The word had passed around

THE golden hour. An Aussie beach, an evening of heavenly clearness. Several families around a fire, tummies full of snags and steak.

The sparklers have all been sparkled by the kids - whirligigs and words in the sky, too brief! And the glow-sticks are losing their potency. The world is settling, exhaling at last. Suddenly, a voice.

"There was movement at the station ... " The entire poem: 104 lines, by heart. One by one we're reeled in, caught; especially the children who've never heard of the colt that got away, of the galloping rhythms of Australian recital. By an urban bloke, no less, who none of us knew had it in him; a shine in him as he sat there and stunned us all.

The voice, the words washed over each adult, stilling us with a great calm of reverie and wonder. Oddly, it didn't feel out of place among state-of-the-art beach recliners and iPhones. Most of us were astounded our friend could remember the poem at all. "Mum taught me as a kid," he shrugged quietly. "I've never forgotten it."

Shortly afterwards, I did a TEDx talk in Brisbane. These talks are meant to be memorised rather than delivered with notes; it's a feature of their tightly controlled presentation. But the words felt like they were hanging on by their fingernails, they lost their grip too much; mortified, I surrendered to palm cards. My mind just refused to relax and unfurl amid the mad fracturing of motherhood, work, age, life. So much in my head, too much! I willed my brain to astound me that day and resolutely, disappointingly, it didn't.

Learning by heart is a form of mental exercise; leave it untended and the ability rusts away. Like handwriting and shoelace-tying, its significance is fading in this modern world. Memorising anything at length now feels like an agility, a marvel, that's being lost amid everything, instantly, on tap; screens are constantly at the ready, in front of us and in our pockets, for whatever we want. Recital's no longer taught in schools. NYU professor Catherine Robson's book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem looks at recitation from last century, when it was part of the classroom curriculum. Why do it? To cultivate a love of literature, to boost self-confidence, to improve the speaking voice, to exercise and strengthen the brain - and to maintain a connection with the poet. "If we do not learn by heart," Robson writes, "the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat."

Poets are big on recital. Russian Joseph Brodsky demanded his students memorise a thousand lines per semester. Why? To prepare them for later life, he reasoned, for whatever might be flung at them; to provide solace. During his exile in the Arctic by the Soviets he was grateful for every piece of poetry he had in his head. Aung San Suu Kyi kept her mind exercised during her own long imprisonment by learning a new poem every day. In the end she'd memorised Tennyson's and Yeats' complete works.

My kids don't learn poetry by heart in their Aussie schools. In London they were forced to, for an annual, compulsory, school-wide competition. Five-year-olds were reciting mostly nursery rhymes but the older kids were diving into Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Lear. It was wonderful to witness. The sheer skill of it; the way their little minds would absorb the poem's rhythm, beauty, narrative muscularity. I wish they'd do something similar here. We have a vast tradition of bush poetry that feels like it's not written for the page but the voice.

A campfire voice, just as I heard on that wondrous night recently, which felt like we were suddenly afforded a direct line to the poet. Banjo Paterson felt close, thrillingly, for an arrested moment, and then life took over once again ...

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