Ian Irvine: Two Essays Australian Poetry

Two Essays on Australian Poetry

Copyright Notice:

Extracts from theorists and Australian poets discussed in this work are included under ‘fair usage’ provisions related to review and academic critique.

Author Bio

Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as

Humanitas

(USA),

The Antigonish Review

(Canada),

Tears in the Fence

(UK),

Linq

(Australia) and

Takahe

(NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies:

Best Australian Poems 2005

(Black Ink Books) and

Agenda:

‘Australian Edition’, 2005.He is the author of three books –

Dream-Dust Parasites

a novel (written as Ian Hobson);

The Angel of Luxuryand Sadness

a non-fiction book concerned with post-traditional forms of alienation/chronic ennui; and

Facing the Demon of Noontide

, a collection of poetry. Dr. Irvine currently teaches in the Professional Writingand Editing and Community Services programs at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia). He has also taught history andsocial theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normativeand dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui. In his recent theoretical work he has attempted todevelop an anti-oppressive approach to creative writing based upon the integration of Cultural-Relationaltheories concerning ‘self in relation’ with Jungian and Groffian models of the ‘collective’ or ‘transpersonal’unconscious.

Essay One

Reassessing the Jindyworobak ‘imagery’ revolution on the way to aliterature of the

‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’

[This essay is based upon the draft of a talk delivered as part of a panel on Australian poetry delivered at theASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) conference held in Perth, Western Australia, June-July 2006.]

Essay Two

Tracing the Political in Contemporary Australian Poetry

[This essay is based upon the draft of a talk delivered as part of a panel on literature and politics at the AAWP(Australian Association of Writing Programs) conference held in Perth, Western Australia, November 2005.]

Reassessing the Jindyworobak ‘imagery’ revolution on the way to aliterature of the

‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’

1

?

1. Who were the Jindyworobaks?

It is a ghost that walks before birth.As a faithful promise it comes.To have known it is to yearn with heart and eyesfor the long hushfor the long, long hushunder starlight in the desert with the winds,waiting the sun’s rise.

2

The ‘Jindyworobaks’ were a loose ‘club’ of Australian poets who wanted to forge a newrelationship between language and landscape, indigenous and non-indigenousAustralians. Their project eventually involved (invoked?) encounters with the spectresand ghosts of Australia’s colonialist history—i.e. ‘entities’ that spoke of the repression of alternative histories, especially indigenous, and of non-indigenous ‘shadow stuff’ (in theJungian sense). It is arguable that these encounters, recorded in poetry and prose, helpedconstruct a cultural space conducive to white acknowledgement—however limited,initially—of indigenous loss and grief linked to dispossession and forced assimilation.These same encounters also paved the way for later indigenous and non-indigenous poetic representations of the suffering of the land itself, its many extinctions, itsdevastated forests and grasslands.The group originated in Adelaide and their anthologies span the years 1938 to1953. The best work of the group’s leading poets—Rex Ingamells, W. Flexmore Hudson,Ian Mudie, William Hart-Smith and Roland Robinson—clearly introduced a fresh hybrid poetic to the national psyche—one cannot say ‘new’ given the antiquity of the Aboriginalelements they openly acknowledged. It is arguable that the Jindyworobak project has alsohad an important, often under-unacknowledged, impact on Australian literary and culturallife. Poets as diverse as, Mary Gilmore, Judith Wright, Colin Thiele, Dorothy Hewett,James McCauley, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Margaret Irvin and Geoffrey Duttoncontributed to the various Jindyworobak anthologies Les Murray has also acknowledgedJindy influences on his work.

3

This article will reassess the Jindyworobak contribution to 20

th

century Australianliterary developments. It will also attempt to highlight the role of ‘spectres’ and ‘ghosts’in their poetics. In particular, it will emphasise the group’s local contribution to what isnow recognized as an international environmental/ecological poetics (epitomized by thework of Gary Snyder in the US and Judith Wright, and more recently John Kinsella, inAustralia). In the case of the Jindies this poetics emerged in the form of a uniquelyAustralian ‘landscape poetics’ (Ingamells’: ‘environmental values’). The movement’s

1

Judith Wright, from ‘Landscape and Dreaming’

2

From ‘Desert Dawn’, Rex Ingamells, 1940

3

Brian Elliott in his 1979 book

The Jindyworobaks

, goes as far as to equate Murray’s idea of the‘vernacular’ with Ingamell’s definition of the term ‘environment.’ Murray’s

The Vernacular Republic

of 1975 certainly reworked and extended on select Jindyworobak themes.