‘WINTER NIGHT AT LIFFEY” EP

These performances provide a very special insight into Bob Brown the person - beyond the internationally-recognised political and environmental leader and campaigner - highlighting Bob’s broad life experiences, his gift for connecting with people from all walks of life, his gentle and gracious humour, and his deeply reflective mindset. As well as “Winter Night at Liffey”, the other poems on the CD are “Katie Kingston”, “In Balfour Street” and “Wynyard Girl”, all introduced by Bob:-

The poems spoken on this record are from “In Balfour Street”, a collection of poetry I wrote between 1970 and 1976 (NewPrint, 2010). It was the height of the Cold War and I was in my Twenties. “Winter Night..” is at Liffey, under the Great Western Tiers in Northern Tasmania. The original shingles of my 1904 farmhouse had been replaced with corrugated iron. It was unusual for snow to settle long at the house but, often, I’d awake in the morning to find the mountain behind laden with white.

In Launceston’s hilly Balfour Street there’s a huddle of conjoint single story houses built in the 1800s. I was a young doctor in the 1970s and walking past the houses one wet night set me ruminating on the frustrating concept of a super-being.

“Katie Kingston” is a story my mother told me from when she was a girl at the family farm on the Great Dividing Range north of Sydney, New South Wales. Katie had a humpy on the Glenn Innes common and she was a lot talked about - seen as very strange in those days. But, one night, my mother (just a few years old) heard Katie passing with all the farm dogs barking. Many years later, my mother told me about that night.

At Wynyard, in Sydney not Tasmania, there’s an underground railway station with long wooden escalators at the York Street entrance going down to where the trains come and go. It was Sunday morning - I was going down as she was coming up.

Steve sees Bob’s poems as vivid, rugged, gentle, funny, brave accounts of various events in Bob’s life in the 1970s. Steve’s musical sketches were improvised by conjuring up what the poems meant focusing on key events in each - in the case of the title track, the peacefulness of snow at the end of a night time storm at Liffey under the Taytitiheeker (Dry’s Bluff) that looms above the farm. Watch the video here!