Geordie Williamson
speaker
728 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2018
last heard 21 Aug
Geordie Williamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And exquisite in the bodying forth of that that simple drive to be what one is as a creature.
And I guess the final result of this series of poems is that Les is making this argument that nature's just not a passive backdrop or an uh object for us to exploit or or or or murder for meat.
Um, it's saturated with divine presence and intrinsic dignity.
And for a conservative Catholic like Les to take this incredibly kind of pantheistic position, I think is a really beautiful moulding of of of levels of sacredness.
And it's the point I like to think where Les's profound.
profound devout religiosity in that kind of official old world European sense melds with um Australian indigenous ways of viewing the world.
Absolutely.
I I think that this is and and I mean, you know, I mean, people who are um are much more uh close readers of of Les than I would say this is at the heart of his body of work.
Um there's there's a lovely line that later in his career, Clive James said, having built Versailles in this latest collection, Les has wandered around the grounds building outhouses.
houses and wonderful outhouses they are.
And I think this is this is Lesers Versailles.
You know, you you asked this question of like what are the three great Australian books?
And what I've tried to do in responding.
albeit eccentrically to that response is to say, what are the three texts that feel like they're trying to become Australian?
So there's a list I could have given you with wonderful cosmopolitan kind of authors like Christina Stead, um, and there is a list, you know, of great of great local grounded authors like Stowe
And and Patrick White.
But what I'm trying to communicate with my choices are those texts which actually try and get to the core of what it is to be a newcomer to this continent and yet to connect with it through the medium of words.
So my final um choice is a very fragmentary essay, a philosophical essay, by an eco-feminist philosopher named Val Plumwood.
It's called The Eye of the Crocodile, and it is a uh fragment uh of a series of essays that this uh remarkable philosopher was working on at the time of her death that emerged from a s an experience that she had uh in the top end uh in Kakadoo when she went out for a paddle in her canoe in 1985 at the beginning of
Of the monsoon season at the beginning of the wet.
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