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Vale – Frank Daniel

Frank Daniel, a former President and Vice President of the Australian Bush Poets Association and recipient of the Judith Hosier Heritage Award in 2008, passed away early Monday, December 22. He was 72.

One of Australia's foremost performance bush poets, Frank toured over a wide area of the three eastern states taking his home-spun bush humour and bush poetry to many schools and clubs. He was in demand as an after-dinner speaker and festival compere.

A true-blue Aussie with an Irish Heritage, Canowindra, NSW, based Frank believed in keeping his country's traditions alive. With a unique laid-back Aussie country-style inherited from his late father, coupled with more than a touch of the blarney after five generations in Australia, he could make an audience laugh their heads off reminiscing about days gone by or turn them to tears with nostalgia.

From his early days at school and the works of the great masters Paterson and Lawson, he maintained a keen interest in bush poetry over a wide and varied career from his childhood on the family farm through a life of rough-riding, droving and truck driving.

Frank appeared at all of the major festivals in Australia and annually from 1993 at the famous Longyard Hotel as part of Tamworth's Country Music Festival.

For many years from 1997, he hosted the Traditional Longyard Hotel Bush Poets Breakfasts held daily during the 10 days of the Tamworth Festival. In 1997, he was inducted to the Bush Poets Wall of Renown at the Longyard's Fireside Festival.

Frank self-published a number of books of yarns and verse, his first, Bush Yarns & Poetry. In 1998, he took out Single Recorded Performance of the Year with his single recording of the Claude Morris poem A Grave Situation from the 1998 Album of the Year Dipso Dan & Other Silly Buggers. His work has appeared in no less than five anthologies and on five compilation albums.

In 2002, Frank beat all comers in the Australian Yarn Spinning Championships at Mulwala during the annual Australian Bush Poetry Championships.

Many people believed whatever Frank told them but, as he so often said, "Only half the lies I tell are the truth!"

His passing, and that of another revered Judith Hosier Memorial Award winner Carmel Randle earlier this year, make this a sad year for followers who remember the early days of the Bush Verse Revival.

A funeral and service to celebrate Frank's life will be held at Canowindra Catholic Church at 10:30am on Monday December 29.