DAVE'S DIARY - 6 JUNE 2004 - SARA STORER DVD REVIEW
DVD
REVIEW
SARA STORER - STORIES TO TELL (ABC-UNIVERSAL)
 |
The
superb sequencing of prolific Sunraysia raised Gold Guitar winner
Sara Storer may have gone through to the keeper of the flame and wickets. The Storer story starts with Sara parking her Toyota four-wheel drive at her folks farm in the outback guts of NSW and taking her keys out. "I've become a city girl," Storer, 31, says, "I don't need to take the keys out here." And the DVD ends with Storer talking about Ballad Of Tommy Foster - her true story of a bank robber in Silverwater jail. "The Ballad Of Tommy Foster shows how powerful songwriting can be if you nail a song," Storer says. "Tommy escaped from jail 11 times and has been in jail 38 years. He has eight years to go and is now too old to run." Storer has won her awards for writing about rural life - her family's toils and the outback characters of her teaching and roadhouse era. |
But, with
danger of being pigeonholed as an off-cut of the Australiana tree, she's
taking a punt on more challenging subjects.
Tommy Foster characters are a staple of American country music and the
Ned Kelly folk school.
But in the unlucky radio country Storer won her national following for
folksy fables from her embryonic environs - the bush and more specifically
her family's farms near Wemen in the Sunraysia and now a bigger property
near Gullargambone.
And it's the latter where most of these 17 songs and anecdotes are filmed
with her roving minstrel brothers, father and extended families.
Storer's strength is ploughing the family's famine, flood, drought and
climate controlled life for song material.
And she doesn't just write about hardship of bush life - she sings her
songs acoustic and raw with her brothers on banjo, guitar and drum kits
on the verandah and garden of their homestead.
This is real reality TV - a family joining musical soirees as the sun
goes down on another long day in the paddocks.
It is not the Osbornes, Osmonds or manufactured mulch for city slicker
slaves to fashion and fads.
The Storers are a real Australian family, albeit a happy one, and this
is their story with no fuelled for ratings refuse.
Urban denizens might perceive Storer as a daggy diva but she proves she's
real and sings, sells and wins despite radio apathy.
We also see but don't meet Herbie - her Maltese cross terrier - who was
taken by a dingo.
But we learn more about Storer and her song sources than reality shows
about faux folks sentenced to life in urban tribes. - DAVID DAWSON