Hunting the Wild Reciter: Elocution and the Art of Recitation

Abstract

Despite the endurance of bush poetry festivals and an inner-city fashion for contemporary spoken word and performance poetry, these days the recitation of verse in Australia-as in other Western anglophone nations-remains a minority taste. Early last century, things were very different. In the 1920s, Australians were reciting verse all over the place; so much so that the well-known Bulletin humorist 'Kodak' O'Ferrall lampooned them: Way out in the suburbs howls the wild Reciter, Storming like a general, bragging like a blighter; He would shame hyenas slinking in their dens As he roars at peaceful folk whose joy is keeping hens. 'How We Beat the Favourite', 'Lasca', 'Gunga Din', There they sit and tremble as he rubs it in. When he's done they thank him! Never do they rise, Tie his hands and gag him as he rolls his eyes, Bag his head and bear him swiftly through the night. That's the only remedy for villains who recite. 1 Here, from the modern, metropolitan perspective of the professional writer, the reciter is an outlandish form of Homo suburbiensis. An amateur with half-baked literary taste, his choice of party pieces is quaintly Victorian, comprising narrative ballads from Adam Lindsay Gordon to Rudyard Kipling, and extending to Lasca by the Englishman Frank Desprez, in which a Texan cowboy laments the death of his Mexican sweetheart in a cattle stampede. And yet, despite his vulgarity, the reciter's manic energy makes him a force to be reckoned with. It seems only physical violence can put an end to his kind.