After the fire, into Africa By JOHN BARTLET Monday 21 May 2001 Now hear the hollow hills, now walk on shards, hear the death of color, watch white birds hawk the blackened plains. Sit among stones, sing summer songs of dust and ashes, and let the lessons begin. Now Hear the Hollow Hills With these words, poet Ken Taylor began to put into words the grief and depression into which he fell after the destruction of his Mount Macedon home and possessions in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. It was his decision to "deal with grief in order to live" and marks the first poem in Africa, his collection that this week won the New South Wales Premier's Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry. Africa is his first published work for 15 years and indicates the profound effect Ash Wednesday had on his life. The fires meant not just the loss of house, possessions, paintings and library but works in progress, journals and notebooks he had kept during the years he had been developing the Natural History Unit of Australia. "It was a major loss for me, a career loss, and an exponential loss, hard to explain to anyone," he says. Like many people who have been through this type of disaster, the post -fire depression was overwhelming and it took Taylor almost 10 years to recover from the experience. "I was lucky to survive," he admits now. The poems of Africa represent his recovery from that loss. Taylor was born in Ballarat in 1930 and his life was unsettled by his father's absence at the war. "My mother suffered on account of this and it was a difficult time for her. I was sent as a boarder to Ballarat Grammar School but strangely I enjoyed the life." Even then, he expected to go to war and went to infantry training schools in Watsonia and Puckapunyal. His real ambition, at 17, was to leave Ballarat for the wider world, where he could "have adventures and write books". His "adventures" included working as a cub reporter in New Zealand, where he covered the shipping round. One night a British refrigerated meat-boat had to replace two deserters in order to sail with a full crew. Taylor volunteered and became a fireman on the ship. He not only survived the threat of being thrown overboard but also a force-12 storm in the Western Atlantic. It was this experience that he wrote into the first of his Africa poems, "to get rid of the fire, to deal with an enduring, pervasive sense of depressive grief". He says he needed images of upheaval and transformation and found them in that experience. "A little ship like ours would creep up the side of a great wave and then tip over the top. The screws would race in air and the governors would cut in like machine gun fire to stop the big engine destroying itself. Then the ship would go down the other side of the mountain." Taylor was an established writer and film maker by the 1960s. On his return from a Harkness Fellowship at Cornell University, he was one of the founding writers of the La Mama Writers Workshop in Melbourne. His first poems were published in the United States. He went on to found the Natural History Unit of the ABC in 1969. But he was never satisfied to record wilderness from a distance and once spent 10 days on a fishing boat riding out a storm in Bass Strait. "I think I spent 12 hours studying a small patch of red linoleum on the floor while blue and white water smashed over the wheelhouse," he says. Over two years, the unit produced 12 films on natural Australia. Wild Australia was the first series of Australian documentaries to win a worldwide television audience. Africa speaks of a man surprised by love, not a mawkish or adolescent love, but one that is startling and harshly realistic "that happens / across the stretched white paper / we both walk on." "A long friendship turned into an intense relationship," he says, "and this made me write again. One day I became conscious I could see color in the world about me and I wrote of "that / particular silence as / color seeps into the edges of a washed out / world." "Poems," he says, "start with a certain thought or observation and then the pulse takes it on. I'm usually not trying to write for effect, although there are effects. "It's a substantial honor for me (to win the prize),coming after 40 years of serious writing and I think it will encourage me enormously." According to poet and critic Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Taylor's is a "poetry that felt fast, natural spontaneous as though the landscape itself were pouring onto the page in words". Taylor is a poet who interprets the landscape with an eye that is not European. He credits a long list of people as having shown him the way to look at landscape- "fishermen, farmers, film makers, pilots, rangers, divers, scientists, bird people, reptile people, arid land people, station managers and one publican/pilot". Africa is published by Five Island Press.