The Light River
Hal Colebatch

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Archbishop Hickey's Speech at the launching of The Light River

BOOK LAUNCH - THE LIGHT RIVER

by Hal Colebatch

This is a benign book, a gentle book, one to read slowly with ears and heart open to receive the pictures painted through the words of one who can bring the best out of the English language.

Anyone who knows Hal Colebatch will know that his words are not always benign. He more than occasionally lines up his targets and lets the words fly like penetrating arrows.

This is a different book. It is Hal in a more introspective mood, conscious of the beauty of ordinary things and aware of the little cameos of elegance and charm that he sees in nature or even in a cat.

Hal writes about cats in this little book. Perhaps he has a special interest in cats, an admiration for their qualities of apparent contemplation and aloof superiority. Cats often look thoughtful, and wrap themselves in a deep meditative trance as they close their eyes before the winter fire. It may be that thoughts are just too much for their small brain, but they fool us all with their show of philosophical profundity.

May I quote? (Summer morning p.64)

“… patrolling Winston and his small compass of whiskers and his purring buzz-saw that seeks to hold a mystery” (p.28)

The Light River, called, I presume after the shimmering Swan River, asks us to look again at familiar things and places, beautiful experiences in Kalgoorlie, Rottnest, Nedlands, along the river at Nedlands, and Augusta to name a few. He even takes us to the England he delights in, to Egypt and to Israel and to Lebanon.

This book is full of phrases that take you by surprise, as poets do. On August he writes: (p.30)

Who of us would ever think of calling the wind a “black wind”, yet the word is just right in describing the sensation/listening at night to the rain and howling wind outside.

Of course the book contains more than beautiful lyrical poems and also of his own Haiku. This is a long epic poem about the fate of a cargo ship, the tanker called the San Demetrio. It is set in 1940, in the North Atlantic during the war, when it found itself caught up in a naval battle.

I launched out on the poem, thinking to read it in stages, but once I began I could not stop till I had finished it, so powerful was the language and the dramatic and relentless pace of the story.

There was no blame in this poem, no criticism of the actions of the hostile battleships in firing their destructive artillery, no condemnation of war that caused such pain, destruction and death, only admiration for the courage of ordinary people faced with the slim challenges of survival. They were not admirals or generals or trained fighters, these people were, in his words “mostly anonymous, dressed in dungarees, serge oil-stained tropic whites doing a fairly dirty job”.

“Mr Pollard, who has something to do with the engines,

“Mr McNeil, the Scottish seaman, there is Boyle, a little man who mixes engine-grease and wipes machines.” And so on.

What the poem does is show the nobility under enormous pressure and the threat of death, and the great courage of ordinary people.

This book of poems will please ordinary people like us because the poet takes us to ordinary places and shows us ordinary things, revealing their beauty.

If there is perhaps a hint that he is asking us to think about the origin of all these beautiful things, as he dwells on dove shells on a Rottnest Beach. P.24

The beauty of the dove shell on the white sand, he says, “is no accident”.

It reminds me of the insight of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in “God’s Grandeur” when he said.

“and for all this, nature is never spent;

There lies the dearest freshness deep down in things….

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World

broods with warm breast and with, ah!

Bright wings”

I have great pleasure in launching this refreshing book “The Light River” and offer my personal congratulations.

Most Rev B J Hickey
Archbishop of Perth
25 June 2007