THERE was a little poem about fire I recited in an eisteddfod long ago and although scorched into my brain for decades, the words seem to have fallen out an ear.
Hard and black is my home. Hard as a rock and black as night.

Yellow and cold am I, delicate warm and light.
For long years I lie,
a prisoner in the dark.
Until at last I break my shackles in a .

. . something, something, something .

. .
Yet the childhood eisteddfod experience never fades.

That scorch mark doesn't budge. It is like the growth rings inside old-growth trees.
Right now, in much of Queensland, something mad and crazy is brewing, as well as the cyclones and the start of the footy season.

From country town to coastal cities, we are approaching the season of The Eisteddfod .
It is a mysterious beast. Authorities can rip up rail lines in regional towns and close department stores.

They can close post offices and bank branches. But they'll never kill the eisteddfod. It is the lantana of the Australian entertainment landscape ndash; indestructible and strangely addictive.

On paper, the eisteddfod is a Welsh festival of literature, music and performance, dating to the 12th century. The word derives from the Welsh word meaning sit . Any parent who has sat through 120 recitals of a piano rendition of Alley Cat by eight-year-olds knows this is accurate.

The traditional eisteddfod is not to be confused with the highly popular rock eisteddfod which annually involves hundreds of schools. The traditional eisteddfod is for purists, a program over about 10 days of schoolchildren and adults singing, dancing and acting. It is hard-core, not for the faint-hearted.

Once, a few years ago, a friend rang from north Queensland. He was a hard-nosed business type, but the eisteddfod had broken him. He had been watching his children compete.

Then one old eisteddfod Nazi bullied me when I used my phone to read a text. Bloody hell, that reprimand in a darkened hall sent me back to when I was eight and waiting to perform my piano recital. Backstage was full of 30 little white-faced boys and girls, sweat, hairspray and the sound of dozens of squeaky, little nervous farts.

The eisteddfod was what this country had before Australian Idol. It is a fair amount of talent meeting a mountain of ambition, usually the mother's and teacher's.
Reigning over it all is the adjudicator, the keeper of the knowledge, the high priestess.

I've a friend who is a reluctant eisteddfod mother leading up to the Easter event. She drinks a lot of white wine this time of year. She is an eisteddfod sub-species ndash; a Dance Mum.

Her problem is she is not a natural Dance Mum. She was not born with bobby pins held in her mouth, feet in the duck position and tiny little fingers for sewing on those thousands of tiny sequins.
She made the mistake of thinking dance would be fun for her little girl.

She didn't realise dance is deadly serious. As your child progresses, the teacher suggests they enter the eisteddfod. You are greatly flattered.

Then the teacher suggests that to avoid causing the dance school complete embarrassment, your child will need two extra classes a week, on top of her ballet, jazz and modern classes, to prepare her classical-character, modern tap and novelty items for the eisteddfod. All at extra cost. And so your husband takes another job to finance the dance career of your eight-year-old.

And you spend the time you'd usually waste furthering your career or eating or sleeping, sewing sequins on to a tutu. On the big day, your child will be on stage for four minutes, look wonderful and receive a highly commended . This seems to be the way of the world.

Several years ago I rang a lawyer in Toowoomba about a story, and he was going ballistic. He was outside a theatre after watching his daughter dance in the eisteddfod.
Something's afoot, he said.

I reckon the adjudicator is on the take. How can that big heffalump of a girl with two left feet win first prize? It's rigged.

I'm putting in a protest.
I told him it's not like racing or the courtroom. You do not ruffle feathers.

The adjudicator is not just the judge, I said. She is judge, jury and God. Do not upset her or she will remember your daughter's name next year.

Apart from all that, eisteddfods are wonderful, popular things. The Gold Coast Eisteddfod, one of the largest in Australia, attracts some 55,000 entries. They are seen as confidence builders, a caring, nurturing training ground for talent.

My own nurturing eisteddfod experience as a child went pretty well. All things considered. Each week for months, I'd skip off to the hotbox convent to be taught piano by an elderly nun, although I'll admit my heart really wasn't in it.

As a pianist, even after five years of lessons, I made a great netballer.
My teacher tried to encourage me to master the beauty of Beethoven and Mozart by nearly whacking me off the piano stool with a little stick and cracking me across the knuckles as I was playing.
No matter how much she whacked, I refused to cry.

Or improve.
This never stopped the teacher from putting me in the annual eisteddfod. Maybe she thought the shame of public ridicule would jolt me into practising.

She was wrong.
One year, she decided I would play Humoresque on the organ. The fact that I had a piano at home, not an organ, was irrelevant.

Tell your father to buy you an organ, she said.
I thought: Bugger this. If I was going to con my father into buying anything that expensive, the last thing on God's green Earth it would be was an organ ndash; a motorbike maybe, a new TV, or a waffle-maker.

To get her off my back, I told her we'd had made the big purchase. What kind of organ? she asked, her eyes narrowing.

Ah, one like yours, I said, sweating through the big fat lie.
As the weeks went by and she saw no improvement ndash; and took this as wanton wickedness on my behalf ndash; she whacked me harder.
I carried the charade right to the eisteddfod.

And almost pulled the damn thing off.
One of the worst things about the eisteddfod was they made you wear something nice ndash; frock, stockings and shoes. This was my undoing.

Halfway through a humourless Humoresque, one of my feet slipped between the pedals and got stuck, holding down one pedal. There we all sat, the full, darkened theatre and me, with that long, long note.
Eventually with a little pulling and swearing, I got my foot unstuck and ploughed on.

If I learnt one thing in that convent, it was: Show no tears. The eisteddfod experience teaches you Resilience with a capital R.
So, why is ritual humiliation good for us?

Well, it gets us out of our comfort zone. Kids go to high-ropes camps and Wet 'n' Wild these days to be scared witless. The eisteddfod provides it annually for a nominal fee.

The eisteddfod makes you realise that in life you really are on your own. Like giving birth or facing death, everyone can try to help, but ultimately, up on that stage, you are utterly alone.
And the eisteddfod allows you to find out how tough you are.

Once you've stared down a theatre of competitive mothers and kids, with your foot stuck between organ pedals, and then carried on as if nothing has happened, frankly, nothing in life is going to faze you.
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