On the Hackworth family website, where Allen keeps his poetry and prose alongside the chronologies and obituaries that trace the Tidwell, South, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy lines, a single poem draws its power from something very small: the sound of rain on a tin roof. "The Rain on the Tin Roof of the South Place" is a quiet piece of writing, but it carries the weight of a family place, a piece of weather, and a lifetime of listening. Visitors who arrive at the site looking for genealogical records often stay for the poems, and this one tends to be the one they mention afterwards.
The South Place in the title is not a hotel, a suburb, or a subdivision. It is a particular family property, remembered now mostly through the documents and photographs Allen has gathered there. The poem treats that place the way the archive treats it: as a location where history, weather, and everyday life overlap. For an Australian reader, the image lands with particular force, because the sound of rain on corrugated iron is a familiar note in the memory of many households across Brisbane, Hobart, and the broad inland plains.
The poem opens with weather. Rain arrives at the South Place and the roof begins its percussive work, the kind of steady drumming that turns a building into something closer to an instrument. Allen does not describe the storm so much as let it happen, and the tin roof becomes the listener's point of contact with the place. The roof is old, the poem suggests, and it has heard every storm the family has weathered. There is a quiet gratitude in the lines, as if the house is still speaking to the people who once lived under it.
That gratitude is typical of Allen's voice across the site. Whether he is writing a chronology for the South line or noting the small details of a grandparent's day, he tends to treat ordinary things as if they were worth recording. The tin roof earns its poem because it has outlasted the people who first heard it. In a country like Australia, where fibro cottages and high-set Queenslanders with their corrugated iron have sheltered families for more than a century, this is an easy rhythm to recognise.
Behind the poem is a family, and behind the family is an archive. The South surname appears in the genealogies Allen has published on the site, alongside the connected Tidwell, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy branches. The South Place is one of those properties that a family tree can point to but never quite contain. It stands in the records as a parcel of land, and in the poem as a sound.
Allen has always treated his site as a private archive first and a writing space second, and the two feed each other. A chronology may send him back to a particular date, and that date may give him the weather, the season, and the small event that becomes a poem. "The Rain on the Tin Roof of the South Place" reads like an entry from a family weather diary that has been allowed to become literature. The reader does not need to know the South genealogy to feel the place, but knowing that the place is real makes the feeling deepen.
For a reader in Adelaide or Perth, in a regional town west of the Divide, or on a property outside Wagga Wagga, the poem opens onto familiar ground. Tin roofs are still common across rural and suburban Australia, even if Colorbond has replaced the older galvanised sheets in many newer estates. The older roofs keep their hold on the imagination because they change the weather into sound. A summer downpour over a Queenslander verandah becomes a kind of music, and a winter storm across the southern states turns the house into a drum.
Allen's poem does not try to translate this experience into Australian terms, and it should not. It belongs to its own place, with its own weather and its own family. But the experience it records is portable. Anyone who has lain in bed listening to rain on a roof, anywhere in the country, will recognise the way the sound seems to hold the house together. The Bureau of Meteorology might issue a warning, but the tin roof has its own report: steady, patient, faithful.
The poem is short and unhurried. Its lines move with the rain rather than against it, and the rhythm feels closer to a hymn than to a ballad. Allen does not reach for striking images. He uses the tin roof, the rain, the room, and the remembered people, and lets each of them do its own quiet work. The voice is the voice of someone sitting inside while the weather passes, not someone trying to impress the storm.
That restraint is part of what makes the piece worth returning to. On the site it sits among longer prose pieces and the more formal genealogies, and it offers a different kind of entry into the family record. Where the chronologies try to be exact, the poem is content to be true. Where the obituaries are careful, the poem is open. Together they make a kind of double entry for the South Place: the facts in one column, the feeling in the other.
The poem rewards a slow reading. The suggestions below are ways to move between the poem and the rest of the site so that each one enriches the other, rather than competing for attention.
A short cross-reference of related pages appears below, so a visitor can move between them in a sensible order.
| Related page on the site | What it offers | How it pairs with the poem |
|---|---|---|
| South family chronology | Dates, places, and members of the South line | Gives the people behind the roof a shape and a story |
| Tidwell line notes | Connected branch of the wider family tree | Shows how the South Place fits into a larger migration |
| Brighton and Telford entries | Adjacent households and marriages | Supplies neighbours and kin who would have heard the same rain |
| McCarthy family records | Later generation documents | Closes the archive with the people who inherited the place |
| Prose notes on home exchange | Reflections on houses and belonging | Lets the reader hear Allen's voice in a longer, more reflective mode |
The poem will keep. It has been on the site for a while, and the roof it describes has heard more storms than any reader will. The best thing to do with it tonight is to read it through once on a quiet evening, close the tab, and step outside for a minute to listen to whatever weather is happening over your own roof.