I caught the train into town this morning for a flying visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival and to track down the phones scattered throughout the venues for the event. These are no ordinary phones. Not only are they totally retro with that rotary dial that would make you start the painstaking process of phoning again if you dialled the wrong number (eighties kids you know what I'm talking about) they are completely cool because they are filled with poems!
Yes, you read right. Dial a number on one of these babies and you'll hear a poem read by a poet with a connection to regional Victoria. I'm proud to say that you can hear my poem, Far Flung Seeds, on one of these phones! I wrote this poem about spending time at my grandparents' house in Jeparit, in the Wimmera Mallee. The population here is always around four hundred, it's flat and dry and it has a firm place in my heart.
Huge thanks to Red Room Poetry for commissioning my poem for this project, to Izzy Roberts-Orr for adding the awesome soundscape and to the Melbourne Writers festival for hosting these amazing phones!