We met Bill and Anita at the Gun Creek campground. Michele and I had driven up from Pemberton, for the Mining for Gold Writing Retreat, and as we pulled in, Bill popped over from the next door campsite to give us a heads-up – he and Anita encountered two young grizzly cubs yesterday, on the trail to Minto, just by the campground. Michele is sleeping in a tent, I have a pop-up canvass camper on the back of my truck. We looked at each other a little wide-eyed. We knew were heading into the backcountry for an adventure, but we hadn’t quite factored grizzlies into the storyline. When we exchanged names, it felt like we were all handing each other a lifeline, an “if I scream, please come to my aid” secret handshake.

Catching wind of my accent, Bill located it accurately, then asked, “Do you know A. B. Paterson?”

That’s not where I thought he was going, when he started with “do you know?” My brain was preparing to scoff, (unlikely, 28 million Australians, the odds are low…) but actually, OF COURSE I know Banjo Paterson. He wrote The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda. He was, when I was a kid, a household name, the poet absolutely everyone had heard of.

“Do you know the Man from Iron Bark?” he asked me, and once again, my brain was derailed from its anticipated destination because I thought he was going to say the Man from Snowy River, which I probably could recite myself, but no, I do not know the Man from Iron Bark.

Bill, aka Billy Milly, knows it by heart. 

What are the odds? That I would drive so far out of my comfort zone, into the deepest backcountry of the SLRD, and run into a secret poetry appreciator, right here in our campground? 

“You know, I’ve started this thing,” I told him. “We could record you, if you want to be part of it.”

His eyes lit up, and we made a date, if we survived the presence of grizzlies, and our writing retreat schedule.

He and Anita wandered over the next evening. Bill has a twinkle in his eyes and scrinkles around them and rough hands that have known labour. A retired heavy duty mechanic, he was a ranger on the Bowron Lakes for 6 years. He and Anita have been together 47 years (45 of them married), and only ever slept one day apart. They hike and paddle and ATV and pick huckleberries together, and wherever they stop in BC, they buy books about the local history, to learn about the place. 

He needed to stand, to “do” this poem, so after we’d chatted a while, he pushed back from the picnic table, set his boot on a rock, rubbed his hands over his face, and closed his eyes for a moment, locating the file in his brain. 

One take, we said. And I put my phone at his feet, and hoped his voice would carry over the wind and the river. 

Well, it carried. It carried us away, all the way to Sydney town, and to the shearing sheds of Ironbark. Hope you enjoy this regaling as much as we did.

Listen: https://secretpoetryappreciators1.substack.com/p/bill-miller-recites-banjo-paterson

The thing I started, that was fresh in my mind when I met Bill, is a digital home for the Society of Secret Poetry Appreciators, over on substack. Once a week, every Wednesday, we share a short recording of someone sharing a poem. It has been called “one of the most insightful and charming corners of the internet” by our insightful and charming friends at the Whistler Writers Festival. Hit the subscribe button over there, to be notified whenever there’s a new poem to tune into.