Golden Damper award for poet

Empire Bay poet Mr Peter Mace has been awarded the Golden Damper Award in the Tamworth Poetry Group competition held at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in January for his poem Oppression.

Mr Mace has been entering the Tamworth Poetry Groups competition since 2005 and said it was the first major competition he had entered.

"It is an opportunity to perform poems that would not fit into the Poets Breakfast format which are predominantly humorous.

"It is also an opportunity to compete against your fellow poets before a large audience that may only attend a bush poetry function because it is part of the Tamworth Country Music Festival," he said.

This year was Mr Mace's third win of the award.

He has won the award once before for a traditional poem and now twice for original works.

"The fact that the poem was an original work means a lot, especially when you can see the effect the piece has on the audience and judges, especially as the poem was a bit controversial," he said.

Mr Mace said the poem's genesis occurred when he was performing at a folk festival and was billeted with a local historian who related the story.

"The treatment of the Aboriginal population by the early settlers got me thinking about the oppression that the settlers and convicts themselves had endured in England and Ireland and how they did exactly the same when they 'gained the upper hand' so to speak.

"The poem probably took a year from the start to its final draft.

"The process was starting with what I had been told of the massacre and researching it further, then reading about life in general as it was for the first 50 years of settlement," said Mr Mace.

Kaitlin watts, 16 Feb 2012 Interviewee: Peter Mace