Gary Forrester
Encyclopedia
Gary Forrester is a New Zealand-Australian musician, composer, novelist, poet, and memoirist. He was profiled by Random House
Australia (Australian Country Music, 1991) as one of the major figures in the Australian music scene during the 1980s and 1990s. Also a law lecturer and professor, he represented Indian tribes
in securing restoration legislation through the United States Congress
; authored a text on American Indian
law; and wrote numerous articles on the rights of indigenous peoples
, the environment, and other legal topics. Strangers To Us All: Lawyers and Poetry (featuring biographies and works of poets and writers who have a legal background) declared that "Gary Forrester is a hard man to pigeon-hole. He has practiced law, taught law, and spent time away from the legal profession. He is a singer, musician, poet, and writer."
Records, 1987), Uluru
(Larrikin Records
, 1988) and Kamara (Troubadour Records, 1990).
In 1988, his single "Uluru" (the Aboriginal
name for Australia's central Ayers Rock) was featured on two national commemorative albums by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
(the ABC), as "the cream of a very rich mix" of Australian country music. The ABC observed: "Like our landscape, the history of Australia is best told by our poets, and this recording offers a unique slice... of our bushland, our people, our dreams, and our extraordinary sense of humour."
Forrester's music also appeared on the Larrikin Records
1996 composite album, Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees, along with Australian country-folk icons Eric Bogle
, Judy Small
, The Bushwackers, and others.
Random House Australia's 1991 profile declared that "the most striking aspect of the albums, apart from their frequency, is the exceptionally high standard of songwriting." Australian Country Music observed that the bluegrass band fronted by Forrester (as lead singer and guitarist), the Rank Strangers
, "have a musical immediacy that typifies the best of bluegrass and recalls such players as The Stanley Brothers
and Bill Monroe
."
According to Country Beat, Australia's country music journal, Dust on the Bible was "one of the best bluegrass-country albums released in Australia" in 1987, and Forrester was "one of the best songwriters living in Australia."
In 1988, the Rank Strangers swept the Australian Gospel Music Awards in Tamworth, New South Wales
, winning Best Group, Best Male Vocalist, and Best Composition. In 1989 and 1990, Dust on the Bible and Uluru were finalists (top five) in the overall Australian Country Music Awards (ACMA). The Rank Strangers were edged out in 1989 in ACMA's "best new talent" category by future country star James Blundell
, and in 1990 in ACMA's "song of the year" category by country legend Smoky Dawson
. In 1990, the Rank Strangers finished second in the world (to a Czech
band) in an international competition sponsored by the International Bluegrass Music Association
(IBMA), Nashville, Tennessee
.
Forrester led the Rank Strangers on tours of Australia and America, sharing billings with bluegrass legends Bill Monroe
, Alison Krauss
, Ralph Stanley
, Emmylou Harris
, Tony Rice
, and many others. The American tour included "successful appearances at the Station Inn
in Nashville [with country-folk icon Townes Van Zandt
] and the IBMA Fan Fest in Owensboro, Kentucky
," as well as headlining at the Louisville Bluegrass and American MusicFest in Kentucky, then "the largest [acoustic] music festival in the USA."
Bluegrass Unlimited
, the oldest and arguably most influential journal of bluegrass music (based in Warrenton, Virginia), declared that "the Rank Strangers have a unique angle on bluegrass music, and ought to be proud of making their own brand of music come out on top in the Land Down Under." BU described Uluru as "one of the most intellectually stimulating bluegrass works of recent years, and it cannot be restricted to mere national boundaries." The Rank Strangers were the subject of a feature article in the December 1988 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. In a 2011 retrospective, BU featured the career of the Rank Strangers' banjo guru Peter Somerville, and recalled Forrester as "an excellent songwriter" of "challenging original material."
Britain's country music newspaper, International Country Music News, noting the band's successes at Australia's National Country Music Festival in Tamworth, New South Wales
, found the compositions contained "archetypal elements of nostalgia, humour and religion", as well as themes that were "contemporary and Australian in influence." International music critic Eberhard Finke, writing in the German magazine Bluegrass-Bühne, identified the source of some of the compositions: "In 1987 when his grandfather died in Illinois, he put his grief into writing songs. Not that they are sad songs - there are swinging happy ones, with plenty of religious overtones that brought him closer to his grandfather's legacy. He tuned his guitar to double drop-D, DADGBD, making the G-run more difficult, but better suiting his words and melodies."
medicine man Frank Fools Crow
. A 2006 review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
found Houseboating in the Ozarks idiosyncratic, but still engaging: an autobiographical "extended meditation on the difficulty of preserving familial and social memory, and sustaining and transmitting values and culture in our mobile, throwaway society." Lawyers and Poetry described Houseboating in the Ozarks as "autobiographical in the sense that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about the life of Robert Pirsig."
Begotten, Not Made, his second novel, recounts the travels of a wandering musician and his deaf sidekick, shuffling along on a doomed walking marathon from New York to San Francisco in the 1920s. A lengthy extract from Begotten, Not Made was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press, in Scoring from Second, an anthology featuring the works of "thirty accomplished writers" from North America, including Michael Chabon
, Andre Dubus
, and others. Begotten, Not Made is written "entirely in free verse in the voice of a demented Brer Rabbit."
Poems from Forrester's 2009 New Zealand book of verse, The Beautiful Daughters of Men: A Novella in Short Verse from Tinakori Hill, have appeared in prominent journals including the South Dakota Review
, Poetry New Zealand, JAAM (Just Another Art Movement), the Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop, and Voyagers: A New Zealand Science Fiction Poetry Anthology. The complete poems were published in January 2009, in The Legal Studies Forum, a journal established by the American Legal Studies Association to promote humanistic, critical, trans-disciplinary legal studies, and featuring works of poetry, essays, memoirs, stories, and criticism. The Beautiful Daughters is the tale of two migrants to New Zealand, a woman from Chechnya
and a dying man.
Forrester's 2010 story, "A Kilgore Trout Moment," which also appears in The Legal Studies Forum, is the whimsical tale of an oddball poet who contributes to a baseball writing conference in Tennessee, suffering near-death experiences and failures to communicate, only to find redemption, at last, at "home."
In 2011, Forrester's initial memoir, Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn, was published in America. Blaw, Hunter is a recollection of the years 1946-57 in central Illinois. The author's screenplay, Confiteor, is based on the memoir.
Also in 2011, he completed his third novel, The Connoisseur of Love. This novel is comprised of twelve meditations – a dozen episodes from the endgame of Peter Becker, Wellington’s self-styled "connoisseur of love." Peter is not quite at home in adopted city of Wellington, but there is no place on earth he would rather be. He is a creature of routine, an eccentric public servant, estranged from his only child Katrin and his ex-wife Sylvia. Alone, he stalks Wellington’s second-hand shops and cafés, bicycles through its streets and lanes, battles doggedly on its tennis courts, and plays his music – never quite connecting with anyone or anything.
The Germans, as you might expect, have a word for Peter Becker’s underlying sense that all is not well: Torschlusspanik – literally, "gate-closing panic" – or in Peter’s case, the quiet angst of aging as life’s options narrow. Not that long ago, he seemed to have all the time in the world; now his world is shrinking, and grace has not arrived.
tribal members, learned bluegrass music in the early 1980s from two members of the Lakota tribe, Cheeto Mestes and Mervin Frazier, while defending Indian
tribal rights in South Dakota
. During these years, while living on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation
in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, he also advised members of the American Indian Movement
, including activist Kenny Kane and others, and helped Lakota clients, including Kane, Madonna Thunder Hawk, and spiritual leader Sidney Uses Knife Keith, prepare for interviews and participation in Peter Matthiessen
's landmark 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
As Director of the Native American Program for Oregon Legal Services (NAPOLS) in the mid-1980s, he represented several American Indian tribes, notably as tribal attorney assisting the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
and the Klamath Tribes
before the United States Congress
in securing federal legislation restoring treaty rights following generations of "termination." In advocating before Congress for the restoration of these tribal governments, he worked with activist (and later Congresswoman) Elizabeth Furse
, tribal leaders Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) and Charles Kimball (Klamath), Congressman Les AuCoin
, and Senators Mark Hatfield
and Ted Kennedy
.
Forrester represented Indian clients in a number of litigated cases, including State v. Charles (custody of Indian child under the Indian Child Welfare Act); Medberry v. Hegstrom (Klamath Tribe's rights under Indian Claims Commission); Red Bird v. Meierhenry (unemployment statutes must be strictly construed in favor of Indian claimant); and Quiver v. Deputy Assistant Secretary, Indian Affairs (collection and distribution of Klamath lease payments under Indian trust allotments). He also argued successfully before Judges Richard Posner
, Diane Wood, and Daniel Anthony Manion
in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Cavalieri v. Shepard, establishing that where the police were "deliberately indifferent" to a prisoner's health and safety, they had violated his constitutional rights (where the former prisoner was now in a permanent vegetative state following an unsuccessful suicide attempt behind bars). The Seventh Circuit in Cavalieri further held that the police were not entitled to "qualified immunity," as the law regarding "deliberate indifference" had been established before the attempted suicide, so the police were on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional. Following the Seventh Circuit's decision, Forrester successfully opposed the writ of certiorari filed on behalf of the police in the U.S. Supreme Court.
His text Digest of American Indian Law: Cases and Chronology derived from his Oregon lectures at the Northwestern School of Law
in Portland
. He also taught law at the University of Melbourne
, the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and Victoria University of Wellington
, and wrote extensively on indigenous rights and other matters.
Forrester was given the honorary Lakota name "Jeshel" (meaning both "meadowlark" and "messenger") following an unusual incident at a sundance in Green Grass, South Dakota, in the summer of 1981. During piercing day, which was guided by Yuwipi
medicine man Frank Fools Crow
, a meadowlark glided down to Forrester's shoulder from the tall cottonwood Sun Pole at the center of the sundance circle. Fools Crow paused at the cauldron, and quietly bestowed the name Jeshel. The sundance continued.
Gary Forrester (aka Jeshel Forrester) was born in Decatur, Illinois
, "the soy-bean capital of the world." He grew up in Effingham, Quincy, and Tuscola in central Illinois, but spent most of his adult life overseas.
His father Harry Forrester (1922–2008), an Irish-American basketball and baseball coach, was inducted into the Quincy University
Hall of Fame and the Illinois Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame for his ground-breaking work on behalf of African-American athletes in the racially-segregated 1950s. His mother Alma Rose Grundy (1922–2009), a primary school teacher and piano player of European, American Indian, and Melungeon
descent, came from a line of musicians on her mother's side that included the German-American violinist Otto Funk
, who gained an entry in the 1977 edition of the Guinness Book of Records for playing the fiddle from New York to San Francisco. (The "Walking Fiddler's" journey was chronicled in Forrester's second novel, Begotten, Not Made.) On her father's side, Alma Rose Grundy's ancestors included the abolitionist crusader Miner Steele Gowin, a Melungeon who operated an Underground Railroad safe house in Jersey County, Illinois, for escaping slaves; his wife Nancy Beeman, descended from Cherokee Indians from Georgia, also helped to operate the Jersey County safe house.
After graduating from Tuscola High School in 1964, Forrester worked his way through university by farming, life-guarding, and stacking bottles at a Kraft Food plant. He became a conscientious objector and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War
, and performed alternative service in the Peace Corps
teaching mathematics in Guyana
, South America.
Following an M.A. in English and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Illinois College of Law, where he served as an editor on the law review
, Forrester clerked for U.S. Federal Judge Henry Seiler Wise
before emigrating to Australia. There, he taught at the University of Melbourne
and befriended Aboriginal leader Brian Kamara Willis in Alice Springs. Through Kamara Willis, Forrester became interested in the rights of indigenous peoples, and left Australia in 1980 to work on Indian reservations in the states of South Dakota and Oregon in the USA. (The album Kamara is dedicated to the memory of Kamara Willis.)
Upon the successful restoration of the Grand Ronde and Klamath tribes, Forrester wrote his book on Indian law and returned to Australia to form the Rank Strangers and represent Aboriginal clients and others. He was also politically active, advising Australian Democrats
leaders Senator Don Chipp
and Senator Janine Haines
in regard to the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio and the Democrats' successful campaign to save the Franklin River
in Tasmania
.
In 1990, Forrester led a group of eleven colleagues in mounting legal and political challenges to improprieties and mismanagement within the State of Victoria's accident compensation scheme, known at the time as "WorkCare." Approximately 25 court cases were lodged, based on allegations of racism, workplace espionage by WorkCare's fraud investigations unit, and other improprieties. Following airing of these grievances in the Victorian parliament on 29 March 1990, and a nationally-screened report by ABC television on 31 July 1990, the management of Victoria's Accident Compensation Commission (ACC) mounted Australia's longest-running defamation case, against the ABC, in Victoria's Supreme Court.
Victoria's State Ombudsman found that an ACC general manager had ordered one of his fraud investigators, Gary Mutimer, to spy on the ACC's chairman Professor Ronald Sackville
. Spy operations were also carried out against Mr. John Halfpenny, secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council
, an ex-offico member of the ACC board.
Following repeated urgings by Supreme Court Justice David Byrne, the ACC/ABC defamation case eventually settled on 28 March 1992, when the ABC issued an "apology" to the ACC's former managing director and two other managers. However, the ABC declined to pay any financial compensation to the three, and the ABC's chairman, David Hill
, told the Australian Senate that the apology was simply a "commercial decision." The case had cost the taxpayers of Victoria over two million dollars in legal costs.
In separate litigation in the Federal Court of Australia, Forrester was awarded a six-figure settlement by the ACC in November 1992. In a case before the Equal Opportunity Board, Forrester's colleague, African-born lawyer Dr. Nii Wallace-Bruce, received $33,000 in costs in July 1991, in the course of settling his claims of racism and other improprieties. Gary Mutimer was awarded compensation for stress caused by being required to carry out improper surveillance operations on Professor Sackville. The ACC general manager who had ordered the spying operations submitted his resignation from ACC in March 1990. On 25 July 1991, the ACC's managing director was removed from office by Victoria's State Government.
Throughout the rest of the 1990s, with the assistance of international WWOOFERS ("Willing Workers on Organic Farms"), Forrester (a vegetarian) and his family (including six children) operated an 80 acres (323,748.8 m²) organic farm in an Australian eucalypt
forest in the Shire of Hepburn, Victoria, based on principles developed by permaculture
designer and fellow Shire of Hepburn resident David Holmgren
. During this time, he also worked with Father Bob Maguire on behalf of homeless children in Melbourne, studied theology under Veronica Lawson RSM at the Australian Catholic University
, and wrote weekly newspaper columns in Central Victoria.
In 2000, Forrester accepted a professorship at the Law School of the University of Illinois. In 2006, following the completion of his first two novels and several years of anti-war protests against the USA's invasion of Iraq
, he and his family left America to live on Tinakori Hill
in Wellington
, New Zealand, where he wrote the poems collected in The Beautiful Daughters of Men, his memoir Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn, and his third novel, The Connoisseur of Love (in press).
From 2007 to 2012, he worked as a lawyer for Te Komihana O Ngā Tari Kāwanatanga
, and as a Teaching Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington
, lecturing in ethics, contract law, and writing.
Forrester's life has been fictionalized, as the character "Skidmore", in the works of Philip F. Deaver
, winner of the 1986 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
for his story collection Silent Retreats. See http://www.philipfdeaver.com.
(with H. Barry Holt).
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
Australia (Australian Country Music, 1991) as one of the major figures in the Australian music scene during the 1980s and 1990s. Also a law lecturer and professor, he represented Indian tribes
Indian tribes
The India's tribal belts refer to contiguous areas of indigenous settlement of tribal people of India.-Northwest India:The Tribal Belt of Northwest India includes the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka. The tribal people of this region have origins which precede the Vedic...
in securing restoration legislation through the United States Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
; authored a text on American Indian
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
law; and wrote numerous articles on the rights of indigenous peoples
Indigenous rights
Indigenous rights are those rights that exist in recognition of the specific condition of the indigenous peoples. This includes not only the most basic human rights of physical survival and integrity, but also the preservation of their land, language, religion and other elements of cultural...
, the environment, and other legal topics. Strangers To Us All: Lawyers and Poetry (featuring biographies and works of poets and writers who have a legal background) declared that "Gary Forrester is a hard man to pigeon-hole. He has practiced law, taught law, and spent time away from the legal profession. He is a singer, musician, poet, and writer."
Bluegrass music
Forrester's musical compositions were recorded (under his "nom de guitar" Eddie Rambeaux) on the albums Dust on the Bible (RCARCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
Records, 1987), Uluru
Uluru
Uluru , also known as Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone rock formation in the southern part of the Northern Territory, central Australia. It lies south west of the nearest large town, Alice Springs; by road. Kata Tjuta and Uluru are the two major features of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park....
(Larrikin Records
Larrikin Records
Larrikin Records is a record company founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey. Larrikin started as an independent label and was sold in 1995 to Festival Records....
, 1988) and Kamara (Troubadour Records, 1990).
In 1988, his single "Uluru" (the Aboriginal
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
name for Australia's central Ayers Rock) was featured on two national commemorative albums by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
(the ABC), as "the cream of a very rich mix" of Australian country music. The ABC observed: "Like our landscape, the history of Australia is best told by our poets, and this recording offers a unique slice... of our bushland, our people, our dreams, and our extraordinary sense of humour."
Forrester's music also appeared on the Larrikin Records
Larrikin Records
Larrikin Records is a record company founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey. Larrikin started as an independent label and was sold in 1995 to Festival Records....
1996 composite album, Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees, along with Australian country-folk icons Eric Bogle
Eric Bogle
Eric Bogle is a folk singer-songwriter. He emigrated to Australia in 1969 and currently resides near Adelaide, South Australia.-Career:...
, Judy Small
Judy Small
Judy Small is an Australian entertainer, folk singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Known for her feminist, often patriotic, and political songs, usually following a traditional theme, she has produced twelve albums, hundreds of songs and has been described as being among the most popular political...
, The Bushwackers, and others.
Random House Australia's 1991 profile declared that "the most striking aspect of the albums, apart from their frequency, is the exceptionally high standard of songwriting." Australian Country Music observed that the bluegrass band fronted by Forrester (as lead singer and guitarist), the Rank Strangers
Rank Strangers
The Rank Strangers were an Australian bluegrass band that won multiple national and international awards during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Random House’s 1991 book Australian Country Music declared the Rank Strangers to be among the major figures of the 1990s Australian music scene, along...
, "have a musical immediacy that typifies the best of bluegrass and recalls such players as The Stanley Brothers
The Stanley Brothers
The Stanley Brothers were an American bluegrass duo made up of brothers Carter and Ralph Stanley.-Biography:Carter and Ralph Stanley hailed originally from Dickenson County, Virginia. The family soon moved to McClure, Virginia where their parents worked a small farm in the Clinch Mountains...
and Bill Monroe
Bill Monroe
William Smith Monroe was an American musician who created the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader...
."
According to Country Beat, Australia's country music journal, Dust on the Bible was "one of the best bluegrass-country albums released in Australia" in 1987, and Forrester was "one of the best songwriters living in Australia."
In 1988, the Rank Strangers swept the Australian Gospel Music Awards in Tamworth, New South Wales
Tamworth, New South Wales
Tamworth is a city in the New England region of New South Wales, Australia. Straddling the Peel River, Tamworth, which contains an estimated population of 47,595 people, is the major regional centre for southern New England and in the local government area of Tamworth Regional Council. The city...
, winning Best Group, Best Male Vocalist, and Best Composition. In 1989 and 1990, Dust on the Bible and Uluru were finalists (top five) in the overall Australian Country Music Awards (ACMA). The Rank Strangers were edged out in 1989 in ACMA's "best new talent" category by future country star James Blundell
James Blundell (singer)
-Music:He won a Golden Guitar Award for best new talent of 1987.Blundell's eponymous first album, in 1989, followed up by "Hand It Down", which was released in the United States in 1990 following its success in Australia. Successive albums were This Road and Touch of Water. This Road included the...
, and in 1990 in ACMA's "song of the year" category by country legend Smoky Dawson
Smoky Dawson
Smoky Dawson, MBE , born Herbert Henry Dawson, was an Australian country music performer. He was widely touted as Australia's first singing cowboy.-Biography:...
. In 1990, the Rank Strangers finished second in the world (to a Czech
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
band) in an international competition sponsored by the International Bluegrass Music Association
International Bluegrass Music Association
The International Bluegrass Music Association, or IBMA, is a trade association to promote bluegrass music.Formed in 1985, IBMA established its first headquarters in Owensboro, Kentucky. In 1988 they announced plans to create the International Bluegrass Music Museum as a joint venture with...
(IBMA), Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
.
Forrester led the Rank Strangers on tours of Australia and America, sharing billings with bluegrass legends Bill Monroe
Bill Monroe
William Smith Monroe was an American musician who created the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader...
, Alison Krauss
Alison Krauss
Alison Maria Krauss is an American bluegrass-country singer, songwriter and fiddler. She entered the music industry at an early age, winning local contests by the age of ten and recording for the first time at fourteen. She signed with Rounder Records in 1985 and released her first solo album in...
, Ralph Stanley
Ralph Stanley
Ralph Stanley , also known as Dr. Ralph Stanley, is an American bluegrass artist, known for his distinctive singing and banjo playing.-Biography:...
, Emmylou Harris
Emmylou Harris
Emmylou Harris is an American singer-songwriter and musician. In addition to her work as a solo artist and bandleader, both as an interpreter of other composers' works and as a singer-songwriter, she is a sought-after backing vocalist and duet partner, working with numerous other artists including...
, Tony Rice
Tony Rice
Tony Rice is an American acoustic guitarist and bluegrass musician. He is considered one of the most influential acoustic guitar players in bluegrass, progressive bluegrass, newgrass and acoustic jazz.Rice spans the range of acoustic music, from traditional bluegrass to jazz-influenced New...
, and many others. The American tour included "successful appearances at the Station Inn
Station Inn
The Station Inn is a concert venue in Nashville, Tennessee that hosts bluegrass acts. Frommers wrote that it is "widely regarded as one of the best bluegrass venues around"...
in Nashville [with country-folk icon Townes Van Zandt
Townes Van Zandt
John Townes Van Zandt , best known as Townes Van Zandt, was an American Texas Country-folk music singer-songwriter, performer, and poet...
] and the IBMA Fan Fest in Owensboro, Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
," as well as headlining at the Louisville Bluegrass and American MusicFest in Kentucky, then "the largest [acoustic] music festival in the USA."
Bluegrass Unlimited
Bluegrass Unlimited
Bluegrass Unlimited is a monthly music magazine "dedicated to the furtherance of bluegrass and old-time musicians, devotees and associates." First published in 1966, as of 2008 the magazine had a circulation of more than 25,000 copies and is widely considered the premier magazine for bluegrass music...
, the oldest and arguably most influential journal of bluegrass music (based in Warrenton, Virginia), declared that "the Rank Strangers have a unique angle on bluegrass music, and ought to be proud of making their own brand of music come out on top in the Land Down Under." BU described Uluru as "one of the most intellectually stimulating bluegrass works of recent years, and it cannot be restricted to mere national boundaries." The Rank Strangers were the subject of a feature article in the December 1988 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. In a 2011 retrospective, BU featured the career of the Rank Strangers' banjo guru Peter Somerville, and recalled Forrester as "an excellent songwriter" of "challenging original material."
Britain's country music newspaper, International Country Music News, noting the band's successes at Australia's National Country Music Festival in Tamworth, New South Wales
Tamworth, New South Wales
Tamworth is a city in the New England region of New South Wales, Australia. Straddling the Peel River, Tamworth, which contains an estimated population of 47,595 people, is the major regional centre for southern New England and in the local government area of Tamworth Regional Council. The city...
, found the compositions contained "archetypal elements of nostalgia, humour and religion", as well as themes that were "contemporary and Australian in influence." International music critic Eberhard Finke, writing in the German magazine Bluegrass-Bühne, identified the source of some of the compositions: "In 1987 when his grandfather died in Illinois, he put his grief into writing songs. Not that they are sad songs - there are swinging happy ones, with plenty of religious overtones that brought him closer to his grandfather's legacy. He tuned his guitar to double drop-D, DADGBD, making the G-run more difficult, but better suiting his words and melodies."
Novels, poetry, memoirs, stories, and screenplay
Following the demise of the Rank Strangers in the 1990s, Forrester turned to writing novels and poetry, with a focus on music and family. Houseboating in the Ozarks (Dufour Editions, 2006), which includes fictional accounts of a bluegrass band, is the story of a circular journey through the American Midwest, with reflective detours to Australia, South America, Japan, and Italy. Houseboating in the Ozarks meanders through tribal and Western spiritual traditions, including those of Aboriginal Australia and Lakota sundances in Green Grass, South Dakota, led by YuwipiYuwipi
A Yuwipi is a Lakota/Sioux healing ceremony. In the ceremony, the healer is tied up with a special blanket and ropes while praying for the healing of a specific person or persons. Other participants also pray for the person or persons to be healed....
medicine man Frank Fools Crow
Frank Fools Crow
Frank Fools Crow was a Lakota Sioux spiritual leader, Yuwipi medicine man, and the nephew of Black Elk. He was instrumental in negotiating the end of the insurrection at Wounded Knee in 1973 and the subject of a biography by Thomas Mails.-Life:...
. A 2006 review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
found Houseboating in the Ozarks idiosyncratic, but still engaging: an autobiographical "extended meditation on the difficulty of preserving familial and social memory, and sustaining and transmitting values and culture in our mobile, throwaway society." Lawyers and Poetry described Houseboating in the Ozarks as "autobiographical in the sense that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about the life of Robert Pirsig."
Begotten, Not Made, his second novel, recounts the travels of a wandering musician and his deaf sidekick, shuffling along on a doomed walking marathon from New York to San Francisco in the 1920s. A lengthy extract from Begotten, Not Made was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press, in Scoring from Second, an anthology featuring the works of "thirty accomplished writers" from North America, including Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon born May 24, 1963) is an American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation", according to The Virginia Quarterly Review....
, Andre Dubus
Andre Dubus
Andre Dubus, II was an American short story writer, essayist, and autobiographer. Dubus is recognized as one of the most prolific American short-story writers in the 20th century.-Early life and education:...
, and others. Begotten, Not Made is written "entirely in free verse in the voice of a demented Brer Rabbit."
Poems from Forrester's 2009 New Zealand book of verse, The Beautiful Daughters of Men: A Novella in Short Verse from Tinakori Hill, have appeared in prominent journals including the South Dakota Review
South Dakota Review
The South Dakota Review is a quarterly literary magazine published by the University of South Dakota. It was founded by John R. Milton in 1963 and is currently edited by Brian Bedard. Past Associate Editors include Eileen Sullivan, and Theo Bohn...
, Poetry New Zealand, JAAM (Just Another Art Movement), the Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop, and Voyagers: A New Zealand Science Fiction Poetry Anthology. The complete poems were published in January 2009, in The Legal Studies Forum, a journal established by the American Legal Studies Association to promote humanistic, critical, trans-disciplinary legal studies, and featuring works of poetry, essays, memoirs, stories, and criticism. The Beautiful Daughters is the tale of two migrants to New Zealand, a woman from Chechnya
Chechnya
The Chechen Republic , commonly referred to as Chechnya , also spelled Chechnia or Chechenia, sometimes referred to as Ichkeria , is a federal subject of Russia . It is located in the southeastern part of Europe in the Northern Caucasus mountains. The capital of the republic is the city of Grozny...
and a dying man.
Forrester's 2010 story, "A Kilgore Trout Moment," which also appears in The Legal Studies Forum, is the whimsical tale of an oddball poet who contributes to a baseball writing conference in Tennessee, suffering near-death experiences and failures to communicate, only to find redemption, at last, at "home."
In 2011, Forrester's initial memoir, Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn, was published in America. Blaw, Hunter is a recollection of the years 1946-57 in central Illinois. The author's screenplay, Confiteor, is based on the memoir.
Also in 2011, he completed his third novel, The Connoisseur of Love. This novel is comprised of twelve meditations – a dozen episodes from the endgame of Peter Becker, Wellington’s self-styled "connoisseur of love." Peter is not quite at home in adopted city of Wellington, but there is no place on earth he would rather be. He is a creature of routine, an eccentric public servant, estranged from his only child Katrin and his ex-wife Sylvia. Alone, he stalks Wellington’s second-hand shops and cafés, bicycles through its streets and lanes, battles doggedly on its tennis courts, and plays his music – never quite connecting with anyone or anything.
The Germans, as you might expect, have a word for Peter Becker’s underlying sense that all is not well: Torschlusspanik – literally, "gate-closing panic" – or in Peter’s case, the quiet angst of aging as life’s options narrow. Not that long ago, he seemed to have all the time in the world; now his world is shrinking, and grace has not arrived.
Representation of US Indian tribes
Forrester, a descendant (on his mother's side) of CherokeeCherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...
tribal members, learned bluegrass music in the early 1980s from two members of the Lakota tribe, Cheeto Mestes and Mervin Frazier, while defending Indian
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
tribal rights in South Dakota
South Dakota
South Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States. It is named after the Lakota and Dakota Sioux American Indian tribes. Once a part of Dakota Territory, South Dakota became a state on November 2, 1889. The state has an area of and an estimated population of just over...
. During these years, while living on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation
Cheyenne River Indian Reservation
The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation was created by the United States in 1889 by breaking up the Great Sioux Reservation, following its victory over the Lakota in a series of wars in the 1870s. The reservation covers almost all of Dewey and Ziebach counties in South Dakota...
in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, he also advised members of the American Indian Movement
American Indian Movement
The American Indian Movement is a Native American activist organization in the United States, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by urban Native Americans. The national AIM agenda focuses on spirituality, leadership, and sovereignty...
, including activist Kenny Kane and others, and helped Lakota clients, including Kane, Madonna Thunder Hawk, and spiritual leader Sidney Uses Knife Keith, prepare for interviews and participation in Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist...
's landmark 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
As Director of the Native American Program for Oregon Legal Services (NAPOLS) in the mid-1980s, he represented several American Indian tribes, notably as tribal attorney assisting the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon consists of twenty-seven Native American tribes with long historical ties to present-day Western Oregon between the western boundary of the Oregon Coast and the eastern boundary of the Cascade Range, and the northern boundary of...
and the Klamath Tribes
Klamath Tribes
The Klamath Tribes, formerly the Klamath Indian Tribe of Oregon, are a federally recognized confederation of three Native American tribes who traditionally inhabited Southern Oregon and Northern California in the United States: the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin...
before the United States Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
in securing federal legislation restoring treaty rights following generations of "termination." In advocating before Congress for the restoration of these tribal governments, he worked with activist (and later Congresswoman) Elizabeth Furse
Elizabeth Furse
Elizabeth Furse is a small business owner and faculty member of Portland State University. She was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 1999, representing Oregon's 1st congressional district...
, tribal leaders Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) and Charles Kimball (Klamath), Congressman Les AuCoin
Les AuCoin
Walter Leslie "Les" AuCoin , is an American politician and the first Democrat elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from since it was formed in 1882. The seat has been held by a Democrat ever since....
, and Senators Mark Hatfield
Mark Hatfield
Mark Odom Hatfield was an American politician and educator from the state of Oregon. A Republican, he served for 30 years as a United States Senator from Oregon, and also as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee...
and Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...
.
Forrester represented Indian clients in a number of litigated cases, including State v. Charles (custody of Indian child under the Indian Child Welfare Act); Medberry v. Hegstrom (Klamath Tribe's rights under Indian Claims Commission); Red Bird v. Meierhenry (unemployment statutes must be strictly construed in favor of Indian claimant); and Quiver v. Deputy Assistant Secretary, Indian Affairs (collection and distribution of Klamath lease payments under Indian trust allotments). He also argued successfully before Judges Richard Posner
Richard Posner
Richard Allen Posner is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School...
, Diane Wood, and Daniel Anthony Manion
Daniel Anthony Manion
Daniel Anthony Manion is a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.Manion received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 1964. At Notre Dame, Manion was a participant in the Bengal Bouts. Following graduation, Manion served in the Army in the Vietnam War...
in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Cavalieri v. Shepard, establishing that where the police were "deliberately indifferent" to a prisoner's health and safety, they had violated his constitutional rights (where the former prisoner was now in a permanent vegetative state following an unsuccessful suicide attempt behind bars). The Seventh Circuit in Cavalieri further held that the police were not entitled to "qualified immunity," as the law regarding "deliberate indifference" had been established before the attempted suicide, so the police were on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional. Following the Seventh Circuit's decision, Forrester successfully opposed the writ of certiorari filed on behalf of the police in the U.S. Supreme Court.
His text Digest of American Indian Law: Cases and Chronology derived from his Oregon lectures at the Northwestern School of Law
Lewis & Clark Law School
Lewis and Clark Law School is a private American law school located in Portland, Oregon. In the last ten years, L&C's Environmental Law program has been the highest-rated in the United States eight times....
in Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
. He also taught law at the University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
, the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
, and wrote extensively on indigenous rights and other matters.
Forrester was given the honorary Lakota name "Jeshel" (meaning both "meadowlark" and "messenger") following an unusual incident at a sundance in Green Grass, South Dakota, in the summer of 1981. During piercing day, which was guided by Yuwipi
Yuwipi
A Yuwipi is a Lakota/Sioux healing ceremony. In the ceremony, the healer is tied up with a special blanket and ropes while praying for the healing of a specific person or persons. Other participants also pray for the person or persons to be healed....
medicine man Frank Fools Crow
Frank Fools Crow
Frank Fools Crow was a Lakota Sioux spiritual leader, Yuwipi medicine man, and the nephew of Black Elk. He was instrumental in negotiating the end of the insurrection at Wounded Knee in 1973 and the subject of a biography by Thomas Mails.-Life:...
, a meadowlark glided down to Forrester's shoulder from the tall cottonwood Sun Pole at the center of the sundance circle. Fools Crow paused at the cauldron, and quietly bestowed the name Jeshel. The sundance continued.
Life
Decatur, Illinois
Decatur is the largest city and the county seat of Macon County in the U.S. state of Illinois. The city, sometimes called "the Soybean Capital of the World", was founded in 1823 and is located along the Sangamon River and Lake Decatur in Central Illinois. In 2000 the city population was 81,500,...
, "the soy-bean capital of the world." He grew up in Effingham, Quincy, and Tuscola in central Illinois, but spent most of his adult life overseas.
His father Harry Forrester (1922–2008), an Irish-American basketball and baseball coach, was inducted into the Quincy University
Quincy University
Quincy University a private liberal arts Catholic university in the Franciscan tradition. It is located in Quincy, Illinois and currently enrolls around 1,300 students.-History:...
Hall of Fame and the Illinois Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame for his ground-breaking work on behalf of African-American athletes in the racially-segregated 1950s. His mother Alma Rose Grundy (1922–2009), a primary school teacher and piano player of European, American Indian, and Melungeon
Melungeon
Melungeon is a term traditionally applied to one of a number of "tri-racial isolate" groups of the Southeastern United States, mainly in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and East Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations...
descent, came from a line of musicians on her mother's side that included the German-American violinist Otto Funk
Otto Funk
Otto Funk was a German-American violinist who gained fame for playing the fiddle while walking every step of the way from New York to San Francisco in 1928–29. He was 60 years old at the time of his marathon walk...
, who gained an entry in the 1977 edition of the Guinness Book of Records for playing the fiddle from New York to San Francisco. (The "Walking Fiddler's" journey was chronicled in Forrester's second novel, Begotten, Not Made.) On her father's side, Alma Rose Grundy's ancestors included the abolitionist crusader Miner Steele Gowin, a Melungeon who operated an Underground Railroad safe house in Jersey County, Illinois, for escaping slaves; his wife Nancy Beeman, descended from Cherokee Indians from Georgia, also helped to operate the Jersey County safe house.
After graduating from Tuscola High School in 1964, Forrester worked his way through university by farming, life-guarding, and stacking bottles at a Kraft Food plant. He became a conscientious objector and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, and performed alternative service in the Peace Corps
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...
teaching mathematics in Guyana
Guyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
, South America.
Following an M.A. in English and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Illinois College of Law, where he served as an editor on the law review
Law review
A law review is a scholarly journal focusing on legal issues, normally published by an organization of students at a law school or through a bar association...
, Forrester clerked for U.S. Federal Judge Henry Seiler Wise
Henry Seiler Wise
Henry Seiler Wise was a United States federal judge.Born in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, Wise received an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1933 and an LL.B. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1933. He was in private practice in Danville, Illinois from 1934 to 1966. He was a...
before emigrating to Australia. There, he taught at the University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
and befriended Aboriginal leader Brian Kamara Willis in Alice Springs. Through Kamara Willis, Forrester became interested in the rights of indigenous peoples, and left Australia in 1980 to work on Indian reservations in the states of South Dakota and Oregon in the USA. (The album Kamara is dedicated to the memory of Kamara Willis.)
Upon the successful restoration of the Grand Ronde and Klamath tribes, Forrester wrote his book on Indian law and returned to Australia to form the Rank Strangers and represent Aboriginal clients and others. He was also politically active, advising Australian Democrats
Australian Democrats
The Australian Democrats is an Australian political party espousing a socially liberal ideology. It was formed in 1977, by a merger of the Australia Party and the New LM, after principals of those minor parties secured the commitment of former Liberal minister Don Chipp, as a high profile leader...
leaders Senator Don Chipp
Don Chipp
Donald Leslie Chipp, AO was an Australian politician, and the inaugural leader of the Australian Democrats.-Early life:...
and Senator Janine Haines
Janine Haines
Janine Haines, AM , Australian politician, was the first female federal parliamentary leader of an Australian political party. An Australian Democrat, she was also the first member of that party to enter the federal parliament after the party's formation...
in regard to the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio and the Democrats' successful campaign to save the Franklin River
Franklin River
The Franklin River lies in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park at the mid northern area of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Its source is situated at the western edge of the Central Highlands and it continues west towards the West Coast of Tasmania...
in Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
.
In 1990, Forrester led a group of eleven colleagues in mounting legal and political challenges to improprieties and mismanagement within the State of Victoria's accident compensation scheme, known at the time as "WorkCare." Approximately 25 court cases were lodged, based on allegations of racism, workplace espionage by WorkCare's fraud investigations unit, and other improprieties. Following airing of these grievances in the Victorian parliament on 29 March 1990, and a nationally-screened report by ABC television on 31 July 1990, the management of Victoria's Accident Compensation Commission (ACC) mounted Australia's longest-running defamation case, against the ABC, in Victoria's Supreme Court.
Victoria's State Ombudsman found that an ACC general manager had ordered one of his fraud investigators, Gary Mutimer, to spy on the ACC's chairman Professor Ronald Sackville
Ronald Sackville
Ronald Sackville AO is an acting judge of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and a former judge of the Federal Court of Australia.-Career:...
. Spy operations were also carried out against Mr. John Halfpenny, secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council
Victorian Trades Hall Council
The Victorian Trades Hall Council is a representative body of trade union organisations, known as a Labour council, in the State of Victoria, Australia...
, an ex-offico member of the ACC board.
Following repeated urgings by Supreme Court Justice David Byrne, the ACC/ABC defamation case eventually settled on 28 March 1992, when the ABC issued an "apology" to the ACC's former managing director and two other managers. However, the ABC declined to pay any financial compensation to the three, and the ABC's chairman, David Hill
David Hill
-Politicians:* David B. Hill , Governor of the U.S. state of New York, 1885–1891, U.S. Senator from New York, 1892–1897* David Jayne Hill , politician from New York, United States Assistant Secretary of State, 1898–1903...
, told the Australian Senate that the apology was simply a "commercial decision." The case had cost the taxpayers of Victoria over two million dollars in legal costs.
In separate litigation in the Federal Court of Australia, Forrester was awarded a six-figure settlement by the ACC in November 1992. In a case before the Equal Opportunity Board, Forrester's colleague, African-born lawyer Dr. Nii Wallace-Bruce, received $33,000 in costs in July 1991, in the course of settling his claims of racism and other improprieties. Gary Mutimer was awarded compensation for stress caused by being required to carry out improper surveillance operations on Professor Sackville. The ACC general manager who had ordered the spying operations submitted his resignation from ACC in March 1990. On 25 July 1991, the ACC's managing director was removed from office by Victoria's State Government.
Throughout the rest of the 1990s, with the assistance of international WWOOFERS ("Willing Workers on Organic Farms"), Forrester (a vegetarian) and his family (including six children) operated an 80 acres (323,748.8 m²) organic farm in an Australian eucalypt
Eucalypt
Eucalypts are woody plants belonging to three closely related genera:Eucalyptus, Corymbia and Angophora.In 1995 new evidence, largely genetic, indicated that some prominent Eucalyptus species were actually more closely related to Angophora than to the other eucalypts; they were split off into the...
forest in the Shire of Hepburn, Victoria, based on principles developed by permaculture
Permaculture
Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that is modeled on the relationships found in nature. It is based on the ecology of how things interrelate rather than on the strictly biological concerns that form the foundation of modern agriculture...
designer and fellow Shire of Hepburn resident David Holmgren
David Holmgren
David Holmgren is an ecologist, ecological design engineer and writer. He is known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison.- Life and work :Holmgren was born in the state of Western Australia...
. During this time, he also worked with Father Bob Maguire on behalf of homeless children in Melbourne, studied theology under Veronica Lawson RSM at the Australian Catholic University
Australian Catholic University
Australian Catholic University is a national public university. It has six campuses and offers programs in five faculties throughout Australia.-History:...
, and wrote weekly newspaper columns in Central Victoria.
In 2000, Forrester accepted a professorship at the Law School of the University of Illinois. In 2006, following the completion of his first two novels and several years of anti-war protests against the USA's invasion of Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
, he and his family left America to live on Tinakori Hill
Tinakori Hill
Tinakori Hill is a hill running for 38 hectares through the Town belt of Wellington, New Zealand. It was renamed Te Ahumairangi Hill by the Port Nicholson Block Claims Settlement Act 2009.-History:...
in Wellington
Wellington
Wellington is the capital city and third most populous urban area of New Zealand, although it is likely to have surpassed Christchurch due to the exodus following the Canterbury Earthquake. It is at the southwestern tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range...
, New Zealand, where he wrote the poems collected in The Beautiful Daughters of Men, his memoir Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn, and his third novel, The Connoisseur of Love (in press).
From 2007 to 2012, he worked as a lawyer for Te Komihana O Ngā Tari Kāwanatanga
State Services Commission
The State Services Commission , formerly the Public Service Commission, is a central government agency within the New Zealand government. The current State Services Commissioner is Iain Rennie...
, and as a Teaching Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
, lecturing in ethics, contract law, and writing.
Forrester's life has been fictionalized, as the character "Skidmore", in the works of Philip F. Deaver
Philip F. Deaver
Philip F. Deaver is an American writer and poet from Tuscola, Illinois. His work has appeared in literary magazines, including The New England Review, the Kenyon Review, Frostproof Review, the Florida Review, Poetry Miscellany and The Reaper....
, winner of the 1986 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is an annual prize awarded by the University of Georgia Press named in honor of the American short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor....
for his story collection Silent Retreats. See http://www.philipfdeaver.com.
Selected bibliography
- "Begotten, Not Made" (excerpt from novel), in:
- "The Beautiful Daughters of Men: A Novella in Short Verse from Tinakori HillTinakori HillTinakori Hill is a hill running for 38 hectares through the Town belt of Wellington, New Zealand. It was renamed Te Ahumairangi Hill by the Port Nicholson Block Claims Settlement Act 2009.-History:...
." The Legal Studies Forum, Volume XXXIII, Supplement No. 2, West Virginia University (2009), ISSN: 0894-5993 (a journal established by the American Legal Studies Association to promote humanistic, critical, trans-disciplinary writing, and featuring works of poetry, essays, memoirs, stories, and criticism). - "A Kilgore Trout Moment" (short story). The Legal Studies Forum, Volume XXXIV, No. 2, West Virginia University (2010), ISSN: 0894-5993.
- The Connoisseur of Love (2011) [third novel, published by Steele Roberts - in press].
Selected discography
Albums
- Dust on the Bible (Album). RCARCARCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
(Nicholls and Dimes) (1988) (finalist, Australian Country Music Awards).
- Back in Illinois
- Jesus Is a Travelling Man (best vocalist, Australian Gospel Music Awards)
- Hannah Cried
- Dust on the Bible
- A Hundred Miles an Hour to the Throne
- Singing in the Family Circle
- Matthew Chapter Three (best song, Australian Gospel Music Awards)
- Elva
- Greater Country 3UZ
- Seventh Heaven (final five, "Best New Talent", Australia Country Music Awards)
- Uluru (Album). Larrikin RecordsLarrikin RecordsLarrikin Records is a record company founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey. Larrikin started as an independent label and was sold in 1995 to Festival Records....
(Australia) (1989) (finalist, Australian Country Music Awards).
- Uluru (final five for song of the year, Australian Country Music Awards - based on the trial of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain)
- TV Preacher
- Grampa Grundy
- JFK
- Two Dollar Bill (a/k/a "Long Journey Home")
- Alma Rose
- Mekong
- King O'Malley
- Take Me Home
- Ice in Her Veins
- Rain and Snow (written by Dock BoggsDock BoggsMoran Lee "Dock" Boggs was an influential old-time singer, songwriter and banjo player. His style of banjo playing, as well as his singing, is considered a unique combination of Appalachian folk music and African-American blues...
) - Talking in Tongues
- Kamara (Album). Troubadour Records (Australia) (1990).
- Love Please Come Home (written by Bill MonroeBill MonroeWilliam Smith Monroe was an American musician who created the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader...
) - Kamara (based on the life of Aboriginal leader Brian Kamara Willis)
- White Freight Liner (written by Townes Van ZandtTownes Van ZandtJohn Townes Van Zandt , best known as Townes Van Zandt, was an American Texas Country-folk music singer-songwriter, performer, and poet...
) - East Virginia Blues (trad.)
- Walking at Midnight
- You've Got a Lover (written by Ricky SkaggsRicky SkaggsRickie Lee "Ricky" Skaggs is a country and bluegrass singer, musician, producer, and composer. He primarily plays mandolin; however, he also plays fiddle, guitar, and banjo.-Early career:...
) - Come Home Angeline
- Nella Dan (based on the story of the great Australian explorer ship)
- Catfish John (written by Bob McDill and Alan Reynolds)
- Ross River Fever
- Rose Anne's Getting Married Today
- Glendale Train (written by John Dawson)
- Memories of Mother and Dad (written by Bill Monroe)
Composite Albums
- That's Australia. Larrikin RecordsLarrikin RecordsLarrikin Records is a record company founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey. Larrikin started as an independent label and was sold in 1995 to Festival Records....
(Australia) (1988) (composite album produced by ABC TelevisionABC TelevisionABC Television is a service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation launched in 1956. As a public broadcasting broadcaster, the ABC provides four non-commercial channels within Australia, and a partially advertising-funded satellite channel overseas....
). - Music Deli. Larrikin Records (Australia), Larrikin LRF 227 (1988) (composite album of music "borrowing from different traditions and creating new forms").
- Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees. Larrikin Records, 1996.
External links
- http://www.dufoureditions.com/
- http://www.crockheadabroad.blogspot.com (24 November 2006 entry)
- http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/lp-2001/intro/contemp_pt1.html
- http://www.crockheadabroad.blogspot.com (1 January 2007 entry)
- http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/467/2208463.html
- http://forresterfamily.org/index.php