Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
The Making of “Robert Adamson: The Ultimate Commitment” by Ally Burnham.
There was 9 hours of footage about Robert Adamson’s works, his personality, and his effect on the contributors as individuals and the wider Australian poetic community. A ‘paper-draft’ was created first, the step where an editor writes a transcript, and from that text, is able to more easily pluck out connected themes, similar topics discussed, and then group them together. This was particularly interesting to do, as many contributors had different memories of the same moments of Robert’s life. The facts may be different, but the essence they were communicating was always the same. Keeping these contradictions and individual perspectives seemed important — intentionally matching the correctly remembered facts side-by-side with the misremembered details — in an attempt to elevate the work away from simple ‘reading the facts’ to a more human-centred recollection of a man, the portraiture of who he had become in the mind of others. In this sense, there isn’t one Robert talked about in this documentary, but twelve — one for each person who spoke about him.
While creating the paper-edit, it was important to keep in-mind the structure of feature-length storytelling and map the course of the text to that shape. The dark moments of Robert’s past are discussed, as well as delightfully funny anecdotes. Robert’s boyhood history was important context for the audience to hear, before listening to certain poems read. Likewise, it seemed prudent to ‘win over’ the audience to the lighter shades of his character, a protagonist to root for, so to speak, before fully revealing the depths of his more traumatic decades. The academic discussions of his poems contrast against a drawing of a numbat. As one of the poets discerns, Robert’s poetry changed over his lifetime: an arc from ‘gritty and raw’ to the more mystical and spiritual. Likewise, with the arc of this documentary, the intention was to reflect that: the gritty and raw anecdotes slowly giving way to the awe, wonder and adoration many poets have when recollecting him.
Most documentaries usually have a question at their heart. I thought I’d keep this one simple: who was Robert Adamson, and what circumstances led to his poetry? As someone who never met Robert, as editor, I tried to use that to my advantage. Which quotes gave me insight into this man? What passing comment caught my attention and made me wish to know more? I’d been given all the puzzle pieces by those who knew him, and the remaining task was to fit those pieces together until they created the shape of him.
© Ally Burnham
Alexandria (Ally) Burnham is an AWGIE award-winning screenwriter and novelist. A NIDA graduate (2016, Masters, Writing for Performance). She is best known for her feature film Unsound (2020), which was nominated for best original feature at the 2020 AWGIE Awards. The film won best Australian feature at the 2020 Melbourne Queer Film Festival and best fiction feature film at the 2020 ATOM Awards. Ally is the lead writer of Metropius, a multi-media franchise. Her screenplay for the animation won Most Outstanding Animation at the 2022 AWGIE Awards, and issue #1 and #2 of her comic book, Forgotten Rose (2022) are out now. Ally also writes as a novelist. She is a contributing author and editor to the fantasy, sci-fi & horror short story anthology The New Mythic, which features her novella, The Stolen Sword. Set in the same universe, her fantasy manuscript, Majesty, received a Varuna Fellowship in 2020. Her debut historical fiction novel, Swallow, releases November 2025.