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- Gary Forrester (born 3 July 1946 in the United States) is a New Zealand-Australian musician, composer, novelist, poet, short-story writer, 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, and by FishHead: Wellington's Magazine as a "modern Renaissance man": "in addition to publishing three novels and a book of poems, Forrester is a successful bluegrass composer and musician, an advocate for indigenous rights, and a father of six children. Oh, and don't forget his day job - law lecturer in ethics at Victoria University. " He also lectured at the University of Melbourne from 1976-80, at the Northwestern School of Law from 1983-85, and at the University of Illinois from 2000-03. Beginning in the 1980s, 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. " ==Bluegrass music== Forrester's musical compositions were recorded (under his "nom de guitar" Eddie Rambeaux) on the albums Dust on the Bible, Uluru and Kamara (Troubadour Records, 1990). In 1988, his single "Uluru" 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 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. " ==Novels, poetry, memoir, 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 Yuwipi medicine man Frank Fools Crow. A 2006 review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found Houseboating in the Ozarks idiosyncratic but 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. " His second novel, The Connoisseur of Love, was published in New Zealand in 2012. This novel contains 12 meditations – a dozen episodes from the endgame of Peter Becker, Wellington’s self-styled "connoisseur of love. " Peter is not quite at home in his 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 on its tennis courts, and performs his music – never quite connecting with anyone or anything. FishHead: Wellington's Magazine described The Connoisseur of Love as a "comprehensive love song" to New Zealand's capital city, which "exudes Wellington. " According to FishHead, "it's not just a novel about Wellington, it's a novel for Wellington. " In a feature article in Wellington's Dominion Post newspaper, Forrester was described as "a lawyer, public servant, bluegrass musician, and author of a novel set in Wellington. But on paper it's being a writer that counts. " The Dominion Post article captured Peter Becker's sense of alienation, observing that "writer Gary Forrester made Peter Becker up and planted him as an outsider in Wellington, stumbling through familiar places and unsatisfactory relationships - Peter Becker is an alien in Wellington. He doesn't pretend to be a Wellingtonian. He has his nose pressed against the glass. " The Germans 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. Begotten, Not Made, Forrester's third 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. 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. His story "A Kilgore Trout Moment" appeared in The Legal Studies Forum in 2010. The story 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 along the way, only to find redemption, at last, at "home. " In 2012, Forrester's story "Tulips" was also featured in The Legal Studies Forum. ==Representation of US Indian tribes== Forrester, a descendant (on his mother's side) of Cherokee tribal members and Appalachian Melungeons, 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 1990 text Digest of American Indian Law: Cases and Chronology (republished in 2012 by William S. Hein & Co. as part of its online American Indian Library) 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. ==Life== Gary 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 fiddler Otto Funk, who gained an entry as "the Walking Fiddler" in the Guinness Book of World Records for playing his Hopf violin every step of the way from New York to San Francisco in 1929, a marathon of 4,165 miles. (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. Throughout 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-acre (320,000 m) 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 Wellington novel, The Connoisseur of Love. 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. ==Australia's longest-running defamation suit== In 1990, Forrester led a group of eleven public service 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. ==Literary treatment== Forrester's life has been fictionalized, as the character "Skidmore", in the works of Philip F. Deaver. Deaver's stories were collected in his book Silent Retreats, which won the 1986 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. See http://www. philipfdeaver. com. Individual stories from Silent Retreats, featuring Deaver's Skidmore character, were also recognized in the 1988 Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and in 1995's Best American Short Stories. ==Selected bibliography== The Connoisseur of Love. Steele Roberts. 2012. ISBN 978-1-877577-72-7. Houseboating in the Ozarks. Dufour Editions. 2006. ISBN 978-0-8023-1341-6. Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn. Mayhaven Publishing, Inc. 2011. ISBN 978-1-932278-68-2. Digest of American Indian Law: Cases and Chronology. Fred B. Rothman & Co. 1990. ISBN 0-8377-0684-X. (with H. Barry Holt); republished in 2012 by William S. Hein & Co. as part of its online American Indian Library. ">https://www. wshein. com/blog/). "Begotten, Not Made" (excerpt from novel), in: Philip F. Deaver, ed. (2007). Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-5991-1. "The Beautiful Daughters of Men: A Novella in Short Verse from Tinakori Hill. " 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" (story). The Legal Studies Forum, Volume XXXIV, No. 2, West Virginia University (2010), ISSN: 0894-5993. "Tulips" (story). The Legal Studies Forum, Volume XXXV, West Virginia University (2012), ISSN: 0894-5993. ==Selected discography== Albums Dust on the Bible. RCA (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. Larrikin 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 Talking in Tongues Kamara. Troubadour Records (Australia) (1990). Love Please Come Home Kamara (based on the life of Aboriginal leader Brian Kamara Willis) White Freight Liner East Virginia Blues (trad. ) Walking at Midnight You've Got a Lover 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 Records (Australia) (1988) (composite album produced by ABC Television). 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. ==Notes== ==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
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