Geoffrey Rush's tribute to John Clarke: 'A Child's Christmas in Warrnambool', July 2017

Audio of Geoffrey Rush's reading of John Clarke's short story, 'A Child's Christmas in Warrnambool'

Rush was among the speakers at a public tribute to John Clarke's life and work held at the Melbourne Town Hall on Sunday 2 July, 2017

Audio does not belong to me; I clipped it from podcast episode hosted by the Wheeler Centre: https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadca...

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Text of 'A Child's Christmas in Warrnambool':

"One Christmas was so like another in those years around the sea town corner now, that I can never remember whether it was 106 degrees in 1953 or whether it was 103 degrees in 1956. All the Christmases roll into one down the wave-roaring salt-squinting years of yesterboy. My hand goes into the fridge of imperishable memory and out come: salads and sunburn lotions, and the brief exuberant hiss of beer being opened and the laugh of wet-haired youths around a Zepher 6, the smell of insect repellent and eucalyptus and the distant constant slowly listless bang of the flywire door.

And resting on a Formica altar, waiting for Ron, the biggest pav in the world; a magic pav, a cut-and-come-again Pav for all the children in all the towns across the wide brown bee-humming trout-fit sheep-rich two-horse country. And the aunts. Always the aunts. In the kitchen on the black-and-white photographed beach of the past, playing out the rope to a shared childhood, caught in the undertow and drifting. And some numerous uncles, wondering occasionally why they weren't each other, coming around the letterbox to an attacking field in the Test match and being driven handsomely by some middle-order nephew, skipping down the vowel-flattening pitch and putting the ball into the tent-flaps on the first bounce of puberty."

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Text taken from here https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/...

Vale John Clarke.

If you've read this far, you're obviously a fan of John's work, so you might enjoy this podcast episode about him that I published soon after his death in April 2017: http://penmanshippodcast.com/episode-...