Spinning the bulldust

Phil Garland: "I think this is the only festival in the country that touches on New Zealand folklore as such. All the other folk festivals bring in overseas artists, Celtic performers and what have you."

Bards, Ballads and Bulldust, Naseby's Easter weekend celebration of high-country life, is not unlike some of those yarns spun by both guests and locals. Now into its fourth year, it grows a little bit more each time.

This year's event, centred on the Maniototo town's Ancient Briton Hotel, features more than a dozen performers with concerts augmented by arts and crafts displays, busking and informal recitals.

Milton Taylor, an award-winning bush balladeer, heads an Australian trio that also features bush poets Melanie Hall and Suzie Carcary. Closer to home, Dunedin singer-songwriter Marcus Turner, Cardrona folk singer Martin Curtis, Naseby poet Ross McMillan and Cromwell country storyteller and singer Dusty Spittle are other highlights.

Phil Garland, a three-time Tui award winner from Culverden, North Canterbury, will present the festival, which is fitting given he has organised it since its inception in 2006. Back then, it was a one-day event; now, it spans three nights, winding up with an open-poetry session.

"It started off as a weekend in the Ancient Briton Hotel with myself, Dusty Spittle and Ross McMillan. We just did a one-night thing. We've held it every year since and grown it," Garland explains.

His most recent award was last year for the folk album Southern Odyssey and Garland says it's important to celebrate our musical and lyrical origins, rather than rehash other cultures.

"I think this is the only festival in the country that touches on New Zealand folklore as such. All the other folk festivals bring in overseas artists, Celtic performers and what have you, but no-one really puts the emphasis on New Zealand music."

Why then have Australian guests? Well, there has been plenty of cross-pollination over the years, Garland says.

"There is the gold influence, the shearing influence. Australians used to complain about New Zealand shearers over there, but in the 1890s we had Australian shearers coming over here; they were working on a contract basis. They brought with them the poetry of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson and that's where that influence comes from.

"Take a song like Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line - I heard that on the radio in Australia one day as Cootamundra on the Main Truck Line."

According to Garland, Ian McNamara recorded that version in Australia after hearing a recording of New Zealander Mike Harding.

"It was a deliberate reworking by him to make a good song accessible to the Aussie audience. That's one, but there are about five or six New Zealand songs I've heard in which words suit the Australian experience."

Indeed, adding new words over traditional melodies is part and parcel of the folk tradition. Garland knows this only too well: since the mid-'60s, he has been a "song-collector", gathering ballads based on settlers, hard men and women, accidents and adventures, gold-rush opportunism and endeavours gone awry.

"When I first got into collecting music and songs, Ross McMillan was one of the first people I made contact with in Naseby back in 1969. I've put music to a few of his poems over the years and I think Dusty Spittle has done the same.

"I would come across people who could tell some fantastic yarns. That's when I discovered there was some great stuff out there and I've incorporated some of that stuff into what I do in live performance."

Next weekend's festival features an inaugural "High Country Breakfast" for invited guests, including farmers from the area. Garland says the aim is to "tell a few yarns and sing a few songs and people get up".

"We wanted everybody from the area to be involved in some way or other. It's a bit of a hard slog to get people to do things because most people want to sit back and watch, but it's good to get everybody involved."

After the festival, Garland will polish the details of his latest project, Faces In The Firelight, a book featuring "every bit of folklore I've collected over the last 40 years". It has to be with the publisher by the end of this month, with plans to release it in June.

The problem, the 67-year-old says, is knowing when to stop. He admits the stories others might provide next weekend could make good source material for his own work.

"You hear a joke somewhere and people will take that joke and spin it into a yarn and it becomes great. They wring every last ounce of humour out of it."

 
• More info

Bards, Ballads and Bulldust: the Naseby High-Country Festival, will be held from April 10-12. For more information, visit:
www.kiwifolk.org.nz (search for festivals).