The Bogle Blurb
By Eric Bogle
20 August 2001, South Australia
Hello all -My second newsletter (and they said it would never happen!) and also my last for the next three months or so, as I head over to Toronto on Saturday to start the tour with John McDermott, and I will be far too busy getting drunk, trashing motel rooms and generally having a good time, to bother about filing another newsletter. I'll do it sometime after I get back, and out of the Rehab clinic.
Actually I'm not starting the tour with John until the 15th of September, my wife Carmel and I are having a holiday together in Canada before the tour starts, mainly in the Canadian Maritimes we hope. Then once I start touring, she's off to Britain, France and Italy, she has always wanted to see the ruins of Pompeii, probably instead of having to look at the ruins of the nice handsome young man she originally married......
I have spent the bulk of the time since the last newsletter in writing songs, and not before time. I have been having quite a nice little song-writing spasm that at one stage looked like turning into a fully-fledged frenzy, but it petered out after 7 songs.
Still, of the seven songs, I consider four of them to be pretty good, one to be quite reasonable, and two to go on my next CD if there is absolutely no alternative. I finished the song I was telling you about in the last newsletter, the one about the little baby girl who died when she was four months old. It was, as you can appreciate, not an easy song to write, but I'm pretty happy with the finished song. I will be happier once I hear back from the parents, I've sent them a copy, and will not consider taking the song any further (i.e.recording or performing it in public) until they let me know if I got it right. Or wrong as the case may be. The song was written for them about their daughter, and I have no wish to re-open any old wounds or cause them any pain with a song they feel doesn't get near to what they think it should be. We'll have to wait and see.
The rest of the songs are a pretty diverse bunch. I've written, wait for it, a song about the Anzac Horses in WW1. It's a song I've been avoiding to be frank, as I feel I'm already too much identified with the Anzacs already, but the subject is such an emotive one I couldn't help myself. Most of you won't know the story, so briefly, Australia shipped about 53,000 horses overseas during WW1 to the various theatres of War Australia was involved in. Of those 53,000, only one returned to Australia. Because of quarantine regulations, no horses were allowed to be returned to Australia. The Anzacs were advised to dispose of all their horses, and the Light Horsemen who were stationed in Palestine chose to shoot their horses rather than hand them over, or sell them, to the Arabs, as they considered the Arabs to be dreadfully cruel to their animals. Mind you, I can't think what would be more cruel than subjecting innocent horses to the horrors of modern warfare. But those were the attitudes of the times I suppose. Anyway, each horse was shot by the owner's best mate the day before the Light Horsemen sailed back to Australia. I based the song on an actual Light Horseman, a wonderfully named old fellow called Elijah Conn, who had a horse called Banjo. As he was relating the story of how his mate had to shoot Banjo, even after 70 years his eyes were full of tears. That,in a nutshell, is what the song is about, and it's called "As If He Knows"
Of the rest, one is called "The Dalai Lama's Candle" which is about the links from the past we must take with us before we can forge into the future, or at least that what it's meant to be about! The lyrics got a little diverted here and there. Another one is called "Imagine That (If You Can)" and it's about the forced removal of Australian Aboriginal children, mostly mixed blood children, from their families. They were sent to mission schools and then on to white foster homes and told to forget their aboriginal past. It's a shameful episode in Australia's history, but it's an episode we find repeated in many countries, Australia was not Robinson Crusoe in it's treatment of the country's original native inhabitants. This is a very sketchy overview of what happened, the full story would take too long and be too shameful in the telling....
The other three songs do not really warrant much of a description, and NEED MORE WORK!
As far as live performances go,I've only done two in the last month, and they were both free gigs! I'm certainly losing my native Scottish Heritage. Both were however "green" gigs, so that's O.K. One was for The Australian Greens, a political party of conservation-minded folk, to help launch a fund-raiser CD to which I contributed, and a gig for the Greening Australia Foundation, which is basically set up to show farmers and Big Business how going green can actually be profitable. Sounds like common sense to me. And that was the sum total of my live performances. There's no stopping the Bogle Boy, next stop Las Vegas.....
On a personal level, last month was quite a big one for Carmel & I as we bought ourselves a little rural hideaway, a shack (or cabin for our North American cousins) on the River Murray, which is our local equivalent to the Mississippi, although not nearly so wide, polluted or difficult to spell. Mind you, it's not in great shape, after only 200 years of white settlement in Australia we've managed to screw up most of our major rivers, and the Murray is no exception.
But there are some efforts being made now to redress the situation, perhaps too late, we'll see. But there is still a multitude of bird life, pollution or no, and the view from our shack/cabin is really spectacular. (Cue photo insert from Webmaster- Webmistress? Webperson?) ("Webmaster." "Webperson" is too awkward, and "WebMistress" just gets into a weird area... - Ed.) We are now of course flat broke, but who needs money in Paradise anyway?
And that's all folks. I should really be looking after all the preparation type things I still have to take care of before the overseas jaunt, but to be honest, I've enjoyed this more.
I hope you are all healthy and happy and that you'll join me again sometime in the future for more Bogle Blurb. If not, it means you've managed to get a life...........
Cheers Eric
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