The word, Geelong: it even sounds slow, doesn’t it? The elongated vowels; the way your tongue sticks in the ‘l’; the sauntering, circular nature of it. Long touted Sleepy Hollow, Geelong is a meandering kind of a place: pacing itself out from the waterfront, overlooking industry and the misty, sloping You Yangs; rolling back over the hills to the quiet reaches of suburbia. It’s a place that’s very much on the way: to Melbourne, to the Great Ocean Road, to coastal holidays filled with sandy feet and lazy days.
But underneath the Sandy Stone-esque facade, it’s also a place thick with a passionate arts and cultural scene, surrounded by vibrant coastal areas, and home to names like Chrissie Amphlett, Helen Garner and Xavier Rudd.
Not to mention Grant Fraser: a towering, gentle fellow with one of those storytelling voices that makes you think of crackling fires, jackets with elbow patches and the curling smoke of a pipe.
Poet, lawyer, teacher, actor (with a tiny part in Alvin Purple—‘If you look very carefully, I’m sitting in the court, wearing a suit,’ he says, rather sheepishly) and now filmmaker, Fraser arrives at my front door on a crisp Sunday morning to talk to me about his new film on poetry.
Stylishly titled Syllable to Sound, the film is more specifically about the role of poetry in times of oppression, and showcases poets Anna Akhmatova, Wilfred Owen, Osip Mandelstam, Emily Dickinson, Marjorie Agosin, Primo Levi, Rupert Brooke and Zbigniew Herbert.
‘I suppose it’s a personal piece,’ Fraser says when probed about his reasons for making the film. ‘Sadly these things are locked away, and people don’t know about them. How important these people were, in terms of human courage, and the beauty of humanity. I think it’s also about acknowledging that the human voice is so wonderfully powerful. That one voice can be raised and heard and have any meaning in that circumstance.’
He talks about the voice of Primo Levi, an Italian poet and survivor of Auschwitz. ‘Levi’s poems discuss the regard for humanity that survived Auschwitz. Some people were reduced to bestiality, but others were still looking out for one another. There was a sad coda to his life because he couldn’t write about Auschwitz for a number of years. There’s a famous quote: “After Auschwitz, there is no poetry.” I think, at great cost to himself, he wrote about it, in