Live performances 10 Days On The Island Festival - Tasmania, March 2021
/Tasmanians were lucky and privileged to be able to attend multiple music, theatre, art and poetry events all around the state over 3 weeks in March 2021. “If These Halls Could Talk” was the centrepiece attraction of the Festival, using local halls in far-flung, romantic and once thriving locations as a way of taking the Festival to regional communities - designed in part to help healing after 12 months of CV-19 pandemic stresses and strains.
Liffey Hall is perhaps the most iconic, once the school, and now the focus of a monthly farmers’s market and weekly music and dancing events. Inside, a large fireplace stacked with wood speaks to the homeliness and community-mindedness of what these places mean to people so that the walls do “talk” to us about times past and present.
“A Weekend Poetical”, held at Liffey over Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th March, featured people with a close connection to the Liffey Valley. While the audience wasn’t told who Jane Longhurst was going to interview on Sunday AM, the fact that Bob Brown’s old home “Oura Oura’ sits in an idyllic spot under Dry’s Bluff (Taytitikitheeker) meant quite a few people guessed and made sure to be part of what was an intimate and heart-warming Q&A into Bob’s life beyond his internationally- recognised environmental credentials.
The session finished on a musical note, with Bob reading his poem “Winter Night At Liffey” while I played on the piano the music I had composed for this poem, as detailed elsewhere on these webpages. To perform “Winter Night At Liffey”, in Liffey Hall, with the incomparable Bob Brown, as a centrepiece event for the “10 Days On The Island” Festival, is a highlight of my life I’ll not forget. We also performed Bob’s poem “The Birds”, which references magpies returning to the valley. In the afternoon, local young poets took centre stage, takin up the baton as the next generation to speak about and on behalf of this beautiful environment.
