When Allen Ginsberg came to Oz
Brush with Fame #2
Dear Friends,
A warm welcome to new subscribers and followers, especially those who signed up recently during my Leo B Day Month! Congratulations to
who was 1960th subscriber to join just before midnight on Aug 22. Beata wins a copy of my book, Archipelagogo, Love Songs to Indonesia. Published in 2013 by Saritaksu Press (Bali) this elegant volume of stories, songs and poems set in Indonesia is illustrated by the wonderful Oz/Indonesian artist Jumaadi. The brilliant part of this story is, Beata is Indonesian! She’s a slow traveller, reader, photographer and is just getting started on Substack. Her stack is called The Wild Wandering and I’m looking forward to her future posts!I have to say it’s been a very ‘out there’ Leo month. Not only was I thrilled to be guest traveller on Tom Fish’s Speedy Boarding, but invited me over as a guest on her Creative Dialogues segment. Robin’s stack is brimming with creativity — I hope you have time to check it out!
And to top it off another wonderful Substack creative — writer, director, performance artist , published a recent video conversation she recorded with me from Las Vegas (how perfectly Leo!). Check it out here. It’s a wonderful convo about theatre, writing, creativity, travel, performance, generational/ cultural difference, self determination, self doubt and more.
And shout out to Keris Fox at who I did my first ever SS interview with me back in June. On money! What a taboo topic. Have a read of her fascinating segment Authors and Money here.
I’m aiming to reach 2001 subscribers in this month of Virgo. I have more prizes lined up for subscribers who sign up on significant poet/author birthdates. Winners will be announced on Notes, so please feel free to share!
Q: Guess whose birthday falls on Aug 27?
Last time I posted about performing with Yoko Ono at Sydney Opera House. If you missed it, catch up here. I’m continuing my Brush with Fame theme this week with the story of another luminary who once visited our shores and guess what?
I was there.
Do you have a brush with fame you’ve never written about? I’d love to hear about it!
When Allen Ginsberg Came to Oz.
Brush #2
Once upon a time, way back in 1972, the beat poet, Allen Ginsberg came to Australia. I was 22 years old, living in Melbourne and was a committed member of the experimental theatre group called Tribe. Since 1968 we’d been doing avant garde plays, street theatre and happenings and in the early 70s we joined forces with the Australian Performing Group to lead the Moratorium marches against the war in Vietnam.
For history’s sake, have a look here. Find me if you can!
In ‘72 Tribe was having a wee hiatus — we’d been doing rock ‘n roll gigs with bands like Spectrum and Tully at The TF Much Ballroom and when I heard that a random group of poet/anarchist friends were travelling to the Adelaide Festival to see Allen Ginsberg, I jumped on board.
We set off in an old Ford Falcon station wagon to drive the 8 - 10 hour journey. I can’t remember if we traversed the dry dusty Mallee plains or took the Great Ocean Rd, but when we got to Adelaide (in the neighboring state of South Australia) we declared ourselves to be the official Allen Ginsberg groupie brigade. After all, our little band included the acclaimed poet/composer Chris Mann and we knew he had some clout.
Being anarchists, we refused to pay for anything and instead talked our way into all the places we wanted to go. We headed straight for the Adelaide Town Hall where Ginsberg had his main festival gig, made our way backstage and took up a spot close to where Ginsberg was performing. On stage there were no chairs, no lectern, just Ginsberg sitting cross legged at his harmonium with his invited guests — a group of Pitjantjatjara elders from the north western desert of South Australia.
Memory is an elusive thing and I decided I should google for verification. Barnaby Smith writing for the State Library of NSW confirms that I didn’t just imagine it all!
‘The reading at Adelaide Town Hall was, by all accounts, remarkable. Having encountered them in the days leading up to the event, Ginsberg invited Indigenous songmen from the Indulkana community in APY Lands to share the stage with him.
‘They took turns performing poems and songs, with Ginsberg reading his own work or that of William Blake, and the songmen telling stories. This went on for hours and included improvised poems, using songsticks to keep time.’
It was indeed extraordinary, we stood all night just a couple of lengths away and never once got tired or wished we had a seat. When the Pitjantjatjara Elders sang, it was like nothing you had ever heard before. It was the first time these Indigenous elders had ever travelled to the city, the first time their songs were heard on a stage of a town hall of any city in Oz. All thanks to AG.
Critic Murray Bramwell said…
‘Ginsberg celebrated the Aboriginal performers, giving them centre-stage and joining them with awkward, disinhibited Brooklyn Jewish dance moves of his own,’ he says. ‘The audience was thrilled by the spontaneity and the cultural and emotional unity of the event. This was classic Ginsberg — using his celebrity to bring together people and cultures in spite of the systemic racism in Australia at the time — and still now.’
Ginsberg held the elders in high regard and in 1976, at his School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Colarado, he lectured on the Indigenous song men…
‘One really interesting and very ancient form of poetics, which is maybe the oldest, is Australian Aborigine practice. They have epic material – that is, it takes sometimes forty years to become a songman in Pitjantiatiara, which is in Central Australia, or (in) the Arnhem Land, among the Yirrkala tribes, involves memorizing epic material that covers a cycle of migration that the tribe takes over anywhere from twenty to forty years. And that’s why it might take that long to become a songman. Read the full lecture here and his interview re being in Oz with Jeune Pritchard here.
The day after the Town hall gig we were invited to hang out with the elders at a low slung, stone verandahed house where they were staying. Ginsberg would be there too.
We turned up and literally that’s all we did — hang out. Everyone sat around in a big circle, sometimes smiling or laughing, sometimes talking, sometimes not. No need to fill the silences with idle chatter. No need to punctuate the stillness that hung in the air around the elders or disturb the flow of energy that connected them so solidly to the earth. Years later I likened it to how it felt to sit with the few great Tibetan Buddhist teachers I have been fortunate to meet. But unlike Ginsberg I hadn’t met my first spiritual teacher yet. When I did, suprise, surprise, by a very different route, it was Chögyam Trungpa, the very same Tibetan Lama that not only Ginsberg, but many of the other beat poets followed. The one who set up Naropa University in Boulder Colarado which still flourishes today and where I still have a dream to one day attend summer school.
Through the community of my next Tibetan teacher, Chögyal Namkai Norbu, I met the American poet Jacqueline Gens and was thrilled to hear first hand of her connection with Naropa and her years working for Allen Ginsberg as his photo archivist. Ginsberg’s photography was in demand by galleries, books, magazines and Gens was tasked with finding and cataloguing them for the archive project. She tells the story with photos in Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Once again I had chance to reflect on the fleeting connection we made with AG way back then.
If you believe in serendipitous degrees of separation as I do, then it would come as no surprise that we are all connected to one another more closely than we think. We live in such a small world really, how wonderful that by chance or design we can get to to meet some of the world greats, to stand in places they once stood or go on pilgrimage to towns and countries where they once lived. And if a little bit of their greatness can rub off on us who knows, maybe it flows the other way too.
It’s all inspiration after all. The ability of one human being to inspire another through their art. That’s what gets me high everyday!
WRITERS JOURNEY NEWS
Draft Busters Online is currently on a two week break. Monthly modules on Zoom. Monday mornings, craft discussion and meditative writing exercises, 10 - 11.30 am AEST. and Friday afternoons, readings and feedback 3.30 - 5.30 pm AEST. Next module starts Sept 9. Find out more here! or DM me.
Free Online Workshop. On the third Sunday of the month at 4 - 5pm AEST. We meet on Zoom to introduce our writing projects and do a meditative writing exercise. Open to all— beginners, experienced, published, non published. Next session, Sept 15. Contact Jan if you would like to join.
Mentoring. If you need help with your manuscript I have a number of packages available. Contact me to set up a free phone or zoom chat so we can choose the right one for you. Contact Jan . If you are a paid member don’t forget you are eligible for have a free yearly Desperate Debrief session!
Creative Immersion in Ischia, Italy May 3-10, 2025. 7 nights, 8 days. For writers and artists. Daily creativity workshops at our seaside hotel offer inspiration and guidance for your creative work. In collaboration with the Create Escape. Booking and info here. Getting a lot of interest so don’t miss out!
Haiku Walking in Japan 2025. Still working out the details, hope to post them here soon! See pics of our Basho tour (mentioned above) here.
Celebrating 20 years of Writers Journey international journeys and retreats. See where we went, what we did here.
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Wow! So deadly 😎😎
I love these Brush With Fame stories! I didn't know about Ginsberg and the Pitjantjatjara elders. How amazing to be there for this.