Ron Palenski - a man of many written talents
News of Ron Palenski's death brought back memories of times spent in his company on various sports writing assignments, and good times shared among others now declining in numbers.
Our first meeting, albeit briefly, was as I recall at the 1983 Bledisloe Cup game at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the occasion of which was made possible as a stopoff point en route to South Africa, where my employer at the time The Southland Times, had deemed it worthwhile that I should accept the invitation the company received to have a journalist at the International Rugby Media Congress, the expensive 18-day meeting at which the South African Rugby Board wanted to show the world that they were trying to do something for the black and coloured people interested in rugby. But that is another story.
When next we met, it was after moving to Wellington to the Evening Post where Ron was working for The Dominion, covering cricket and rugby, making him a rival in those fields.
However, rivalry was for the working hours, friendship was for our own time. It was during the 1988 All Blacks tour of Australia that we spent a lot of time together, me the mere apprentice and Ron the guiding light. We talked of many things, some of it driven by the fact that we were both southern men, Ron from Dunedin and I from Invercargill via Mataura.
Ron Palenski, Don Cameron and Lynn McConnell
It was while in the coastal town of Terrigal that our interests were more clearly intersecting. The establishment we stayed in, The Lights of Cobb and Co, had a unique flavour of the great Australian poet Henry Lawson, the stablemate and rival of Banjo Paterson, who wrote the said poem The Lights of Cobb and Co. One of those flavours was their paper placemats in the restaurant featuring poems from the two afore-mentioned poets. By the end of our stay, it is fair to say we were both more familiar with Paterson's 'Clancy of the Overflow' than before we arrived.
Stay with me, there is form here. During our dinner discussions and post-dinner libations, the subject of cycling came up. While Ron has an acknowledged record of rugby, cricket and other sports writing, he had a fascination with cycling. Having had 10 years writing about the tour of Southland, and numerous evenings for track events at Kew Bowl, I had acquired a few tales or more of cycling in the south in which he revelled. He was the only person who caught onto a line a fellow worker at The Southland Times used once as he saw me heading home on my pushbike, 'Back on your Harry Hubber are you?' he would say. Somewhere on the tour I must have seen someone on a bike resulting in the reference to Harry Hubber, a veteran Southland cyclist who broke the South Island land speed record for covering the distance from Christchurch to Invercargill on his trusty bike a few years earlier. Ron almost fell over in laughter.
Anyway, a few years later, Ron covered a couple of Southland cycling tours and one day the following appeared in my email in-box at the Evening Post. It might well be titled 'Salute to the South' and with apologies to Lawson's The City Bushman, a retort to Banjo Paterson's poems of the bush.
The poem hasn't seen the light of day since Ron sent it, but I am sure he would have no problems with its publication at this time, another example of the immense skills he brought to his roles.
I am back from down the country, very happy that I went
Seeking out the southern poet's land whereon to pitch my tent.
I saw a lot of idols, who were waiting on the track,
Read a lot of fancy verses and I'm not glad I'm back.
In the cities may be the pleasant scenes of which our writers boast,
But I think the country's rather more inviting further down the coast.
But I'll stay at present in my Pole house on the edge of town,
Reading Lawson and various bards, and savouring the Speights going down.
Mossburn, Winton, great scott! These hectares that are so grand,
With the everlasting Rothmans tour stretched out across the land.
History where the crow is, nostalgia where the keas fly,
Gore and Mataura, Invercargill too, brought a tear to the eye.
Where under clear blue skies and on oyster shells they creep,
The truck drivers pass slowly to pick up their meat that was sheep
Mighty peaks of granite gleaming all the way up to the Haast,
Signposting the future, remembering the past.
Miles and miles of vertical Ryals, the place where they keep the Bush,
I cocked a snook at the city folk who try to give the country the push.
And further north I ventured to the city of Dunedin,
With the vagrance and feeling of a garden they once called Eden.
The fancy poets may sneer in their deprecating way but I refuse to yield,
For didn't once these two regions of sunlit vista share the Shield?
So I am back from down the country, down the country where I went,
Seeking out the southern poets' land whereon to pitch my tent.
I met my many idols out along the dusty track,
Read a lot of fancy verses – and I'm glad that I went back.
But I intend to stay at present, as I said before, in my Pole house here on the edge of town,
Reading Lawson and various bards, and savouring the Speights going down.