Sea Things – the duffle bag is bulging!

Scores of South Coast people have taken pen to paper to add an Illawarra feel to a national literary project that is seeking to portray Australian’s love affair with the ocean through verse.

A duffle bag that arrived in Port Kembla a week ago on the third leg of the Sea Things project is now bulging with poems and stories and will set sail today on the Hoegh Transporter bound for Brisbane.

“The response to our call-out has been fantastic…we’ve received emails, letters and hand delivered verse from all over…and from people of all ages,” commented Johanna Featherstone, the Artistic Director of the Red Room Company, the event organiser.

“We knew when we started the venture that this stretch of coastline, which has an incredible maritime history, would be very generous in its participation.

“The duffle bag is now bursting with material from amateurs, part-time poets and professional writers from the district like Mark Miller, Colleen Duncan, Ron Vale, Ali Smith and Casse Charlton.”

The Sea Things project is a unique two month long initiative to encourage new verse and to explore and celebrate Australia’s longstanding obsession with the ocean.

Duffle bags of poems are travelling on two sea routes north from Hobart and Fremantle, with stopovers in Devonport, Melbourne, Darwin, Port Kembla, Brisbane and Cairns. The final destination is Thursday Island in Torres Strait, where the journey will collect work composed and performed by the community and students of the Tagai State College.

The two duffle bags containing the final works will then be flown to Sydney in November for a public performance on Sydney Harbour.

A bon voyage-style reading of some of the new works will take place today at 11am beside the Wollongong Harbour Lighthouse.

People can continue to submit poems for placing in the bags in several ways:

Email them (click here)

2. Post them, no later than Monday 9th November, to: The Red Room Company, PO Box 1389, Darlinghurst, NSW 1300.

3. Post them on the POOL website: http://www.pool.org.au/