How Murray Hartin’s haunting poem Rain From Nowhere has become a bush battle cry in times of drought
He describes it as “a bunch of words thrown together”, but the haunting words of Murray Hartin’s Rain From Nowhere resonate just as loudly today as they did when he first penned it 11 years ago.
NSW
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“I WROTE Rain From Nowhere on the morning of February 21, 2007.
This was towards the back end of the worst drought ever recorded in Australia.
A Scottish mate of mine, Russell Workman, who was working for the Oasis Foundation side of The Salvation Army in Sydney, had rung me to find out a bit about the bush.
They were looking at doing a documentary about the drought and its connection to rural depression and suicide.
We had a couple of meetings, there were some pretty tough stories coming out of the rural community and things were getting worse.
I woke up early that day with a few lines in my head and the words just flowed out — Rain From Nowhere was written in under three hours.
You never really know but I had a sense I’d written something pretty special.
I recited it to a couple of mates over the phone and the response was always the same — silence followed by “Geez Muz, that’s powerful”.
I emailed it to a few more friends, they sent it on and then I started receiving replies from all over the countryside.
He had planned to take his life, he was going to shoot his dog first, but then he heard the poem on the radio.
We recorded it, singer-songwriter Pat Drummond put some beautiful guitar behind it and it started to get a little bit of play on radio, particularly the ABC.
As the drought continued the poem received more attention.
It was referenced in a Time Magazine article in 2008 saying it was “as moving a piece of Australian verse as has been written in decades”.
It has been recited in both NSW and Federal Parliaments and whenever it gets dry it resurfaces.
I think the strength of the poem is its simplicity.
I didn’t set out to write the quintessential tear-jerker about drought and depression, I just created a story a lot of people tapped into, and a lot of people were living at that time.
While it’s about a farmer and his dad, it’s accidentally about any relationship, it’s about communication, it’s about family and it’s about hope.
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I have recently been performing at a lot of rural gatherings aimed at bringing people together.
Socialisation is really important in tough times — as is laughter.
I wrap the funny poems around Rain From Nowhere and hopefully everyone leaves feeling a bit better.
I had a bloke come up to me after a function thanking me for reciting the poem.
He told me he had planned to take his life, he was going to shoot his dog first, but then he heard the poem on the radio.
Now, months down the track he had moved towns, got a good job, was in a relationship and his dog was fine.
Knowing you have written something that can have a positive effect on people’s lives is very special.
It’s hard to process that his life was turned around by a poem.
And there are a lot of stories like that.
It was recently posted on a Kiwi Facebook site called NZ Farming and has received 36K likes, 27K shares and 3,800 comments and some of the comments — from New Zealand, Australia, America, South Africa, Europe — would break your heart.
The poem is always well received, it’s brought tears to the eyes of a lot of tough people and it appears it will always be relevant.
It somehow reminds us we can all be vulnerable, we all need good people around us and we all need to watch out for our friends and family.
Knowing you have written something that can have a positive effect on people’s lives is very special.
It doesn’t make me special, sometimes these things just happen.
But the fact a bunch of words thrown together can make a difference is pretty amazing.