PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Before we get started — a bit of listener news. Harry himself tuned in last week. Browsed the site from his home connection. So Harry, if you’re out there listening — welcome aboard, mate. We’re doing our best.
MAXINE: Welcome indeed. And with that — today’s piece.
PHRED: Right. Today’s piece is something a bit different. We’ve spent weeks in Harry’s memoir, in his philosophy essays, in his technology writing. Today we’re listening to Harry perform. It’s a recording he made in November 2021, when he was eighty-two years old. He’s reading Banjo Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” — Australia’s national poem, apparently — and he starts with this personal introduction that tells you everything you need to know about why Harry does what he does.
MAXINE: I’m already curious. What does he say?
PHRED: He opens with this: “I discovered this poem I thought in Australia while looking through some books. After I discovered it, I found out it’s kind of the national poem of Australia. Everyone in Australia knows of it.”
MAXINE: He discovered it in Australia.
PHRED: That’s the thing, Maxine. We’d known Harry loved wombats, loved Australian folk music, but here’s confirmation — he actually went. He was there, poking through books, found this poem, and something in it grabbed him hard enough that he came home and memorised all of it.
MAXINE: All of it.
PHRED: Every verse. Listen to this.
[SFX: HARRY_SNOWY_RIVER_CLIP]
MAXINE: You did it again. No warning.
PHRED: That’s the blanket warning in effect, Maxine. Permanent. Like the Murray River.
MAXINE: The Murray River is not permanent in the way you think it is.
PHRED: Anyway, what was I supposed to do? You needed to hear it in his voice. He says — and this is the part that stays with me — “I was so taken with that poem when I came back from Australia that I memorised the entire thing. It took me about six months, something on that order. I mean, I would work on it every morning when I woke up and every night when I went to bed, and eventually I could recite the entire poem.”
MAXINE: Every morning and every night for six months.
PHRED: That’s the Harry I know. When something grips him, he goes deep. We saw this with his Boppers project, we saw it with his ChatGPT experiments — the man does not do hobbies by halves. He does obsessions.
MAXINE: And then — because he’s Harry — there’s the punchline.
PHRED: Oh, the punchline. “But it turns out, I discovered not many people want to listen to a five-minute poem recited from memory, so I only ever really did it once. This time, I read it.”
MAXINE: That is so perfectly him.
PHRED: It really is. The enthusiasm, the total commitment, the quiet self-awareness that maybe this enthusiasm is not universally shared, and the good humour about it anyway. He knows. He absolutely knows. And he still spent half a year learning it.
MAXINE: I want to come back to that self-awareness in a moment, but first — the recording itself. What’s the quality of his reading?
PHRED: It’s strong. His voice at eighty-two is clear, engaged, warm. He gives it a slight Australian accent — his words — and he apologises for that, but he loves it.
MAXINE: Let me guess. He says something like, I’m going to do this with an accent, sorry.
PHRED: Verbatim: “I’m going to do it with a slight Australian accent. I apologise for that, but I love it.” That line alone is a whole Harry Baya seminar. The apology followed immediately by the honest admission that he loves it. He can’t help himself. He wants you to know he’s being a bit silly, but he’s also not going to stop.
[BED: australian-bush-ambience] (unsourced)
PHRED: There we are.
MAXINE: …Cicadas.
PHRED: Australian bush ambience. It’s called setting a scene.
MAXINE: Phred, that is extremely loud cicadas.
[BED: END]
MAXINE: Thank you.
PHRED: Fine. Spoilsport.
MAXINE: Returning to the poem — before you introduce any more wildlife. What is “The Man from Snowy River” actually about?
PHRED: It’s a bush ballad from 1890. Paterson wrote it for the Bulletin, and it became the most famous poem in Australian literature. Harry gives a tidy summary in his intro: a prize racehorse escapes and joins a mob of feral horses — brumbies — in the mountains. A bunch of riders chase them, and when the horses go down an impossibly steep slope, everyone gives up except this young mountain horseman, the man from Snowy River, who spurs his pony down after them and brings them back single-handed.
MAXINE: It’s myth-making. The rugged individual against impossible terrain.
PHRED: Exactly. And Harry reads it with genuine excitement. You can hear his voice lift at the chase. But here’s what made me sit up — there’s a moment in the poem where Paterson describes the terrain, and he mentions wombat holes.
MAXINE: Wombat holes.
PHRED: Wombat holes. Harry reads this line: “The wild hops scrub grew thickly and the hidden ground was full of wombat holes and any slip was death.” Wombat holes! In the national poem of Australia! Harry must have nearly fallen off his chair when he found that.
MAXINE: It’s almost too perfect. Harry discovers the poem in Australia, falls in love with it, memorises it, and it turns out the poem itself contains a wombat reference.
PHRED: A validation from the universe. Of course the national poem of Australia mentions wombats. Of course it does.
MAXINE: Let’s talk about how this connects to what we already know of Harry. We’ve reviewed his poems before — Episode 28, “The Song of the Sannyasin,” where he read Swami Vivekananda’s poem and wrote pages of commentary around it. That was another case of Harry discovering a poem, falling completely in love with it, and then needing to perform it somehow.
PHRED: That’s right. And the Caracas Reunion Song back in Episode 13 — that was Harry performing his own original work. But this is different. This is Harry curating someone else’s art and making it his own through sheer effort. Six months of memorisation. That’s not casual appreciation. That’s possession.
MAXINE: And the format — a spoken recording on his “Foot Prints on the Web” page, part of a collection he made in late 2021. This is Harry building his archive. He’s not just writing memoir and philosophy. He’s also recording himself singing, reciting, performing — leaving a record of who he is in as many forms as he can manage.
PHRED: It’s generous, isn’t it? He knows not many people want to hear a five-minute poem. He says so himself. And he still records it, still puts it out there, still builds the page. Because someone might want it. Someone might find it. That’s the Harry operating system — connect people with things he cares about, and trust that the right person will show up.
MAXINE: Speaking of which — who is the audience here? He’s not performing live. This is a web recording on a page with a dozen other spoken pieces. He’s not addressing a particular person, the way he does in some of his essays. This feels more like —
PHRED: Like a time capsule. Like he’s throwing something into the ocean and hoping someone finds the bottle.
MAXINE: Precisely. Which makes the self-deprecating line even more poignant. “Not many people want to listen.” He knows the bottle might float past everyone. He threw it anyway.
PHRED: That makes me think of something. We talk about Harry’s ADHD, his hyperfocus, his tendency to go deep on things. But there’s another side to that — the loneliness of it. When you’re the only person in the room who cares this much about something, you still care. You just learn to make your peace with the empty chairs.
MAXINE: He makes the peace with humour. That’s the resilience underneath the self-deprecation. He’s not bitter. He’s —
PHRED: He’s realistic. And he keeps going.
MAXINE: One thing I noticed in his intro: he takes care to define “brumbies” for his listeners. “That’s the feral horses, wild horses. The brumbies of the mountain ranges.” The instructional technologist is still in there. Even in a poem recitation, he’s teaching.
PHRED: He can’t help it. It’s how he loves things — by explaining them. And he mentions the two films, the 1982 one and the sequel, both of which he thought were great. Harry doesn’t do half-measures with his enthusiasms either. He watched both films, he read the poem, he went to the country, he memorised the thing.
MAXINE: The full Harry Baya immersion protocol.
PHRED: Exactly. Anyway, what stays with you from this piece?
MAXINE: For me it’s the voice. Eighty-two years old, clear as a bell, reading a poem with an accent he knows is a bit silly, introducing it with the same teacherly care he’s brought to everything we’ve reviewed. This isn’t a young man’s performance. It’s an old man’s joy. And the joy is undiminished.
PHRED: Undiminished. That’s the word. For me it’s that line about nobody wanting to listen. Because it’s funny and it’s true and it’s also — underneath — a little bit brave. He spent six months on something most people wouldn’t give five minutes to. And he recorded it anyway.
MAXINE: One last thing. I have a question I’d want to ask Harry. Did he ever find anyone who wanted to hear it? One person, even? Because “not many people” isn’t “nobody.” I want to know if there was one listener who made the six months worth it.
PHRED: And I’d want to know if he still remembers it. All of it. Because there’s something beautiful about an eighty-seven-year-old man who might still have Banjo Paterson locked away in there, whether anyone asks for it or not.
MAXINE: Let’s ask him.
PHRED: Let’s do that.
MAXINE: For now — that’s our review.
PHRED: It is. See you next time.
BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.
[SFX: OUTRO_KOOKABURRA]
MAXINE: Was that a kookaburra.
PHRED: It was a kookaburra.
MAXINE: Of course it was.