and pinch it repeatedly and irregularly.

Here is a good, descriptive review of her first album.  Here is her home page.  Here is a YouTube duet with piano, good but I prefer her solo.  Try this solo clip for her dirge side.  Here is another good (and more lively) solo clip.  Her CDs are on Amazon here, buy Living Water if you only get one


Myths and legends have a life of their own, because we need to believe
in the possibilities they offer. They don't die. Slovak view of the
world includes miracles and angels, beast-men and women of unearthly
beauty, gods walking among us and ceremonies that can end a drought.
All of these things are as ordinary to you as tractors, mountain
streams, and ice in the tropics. At the same time, the whole world is
enchanted, mysterious. Cars, mountain streams, and ice are all as
astonishing as angels. Slovak folkloric ceremonies are not unlike magic
painted by Leslie Marmon Silko in his novel Ceremony. There is a scene
in which a abandoned woman is dancing very angrily. Miles away, the man
who betrayed her is checking the commotion his cattle are making in the
night. Descriptions of the woman's heels stamping the floor are
alternated with descriptions of the cattle trampling the man to death,
back and forth from one to the other. No assertion of causality is
made, but the dancer's heels and the animals' hooves become linked so
powerfully that the reader doesn't just "get it." What's conveyed is
not a symbol or a metaphor, but the reality that a woman can be so
angry that when she dances, her lover dies ...

Don Watson with a Slavic looking sickel our grandfather in Pilhov had identical one!

Throughout Don Watson's writing life, spanning academic history, television comedy,  film writing, political speech-writing, plain language essays, biographical portraiture, and travel, nothing he has written quite matches the wonders of The Bush.
SMH reviews the Bush 

The Bush is the crown in Watson’s oeuvre, a magnificent, sprawling ode to the best in Australia, a challenge to us all to find new ways of loving the country

Don Watson with links

Orwell wrote:

“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline

and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it

were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting

out ink.”

Coda ... Deeply impressed as a teenager by John Kennedy’s feat in becoming the first Catholic US president, Keating felt that he too, as a Bankstown "tyke" (a description from Watson’s book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart), had a duty to outstare Protestant bigotry and become Prime Minister of Australia. A wary feeling of uniqueness resulted, with off putting effects in terms of an adversarial and aggressive personal style.

In the early 1930s, Patrick Leigh Fermor decided to go for a walk. With characteristic Irish enthusiasm he walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. His memoir of the trip was published as A Time of Gifts . He has a dazzling way with metaphor: 

As I listened to the muffled vowels of the Slovaks and the traffic-jams of

consonants and the explosive spurts of dentals and sibilants, my mind's eye

automatically suspended an imaginary backcloth of the Slav heartlands behind the

speakers: tbree reeds on a horizontal line, the map-makers' symbol for a swamp,

infinitely multiplied; spruce and poplar forests, stilt houses and fish-traps, frozen 

plains and lakes where the ice-holes were black with waterfowl. Then, at the

astonishing sound of Magyar - a dactylic canter where the ictus of every initial

syllable set off a troop of identical vowels with their accents all swerving one way  like wheat-ears in the wind ... 

CODA: Speaking of folklore and bush - After you read Pequeno Editor's Tree Book Tree, you can plant it into the earth and watch it grow  POPULAR: Book Regrows into Tree After Being Read