Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

(From And So It Went)

Friday 18th January, 5.10 p.m.

To Eric Bogle at The Harp, an Irish pub in Tempe, a purgative tear-splashed experience with my two sons Tom and Jack and a lot of Labor people, gnarled old girls I was at university with, Brian Langton the former Transport Minister and Damien Stapleton the vigorous party stalwart from (yes) Mosman, and a crammed standing audience, mostly over-fifties.

Eric sang with his eyes closed, his head tilted back, a wise wan smile, an expertly fingered guitar and an old friend John whose body, face and humour were a slightly enlarged version of his own, who guitar-accompanied and joined the choruses. They sang ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, the Willy McBride song ‘The Green Fields of France’, ‘Shelter’, ‘Now I’m Easy’ and my favourite, ‘Singing the Spirit Home’, about the teenage black activist about to be hanged whose weeping terror is soothed by cell-mates in chorus who ‘sang his spirit home’.

I have not been more moved in a while. Part of it was knowing Eric, too, like the mouldy cockatoo, has survived and the bleeding-heart ethic of which he was our anthemising laureate had also, though mocked and buffeted and bruised to the core, come through the Howard years and was now in its purity available for acclaim. Like the dying old farmer in ‘Now I’m Easy’, he, and we, could go to our last rest not exactly justified but proud we had a go.

For nearly sixty years I’ve been a Cockie.
Of droughts and fires and floods I’ve lived through plenty.
This country’s dust and mud have seen my tears and blood,
But it’s nearly over now, and now I’m easy.

I married a fine girl when I was twenty,
But she died in giving birth when she was thirty.
No flying doctor then, just a gentle old black gin,
But it’s nearly over now, and now I’m easy.

She left me with two sons and a daughter
On a bone-dry farm whose soil cried out for water,
So my care was rough and ready, but they grew up fine and steady,
But it’s nearly over now, and now I’m easy.

My daughter married young, and went her own way,
My sons lie buried by the Burma Railway,
So on this land I’ve made me home, I’ve carried on alone,
But it’s nearly over now, and now I’m easy.

And so on. Then Eric told a story of Tony Blair.

This handsome, ardent new young Prime Minister, it seems, had in 1997 shown a visitor to Downing Street a silver plaque engraved with ‘my favourite war poem The Green Fields of France’; by, he said, a private soldier, Eric Bogle, who died, he said (and the plaque did too), ‘in the First World War’. And Eric’s one surviving auntie, Thelma, read about this and wrote to Blair saying, ‘My nephew Eric Bogle did not die in World War 1, he is alive and famous and singing and you are a dickhead and your silver plaque, sir, is wrongly engraved’; or words to that effect. And a Downing Street flunky after only eighteen months wrote back to say the Prime Minster was ‘pleased and relieved that Private Eric Bogle was still alive and he would make his best efforts to catch his act when next he performs in England’.

How much by this small tale is told of Tony Blair, I thought, and how well informed are those impelled and sleepless minders who tell him what to do. Eric had frequently played in Blair’s home town of Edinburgh and his song was on the charts in England and Scotland, the land of his birth, and already a standard that many, many other performers performed in pubs and folk festivals. And Blair had never heard it, or heard of it. And he’s been lately ‘surprised’, he says, by how badly the Palestinians are being treated, how many starved and harassed and beaten and killed, unjustly in his opinion. Most things are news to Blair who is on the evidence, as Aunt Thelma deduced, a dickhead.