Storytelling With Mama Duck

Music on in the kitchen, birds calling in the garden and an Aussie reading poetry aloud at wine o'clock.

The possible origins of the hipster beard in 19th century Australia

Humorous Bush ballad, about Irish people adapting their culture to their circumstances in 19th century outback Australia.

My mother bought me an illustrated version (illustrations by Aussie artists who were daughters of the NZ/Aussie writer Ruth Park and Irish Australian writer D'Arcy Niland, come to think of it) when I was five years old, and read it to me animatedly.

I was entranced by the sound of rhyming language in a familiar environment about landscape and identity.

My clever Mummy taught me to read, early.

I became a writer, journalist, comedian and broadcaster.

From little things, big things grow.

Read to our kids, in person and aloud, happily. 😊

One of my favourite poems, musing on womanhood and the stages of maiden, mother and crone with cycles of vanity and ageing.

When I first read this poem as a 23yo English Studies undergrad, I melodramatically identified with it, from the perspective of a struggling young mother and writer in a brutal marriage.

Far too closely..... I've had my head in the gas oven in a metaphorical sense far too often as I struggled with self esteem and finding my way in the world.

Now I'm 50.

I've survived this long.

I'm reconciled and at peace with anything my mirror shows me.

Thanks for listening.

The famous poem written in England, 1906, by a woman homesick for her country of birth, Australia.

Read by a woman in 2021, conscious of the original sin of Terra Nullis, grateful for the opportunities enjoyed by her children in a sunburnt country, missing the smell of gum leaves and gravel as rain falls on the slate roof of her cottage in Ireland.

I read a poem by that Algonquin Queen of the sardonic and Bohemian, Dorothy Parker.

Lockdown socialising has me musing, indeed.

The thru line of my Irish great grandmothers down to my emancipated Aussie daughters, in context of English colonialism and genocide.

Episode one: a humorous tale written & narrated by Mama Duck. A fish out of water seeks divine inspiration on her existence in an unfamiliar territory.