As a Yank, I was under the wrong impression that the only traces of Tasmanians were the children of comfort women kidnapped and raped to serve sealers, whalers and fishermen. I should have known, rapes were very common among the conquerors and slavers in the States, even to the present day.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010-A Personal Comment--Part 1

I first came across Thomas Hardy in grades 11 and 12 in Burlington Ontario. His novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were the novels we studied in those last two years at Burlington Central High School. I was a good student, near the top of my class, but I remember finding Hardy: heavy, cumbersome, difficult reading, although nowhere near as difficult as the Shakespeare play we also studied each year. I did not come across Hardy again until some thirty years later in the early 1990s when I taught matriculation English at a technical and further education college in Perth Western Australia. Again, it was Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

And so it was, when I saw this novel brought to life by some of Britain’s best young acting talent, filmed in the U.K. in 2008 and shown on ABC1(1) on the last two Sunday evenings, I could not help but reflect and so wrote this prose-poem. Greek humanism in its optimistic and pessimistic, cynical and skeptical, forms and not Abrahamic revelation, in the end, stands out in Hardy. It is a road I would have gone down myself had I not discovered a new Flame-Voice and Its extreme solutions, a new prophet placed in Israel’s oven where the heat consumes everything but compassion.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1) ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010 and(2)Roger White, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, Oxford, 1992, p.102 and p.97.

How could one forget your words:
happiness is but one occasional....
episode in a general drama of pain!
No wonder I found your ponderous
descriptions tested my patience back
at the age of 16 when the oils of youth
were bulging out seeking to grease and
light my life beyond that world of sport,
school, girls and endlessly familiar stuff
that filled my life and days way-far-then.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010-A Personal Comment--Part 2--Here is the rest of that prose-poem.-Ron in Tasmania

school, girls and endlessly familiar stuff
that filled my life and days way-far-then.

Your reputation for extreme pessimism,
your pessimistic pantheism, precedence
of feeling over thought.....religious and
metaphysical uncertainties...a nostalgia
for the things of everyday, a longing for
lost faith, seeing change as superficial in
your world—its doomed stronghold of
ancient ways of life, morbid in a way, but
also sublimely compassionate: your many-
sided personality, Thomas, very attractive.

Your sense of dignity, of awe and a power
of endurance in a timeless universe: what a
grand and strange place which we glimpse
only momentarily through the accidents and
coincidences, the tragic fate and a series of
kicks on the long road, long haul to disaster:
no light at the end of your tunnel, eh, Thomas?

Ron Price
16 April 2010

It's perplexing that Rodney Croome hasn't mentioned that,
like his fellow Tasmanians Peter Sculthorpe and Graeme Murphy,
William Buckley was a lavender laddy,
as are nearly all famous Tasmanian ex-pats.

What a strange thing to claim Proxy. Ex-pat lavender laddies like Errol Flynn, David Boon and Ricky Ponting?

Steven F,
I didn't claim it:
http://www.rodneycroome.id.au/comments/645_0_1_0_C/

If it's true, then William Buckley provides yet another role model for young Tasmanians coming out.