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Two Essays On Australian Poetry - Ian Irvine
Two Essays On Australian Poetry - Ian Irvine
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 Luxury
and 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 Writing
and Editing and Community Services programs at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia). He has also taught history and
social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative
and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui. In his recent theoretical work he has attempted to
develop an anti-oppressive approach to creative writing based upon the integration of Cultural-Relational
theories 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 a
literature of the ‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’
Copyright Dr. Ian Irvine, 2006, all rights reserved.
Word count: 3,770 (including quotes)
[This essay is based upon the draft of a talk delivered as part of a panel on Australian poetry delivered at the
ASAL (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
Copyright Dr. Ian Irvine, 2005-2006, all rights reserved.
Word count: 4,446 (including quotes)
[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 a
literature of the ‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’1?
The ‘Jindyworobaks’ were a loose ‘club’ of Australian poets who wanted to forge a new
relationship between language and landscape, indigenous and non-indigenous
Australians. Their project eventually involved (invoked?) encounters with the spectres
and 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 the
Jungian sense). It is arguable that these encounters, recorded in poetry and prose, helped
construct 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, its
devastated forests and grasslands.
The group originated in Adelaide and their anthologies span the years 1938 to
1953. 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 Aboriginal
elements they openly acknowledged. It is arguable that the Jindyworobak project has also
had an important, often under-unacknowledged, impact on Australian literary and cultural
life. Poets as diverse as, Mary Gilmore, Judith Wright, Colin Thiele, Dorothy Hewett,
James McCauley, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Margaret Irvin and Geoffrey Dutton
contributed to the various Jindyworobak anthologies Les Murray has also acknowledged
Jindy influences on his work.3
This article will reassess the Jindyworobak contribution to 20th century Australian
literary 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 is
now recognized as an international environmental/ecological poetics (epitomized by the
work of Gary Snyder in the US and Judith Wright, and more recently John Kinsella, in
Australia). In the case of the Jindies this poetics emerged in the form of a uniquely
Australian ‘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.
uniquely Australian ‘anti-colonial’ poetics—part of what became an international anti-
colonial/ethnopoetic movement—will also be looked at.4
Brian Elliott in his introduction to The Jindyworobaks (1979) described the motivations
of the Jindyworobak poets of the late thirties as follows:
‘The older world suffered from disastrous forms of heart disease. The
[Jindyworobaks] wished, if they could, to assert their youth and difference, to
relish the natural freedom of the human spirit, and they wished to look for it,
since other resources had clearly failed, only in their own country. There was
a sense that poetry … in particular had failed, and it had failed because it no
longer represented fundamental experiences of living. It had become a
decorative frill. The impulse of the [Jindyworobaks] was to say, “We must
find it again; and we must find it here.”’
This quote perhaps summarises the origins of both the empathy and ambivalence modern
progressives feel toward the Jindyworobak poets. On the one hand, their youthful
idealism,5 their respect for Aboriginal culture and their implicit critique of colonial
dependency are to be celebrated and have had a not insignificant humanizing effect on
the development of post-WWII Australian culture. On the other hand there is
ambivalence about their tendency to appropriate Aboriginal culture, especially when
some critics argue that they did little to directly nurture Aboriginal efforts toward self-
determination. Another concern was their tendency to simplify the ‘rural/urban divide in
Australian society—city people were routinely stereotyped as fallen, alienated and out of
touch with ‘the land’ and its spiritual treasures. They are also open to critique with regard
to their ‘insularity’ (leading at times to an exclusionist form of ‘nationalism’) and what
we can describe as their ‘anti-intellectualism’ (a tendency perhaps derived from their
unconscious Romantic assumptions). We note that their anti-intellectualism and tendency
to idealise the ‘rural’ reappeared in Les Murray’s poetics.6
In terms of poetic form, many critics have argued that due to the movement’s
‘insularity’ its leading practitioners were also ‘anti-experimental’ (apart from their
attempts to adapt Aboriginal literary forms into English) and that as a consequence little
worthwhile poetry emerged from the main practitioners of the movement. On this score
the ideological tendency toward the ‘traditional’ in terms of poetic form and the anti-
European element (meaning anti-modernist at that time) undoubtedly hampered the
4
Epitomized internationally by the poetics of Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Diane di Prima and
many others.
5
Brian Elliott, in his introduction to The Jindyworobaks (p.xviii) wrote: ‘They were inexperienced
and earnest; in a word, novices. They may be thought of as the class of ’38, because it was in that
year that they graduated … and produced their first magazine and manifesto, the 1938
Jindyworobak anthology; also Ingamells’ declaration of war against the provincial philistines, the
pamphlet Conditional Culture.’
6
His idea of a ‘Vernacular Republic’ with its underlying idea that there exists an alliance between
Aboriginal Australians and the non-indigenous rural poor (described as the Boetians) against urban
Australians (the Athenians) is vaguely reminiscent of some Jindyworobak ideas.
ability of some of the poets to respond with formal and even thematic flexibility to the
changing world around them.7 However, as the anthologies demonstrate, the major poets
all experimented with free-verse forms and some of their work reveals distinctly
modernist modes of representation, though their aesthetic should more properly be
described as ‘symbolist’ rather than ‘imagist’, with appropriated, often grossly
decontextualised, representations of the Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’ taking the place of the
metaphysical ephemera that typified 19th century French Symbolist poetry.
It is important to note, however, that some of the earliest critiques of the
movement’s poetry clearly arose out of a barely disguised Eurocentric snobbishness, even
perhaps a veiled racism.8
Elliott’s 1979 anthology went a long way toward righting the critical wrongs
committed against the Jindyworobaks in the forties and fifties and it is now generally
accepted that the 44 publications that comprise the bulk of the Jindy output between 1938
and 1953 represent a considerable contribution to Australian literature. The anthologies
and publications of the Jindyworobak Club, often financed by Rex Ingamells, gave many
mid-century Australian poets a start and provided an ongoing forum for other poets
peripheral to the group’s central ideology.
Finally with regard to the generalist critique—that the Jindy movement produced
poetry of little consequence—the verdict is also clear. There is no doubt that a quantity of
aesthetically flawed poetry came out of the movement, though this is the case, of course,
for all poetic movements. However, for those keen to judge poets against canonical
standards it is also indisputable that a number of major poems and poets were inspired, or
at least nurtured, by the movement.
9
Bruce Andrews, ‘Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis’, in The Politics of Poetic Form, ed. Charles
Bernstein, p.31.
10
See also the following lines from Ingamells’ poem ‘The Forgotten People’, 1935:
How can a stranger hope to understand?
Dark ghosts go with me all about the land.
Likewise, Ian Mudie’s poem ‘Intruder’, first published in 1970, expresses a similar sentiment as the
narrator imagines accidentally breaking Aboriginal taboos as he walks the land: ‘do not send/ kadaitcha
men/ to haunt my dreams// Surely you can guess/my conscience/ is uneasy enough/ already’.
complexity of Aboriginal story-telling, its expression of: ‘intense and universal qualities
of tender loveliness, vivid beauty, stirring and noble daring, moving pathos and stark
tragedy.’ Likewise, ‘there seems no limit to the fundamental human qualities which it
could express.’11
Not content with aesthetic appreciation, however, he goes on to outline a more
revolutionary position regarding the value of Aboriginal culture when he states: ‘to
ensure imaginative truth our writers and painters must become hard-working students of
Aboriginal culture’. Similar sentiments are echoed by Victor Kennedy in Flaunted
Banners, 1941.12 Perhaps for the first time members of the non-indigenous community
were told that they had something profoundly important to learn from Aboriginal
traditions. It is difficult to over-emphasise the radicalness of such comments to non-
indigenous Australians of the late thirties.
B) The problem of non-indigenous alienation from the landscape and its flora and
fauna.
Ingamells understood this ‘unsuturable wound’ in terms of an inability, due to erroneous
cultural conditioning, of non-indigenous Australians to connect to the true spirit of the
land. Modern environmentalists, of course, argue that in Australia alienation manifested
as a double dose of environmental exploitation/vandalism. The standard 19 th-20th century
Western instrumentalist attitude toward nature—founded on capitalistic and scientific
paradigms, i.e. landscape as desacralised productive resource/capital—was exacerbated
by colonialist paradigms, which justified wholesale wealth transfer, back to the colonial
centre (‘frontier capitalism’).
According to Ingamells the inherent Eurocentrism of Australian poetry and poetics
had robbed poets of a proper relationship to the land. In remedying this problem he
declared: ‘The real test of a people’s culture is the way in which they can express
themselves in relation to their environment.’13 In applying this ‘test’ to the ‘Vision Poets’
of the twenties, who were basically Georgian in terms of poetics, and to most previous
Australian poets—most memorably to the work of Henry Kendall and to certain
comments concerning the ugliness of ‘gum trees’ made by Norman Douglass—Ingamells
found whole generations wanting. His argument amounted to a full-scale critique of
transplanted European Romantic and Neo-classicist aesthetics.
In Jindy poetics two types of ‘spectres’ and ‘ghosts’ serve to mediate states of non-
indigenous alienation; firstly, literal ghosts (or absences) resulting directly from the
violence inflicted upon indigenous people and the landscape by colonial aggression. In
‘The Forgotten People’, for example, Ingamells imaginatively reconstructs a pre-invasion
‘bushland plain’. This description of a primal, indigenous ‘nature’ is then
erased/backgrounded, ‘slain’, by an image of ‘the white man’s city’ ‘spreading’—the
effect is haunting, spectral:
The second set of specters and ghosts acknowledged by the Jindies were more ancient
and all-pervasive. Since indigenous societies interacted routinely with a multitude of
supernatural entities (in turn representative of profoundly complex spiritual systems)
Ingamells theorized that non-indigenous Australians also needed to acknowledge/address
these ‘environmental’ entities if they were to experience a genuine sense of belonging—a
recipe perhaps, from our vantage, for the appropriation of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs.
The third ‘unsuturable’ wound exposed by the Jindyworobaks involved what they saw as
the immaturity of the Australian people in not wishing to establish genuine political and
cultural autonomy from what at that time looked like a particularly nightmarish ‘Europe’.
On this point the Jindyworobaks took their lead from in particular P.R.
Stephenson’s book The Foundations of Culture in Australia. Stephenson had written: ‘Is
it sedition or blasphemy to the idea of the British Empire to suggest that each dominion in
this loose alliance will tend to become autonomous politically, commercially, and
culturally?’ Similarly, ‘We have a right to our own 19th and 2oth centuries—our own first
and second centuries.’ Ingamells, perhaps, took it upon himself to create the ‘cultural
autonomy’ desired by Stephenson when he wrote: ‘Any genuine culture that might
develop in Australia … would have to represent the birth of a new soul. A fundamental
break, that is, with the spirit of English culture, is the prerequisite for the development of
an Australian culture.’14
Ingamells’ poem ‘Earth-Colours’ (1938) is a particularly vivid description of fear
expressed in relation to the centrifugal demonism emanating out of Europe in the late
30s. The poet invents frightening ‘spectres’ described variously as ‘Death’s keen
minstrels’, ‘Death’s engined angels’, ‘dark carnage squadrons’ and ‘blood-hungry …
Mars’. In summarizing all that is disturbing about ‘civilised Europe’. In the same poem
we read: ‘Blood blinds the world, in war-zones blood is running.’
It is thus inaccurate to see the group’s ‘nationalism’ in the same context as, say, the
jingoistic Neo-conservative nationalism of the current Howard government. The
historical context here reveals a Jindyworobak critique of Australian dependence on
British, and secondarily European, culture. That said, there undoubtedly existed an
‘exclusionist’ element to the Jindyworobak project that Max Harris and A.D. Hope,
among others, were right to critique.
The fourth wound exposed by the Jindies involved their sense that some of the
foundations of mid-century Australian culture: i.e. ‘progress’ (both socially and in terms
14
See also (ibid): ‘It is not in our [ties to Europe] that we must as a people seek our individuality.’ Roger
Covell, in charting Jindy influences on Australian music (in Australia’s Music, 1967) wrote: ‘The
Jindyworobak idea was a kind of longed-for ‘short cut’ to cultural maturity and national identity.’
of the impact of Western scientific and technological innovation on community and self),
‘evolution’ (in the Darwinist and Social Darwinist senses), ‘rationality’, supposed
European/white cultural superiority and, lastly, the status of Christianity as a truly
humane, progressive spiritual tradition, were in crisis.
This wound or unease was perhaps voiced by the Jindies in a more
instinctive/intuitive way than the other three wounds—it’s probably the most obviously
‘romantic’ element to the Jindyworobak project but it is also, arguably, indicative of what
later became known as postmodernism. Given that Aboriginal culture was, within mid-
century discourse, constructed as ‘unevolved’, ‘primitive’ etc. i.e. in Social Darwinist
parlance a social configuration that science and reason-inspired ‘progress’ had swept
aside, it is clear that the act of elevating Aboriginal culture represented a fundamental
critique of many Western conceptions of social and cultural superiority. In this sense the
Jindies had a strong, if problematic, ‘anti-colonialist’ impulse. Problematic since their
hybrid ‘romanticism’ manifests at times as a replay of the ‘noble savage’ myth of the
nineteenth century—a stereotype not particularly useful to oppressed peoples. Likewise,
it has been argued that the application of this myth led to acts of cultural appropriation—
of indigenous story forms, themes (notably the concept of the ‘dreamtime’) and language
(often out of context) etc.—by Jindyworobak poets.
Central to the new Australian poetics attempted by the Jindies was a revisioning of the
visual, thus of the ‘image’ in Australian poetry. They wanted to substitute what they
understood to be organic Aboriginal imaginings, visualizions of the landscape for
imposed (oppressive?) European imagery. Rex Ingamells, in a section of Conditional
Culture (1938) concerned with ‘Environmental Values’ wrote:
‘The biggest curse and handicap upon our literature is the incongruous use of
metaphors, similes and adjectives. It is usual to find Australian writers
describing the bush with much the same terminology as English writers apply
to a countryside of oaks and elms and yews and weeping willows and of
skylarks, cuckoos and nightingales. We find that dewdrops are spoken of as
‘jewels’ sparkling on the foliage of gumtrees. Jewels? Not amid the stark,
contorted, shaggy informality of the Australian bushland.’
5. Conclusions
Once articulated non-indigenous writers and artists were forced to respond to the Jindy
challenge. It is clear that a response, including the generation of what Judith Wright
called a ‘reaction against itself’, did eventuate and that later non-indigenous and
eventually indigenous poets, writers, artists, thinkers and musicians returned to those
‘unsuturable’ wounds (though of course from radically different socio-cultural
positionings) consistently there-after. Though I’ve concentrated on the wounds related to
the ghosts and spectres of the past, of history, we could just as easily speak of the ghosts
and specters related to cultural potentials and possibilities (possible utopias?)—such a
spectre, ‘a ghost that walks before birth’, arguably appears in Ingamells’ ‘Desert Dawn’
(1940) (see the quote that opened this study).
16
This tendency is strong in Ingamells, and evident in some of Hart-Smith’s poems, particularly
‘Nullabor’; likewise it’s there in Robinson’s work, particularly ‘Would I Might Find my Country’ and ‘And
the Blacks are Gone’ The same unease, the same spectre-filled poetics of the landscape haunts Ian Mudie’s
poem ‘Intruder.’
On the question of a less alienated ‘landscape poetics’ Judith Wright, and more
recently John Kinsella among others, have been instrumental in outlining a deeper non-
indigenous poetic of environmental engagement—arguably ghosts and spectres are again
involved. In a piece entitled ‘Landscape Poetry?’ Kinsella writes:
—Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, Allen and Unwin, 2005.
—Veronica Brady, ‘Judith Wright: The Politics of Poetics’, Southerly, 61/1 Sydney 2001.
—David Brooks, ‘A Land Without Endings: Judith Wright, Kenosis and Australian
Vision’, Southerly, Vol. 60/ no.2 2000.
—Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society, 1967, Sun Books,
Melbourne.
—John Daily, ‘The Jindyworobaks: Literary Philosophers or Literary Victims?’
Working Papers in Australian Studies: Paper No. 12. 1986, Australian Studies
Centre, University of London.
—Jack Davis & Bob Hodge, Eds. Aboriginal Writing Today, AIAS, Canberra, 1985.
—Geoffrey Dutton, The Literature of Australia, Pelican, 1964.
—Brian Elliott, ed. The Jindyworobaks, Portable Australian Authors, UQP,1979.
—Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, F.W. Cheshire, 1967.
—Martin Harrison, ‘The Myth of Origins’, Southerly, Vol. 61/ no 2, 2001.
—William Hart-Smith, William Hart-Smith: Selected Poems 1936-1984. Brian
Dibble (Ed.) A&R Modern Poets, Angus and Roberts, 1985.
—J.J.Healy, Literature and the Aborigine in Australia (1770-1975), UQP, 1978.
—A.D. Hope, Native Companions: Essays and Comments on Australian Literature 1936-
1966, Angus and Robertson, 1974.
—Rex Ingamells, Online version of Conditional Culture, 1938. Accessed 29/3/2006
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/conditionalculture.html
—Richard D. Jordon and Peter Pierce, eds. The Poets’ Discovery: Nineteenth Century
Australia in Verse, MUP,1990.
—Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Cambridge University
Press
1996
—John Kinsella, The New Arcadia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005.
—John Kinsella, Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, intro. by Harold
Bloom, Fremantle Arts Press, 2003.
—John Kinsella, various articles/extracts from John Kinsella: Poet, novelist, critic and
journal editor, website.
‘Landscape Poetry?’ http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/landscapepoetry.html
various Accessed 29/3/2006.
‘Towards a Contemporary Australian Poetics,
http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/towards.html accessed 29/03/2006.
‘The Pastoral and Political Possibilities of Poetry,’
http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/newaustralian.html accessed 29/03/2006
‘The Hybridising of Poetry’ http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/hybrid.html
accessed 29/03/2006.
‘A Patch of Ground’, http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/patchofground.html
accessed 29/03/2006.
‘A Brief Poetics’, http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/abriefpoetics.html accessed
29/03/2006.
‘A Different Kind of Light Though Something’s Not Quite Right in Paradise,’
http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/someparadise.html accessed 29/03/2006
‘Multicultural Poetry,’ http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/multicultural.html
accessed 29/03/2006
‘Fens Rivers and Droughts’, http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/fensrivers.html
accessed 29/03/2006.
—Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-
century English Literature, Melbourne University Press, 1970.
—Ian McLean, ‘Aboriginalism: White Aborigines and Australian Nationalism’,
Australian Humanities Review, May 1998. Accessed: 2/03/2006.
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-May-1998/mclean.html
—John McLaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia,
Cambridge University Press, 1996.—Steven Matthews, Les Murray, MUP, 2001.
—Vijay Mishra, ‘Aboriginal Representations in Australian Texts’, online from:
Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 2 no 1 (1987). accessed
20/03/2006. http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/2.1/Mishra.html
—Caitlin Punshon, ‘The Escaping Landscape: Perspective and Perception in the
Landscape Poems of the Generation of ’68’, APIN Network, 2005. accessed 5/4/2006
http://www.api-network.com/articles/index.php?jas80_punshon
—Mareya Schmidt, ‘The Jindyworobak Movement’, accessed 23/2/2006.
http://avoca.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/edit9831.html
Tracing the Political in Contemporary Australian Poetry
Introduction: Australia’s Socio-Cultural Crisis
For the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from
politics. Today, there is a disturbing silence on the dark matters that should
command our attention. (John Pilger, Znet, ‘The Silence of the Writers’) 20
Political ‘fiction’ derives its power from the author’s invitation to the reader to empathise
and identify with the situation of the main character/s. The question arises: What is the
special power of socially engaged poetry? Edward Hirsch describes the creative mood
necessary for the creation of important political poetry; he says ‘the poet wants an
unthinkable tenderness, mercy and justice. The poet wants art.’ He also speaks of the
immense necessity of ‘remembering’ through art, through poetry. (Hirsch, Chapt 9, ‘How
to Read a Poem’).
20
Pilger, J. ‘The Silence of the Writers’, Znet, accessed November 10th 2003.
www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID4472
Poetry is also capable of the decisive image or phrase that resonates with
prophetic power or extraordinary insight—we can speak of enchanted lines with the
power to undo even the most elaborate ‘official’ narrative (lie?). Similarly, we can point
to poetry’s capacity to heighten subjectivity, to intensify the experience of life such that
we are made aware of strange new dimensions (possibilities) of being. This is perhaps
poetry’s ‘utopian function’.
Elements of the above are evident in Dylan Thomas’ great line, ‘The hand that
signed the paper felled a city.’ Or take but two short lines from W.H. Auden’s poem
‘September 1st, 1939’ ‘What huge imago made/ a psychopathic God.’ Or Wilfred Owen’s
opening lines from ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ ‘What passing-bells for those who die
like cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’ More recently Robert Minhinnick’s
‘Twenty-Five Laments for Iraq’ where we come across the lines:
The same intensity of response is evident in Ginsberg’s lines: ‘Moloch whose mind is
pure machinery! Molock whose blood is/ running money…’ Let us also recall Robert
Pinsky’s poem ‘Shirt’ with its superimposition of vivid images from various eras and
geographies that, once combined, critique the phenomenon of economic globalization.
A number of Australian poets have expressed their concern about the direction of
their country under Neo-Con/Neo-Lib rule. Dail Allison’s poem, ‘Refugee Sewing
Circle’, which appeared in Blue Dog (Vol 4, No. 7) is a good example of the way in
which poetry can address state-sanctioned human rights abuses in ways that more factual
writing cannot. Though ostensibly about the self-harm actions/protests of refugees in
detention centres the poem might also serve as a metaphor for the possible impact of the
new sedition laws on Australia’s writers, intellectuals, publishers and literature teachers:
Peter Minter’s poem ‘Australiana’ (a section of which was published in Overland, 179)
attempts to outline the more general malaise afflicting Australian culture:
blasphemous tongues
saccharine in formaldehyde.
The sense is of a nation that has lost its way existentially, I asked you where we’re bound
across/ the clear expanse of grass? Minter articulates an uneasiness indicative of deep
fissures in the collective psyche. The final line of the extract in question reads: things are
getting dangerous again?
A similar sense of unease is fostered in Sara Day’s poem ‘Sky Writing’, which
appeared in Agenda (UK). One could argue that the opening lines succinctly capture the
crisis of Western hyper-capitalism: Things fall apart. Across a summer sky/ the
emblematic Coca Cola script/ above the uproar, miles long, a mile high// dissolves like
cirrus before the squinting eye/ until all that’s left is a vaporous post-script.
Of course the phrase ‘Things fall apart’ comes from Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’,
a poem famously prophetic of Europe’s cultural meltdown last century. Day links the line
to a sky sign for Coca Cola, which gradually dissolves. The result is an ominous
image/prophesy that we can’t help but associate with the instability, post-Sept 11th, of
neo-conservative globalization and consumer capitalism generally. When we look back
on these early years of the new millennium will we point to Day’s poem as the moment
an Australian poet intuitively grasped the import of the mutation of the Western
globalization agenda into a pure neo-conservative globalization project unfettered by
global humanism?
Also in Overland, Barney Egan compares Australia’s indebted middle classes to a
pack of beached whales: Even after the last election/when the/eagerly indebted/beached
as the/easily silenced. The sense is of a looming cultural catastrophe, and the tone is more
clearly political than some of the other pieces we’ve discussed:
The poem ends with a salutary comment on the incapacity of Australians to confront their
collective shadow: we have little understanding/ of self destruction.
Also in Agenda (UK) we come across several poems highly critical of Australia’s
right-wing government—however, the tendency is to oppose a particular policy rather
than to make connections across a range of negative social trends. Michael Ladd’s ‘The
Immigration Minister’s Dream’ is a straightforward reverse-karma piece that makes an
un-named minister with a ‘whispering voice of unreasonable reason’ (Ruddock?) dream
of being an asylum seeker. Upon arrival in an un-named country the minister’s
doppelganger imprisons him (and his family) and then accuses him of various ‘crimes’.
He is then deported back to ‘the village where they hate him.’
Judith Rodriguez’ poem ‘The Asylum Seekers’, a lament for those who have
suffered at the hands of the Australian government, is a powerful piece that captures the
sense of guilt and powerlessness many feel at our public policies toward refugees:
This small survey may give the reader the wrong impression. These kinds of poems are
actually quite rare in recent Australian literary journals and anthologies. Likewise, there
is little evidence of a sustained poetic critique of the core ideology of neo-
conservatism/neo-liberalism. There are various reasons for this; central I think is the
marginality of poetry to Australian culture. Secondarily, the right certainly got its act
together in the 80s and early 90s in the area of ‘public relations’. There are fewer and
fewer avenues for members of Australia’s ‘critical’ community to engage directly with
the Australian public—more worryingly, anti-intellectualism amongst that same public
(wedded to a kind of religious aggrandizement of ‘common sense’ and the ‘vernacular’)
is rife. In part, of course, we’re talking about the familiar problem of the neo-con
monopoly of the media that progressives in country’s like the US and the UK also face.
Likewise, the rightist ideological assault on Australia’s education system, particularly its
universities has on the whole been successful – the corporatisation of ‘knowledge’ and
‘teaching practice’ proceeds apace and Australian academics raised on the identity
politics of the 80s and 90s have trouble naming, let alone confronting effectively, the
beast in question. More recently, as stated earlier, the government’s ant-sedition laws
have made writers and thinkers across the country stop and think before they write
anything that could be misconstrued as ‘anti-Australian’.
However, it is also time I think to acknowledge a certain ‘failure to engage’
amongst Australia’s intellectual culture generally. A number of areas of concern directly
relevant to poets come to mind:
2) Where postmodern poetics has made inroads, its political dimensions (coming
out of, in particular, Lyotard, Foucault, Jameson and Habermas’s writings) have
been severely watered down by arts practitioners. The result in terms of poetic
practice is a tendency to address ‘single issues’ (single examples of ‘oppression’)
rather than more complex and fundamental system-wide generators of oppression
– for example, the current alliance of Neo-Conservative morality with Neo-
Liberal economic models. This results in an understanding of ‘politics’ and
‘oppression’ that comes uncomfortably close to the stance taken by functionalist
sociologists – i.e. ‘If we just fix this one problem all will be well!’ It seems to me
that many Australian poets and writers lack a system-wide understandings of
oppression and human rights abuses, and thus a concomitant ‘poetics’ capable of
combating them is all but absent. Australians generally get more ‘emotional’
about the denial of what Maslow would call ‘higher level’ (i.e. ‘self-
actualisation’) needs than they do about the kind of fundamental abuses currently
taking place in our name.
3) It’s time to admit that a significant number of Australia’s writers, poets artists
and intellectuals have absorbed wholesale Neo-Conservative/Neo-liberal
constructions of the concepts ‘writer’, ‘poet’, ‘poetry’, ‘fiction’, ‘art’, ‘academic’,
etc. Some have little will to critique what is going on because they are doing quite
nicely out of Australia’s ‘first world/Neo-Imperialist’ status, thank you very
much! For others, the day to day grind of being a poet (or artist or intellectual
generally) in Australia has forced them to conform, often against their better
judgment. The result is a prevalent ‘resume culture’ among writers and artists,
based upon the myth of the ‘rugged individual’ or ‘battler’. This highly
competitive ‘individualism’ is central of course to hyper-capitalism and is
revealed most tellingly in Western models of the ‘celebrity
writer/poet/artist/intellectual.’
I now want to look at specific examples of John Kinsella’s recent work. I’d like to
suggest that he is a good example of a home-grown poet/activist of international standing.
Kinsella is a committed anarchist, pacifist and environmentalist, and these beliefs
certainly manifest in all sorts ways in his poetry. However, his poetry never descends into
political sloganeering—in part I imagine because his definition of the ‘political’ seems to
be much more expansive than that afforded us by ordinary definitions. In his work we
find a constructive, life-affirming balance between literature and politics—an important
feature of the best political literature.
One of his recent works, The New Arcadia, deconstructs the ‘pastoral’ tradition of
poetry; though a secondary target is also implicit, the ‘sick pastoralism’ of the
conservative right in Australia. Whilst continuing a theme evident in much of his poetry,
best defined as a desire to deconstruct the narratives Australians like to tell themselves
about the bush. To Kinsella these narratives allow us to avoid the darker realities of not
only ‘country life’, but what it is to be ‘Australian’. At every turn he confronts us with the
violence and oppression that is simultaneously denied and thus justified by adherence to
such narratives—Kinsella sees the violence as directed most obviously at the Australian
landscape itself (its flora and fauna) and at a deeper level, at those who do not fit the
official narratives—indigenous Australians, etc. In his ‘Seven Essays on Linguistic
Disobedience’ in Peripheral Light, this violence is traced back to its colonial European
home and merges with images of Anglo-American aggression in Iraq and elsewhere.
In The New Arcadia Kinsella traces one aspect of this phenomenon (the barbarism
of the West?) by way of a sustained exploration/critique of the European pastoral
tradition, a tradition that began with Theocritus’ in sections of his Idylls. Virgil’s
Eclogues and Georgics are also seminal and display many of the traits that Kinsella might
take offence at – idealized ‘rustics’, singing shepherds dressed for the drawing rooms of
Roman high society and behaving and speaking like polite Roman aristocrats gone bush
for a day. The conventionalized ‘pastoral’ was also popular in England between 1550 and
1750 – usually with the same idealized treatment of country living as a function of the
utopian/Edenic fantasies/desires of the elite. We note that Kinsella’s collection is in
constant dialogue with Sir Philip Sydney’s well known poem Arcadia of 1593. The
fascinating thing about this poem is that it was, in its own way an anti-pastoral. The
Romantics also built upon the ‘pastoral’ theme, particularly Wordsworth, Rousseau,
Thoreau, Whitman, though in many ways it functioned within a literature of critique—of
post-Enlightenment bourgeois society. Nevertheless, elements of the Romantic attitude to
landscape were definitive in initially outlining, later maintaining, a fundamental split in
the Western psyche. This split constructs ‘nature’ as something ‘pure’, a refuge for the
‘real’ or ‘authentic’ or ‘mystic’ self, the ‘truly human’. People in cultures that live ‘close
to nature’ are constructed as ‘noble savages’, creatures of ‘feeling’ and ‘sentiment’
uncorrupted by the artifices of civilization (as opposed to the highly intellectual, rational
and logical city folk). This pure nature is also the domain of the natural child, the very
same child that Wordsworth introduced us to with ‘Even such a happy child of earth am
I’.
Kinsella’s work is in constant dialogue with European Romanticism. In a sense he
is interested the ‘return of the repressed’, in particular the adoption by European colonial
culture of a highly idealized image of ‘nature’ that served as a kind of escapist fantasy for
the ordinary people of modernity; a people more or less content with urban living, but
deeply in need of a psychic ‘arcadia’, a perfect place that could be set aside, perhaps, as a
‘national park’, a place where for short periods of time (leisure time, usually) they could
live the ‘good life’ in perfect accord with an all-beneficent ‘Mother’ nature. Of course
today little ‘wild nature’ remains, mostly what we have, as Kinsella informs us
repeatedly, are merely signifiers of wild nature.
On my reading of his work, Kinsella is very uncomfortable with this reworked
‘Romantic pastoralism’, especially as it functions in the Australian psyche. In the ‘Fourth
Essay on Linguistic Disobedience’ (Peripheral Light, p134) after superimposing the beak
marks of the American ladder-backed woodpecker over those of the Twenty-Eight Parrot
of his native Western Australia, he writes: ‘this is not Romanticism,’ referring to both his
apprehension of the birds and to the writing act of the poet. In the ‘Second Essay’ he
juxtaposes US images of neo-conservative globalization, ‘A Desert Eagle Magnum’ with
symbols of Australian complicity in the same hegemonic process and links this project
directly to a hyper-capitalist construction of the Australian landscape. ‘… the consumer
screen/ and parasitic non-denominational/ ‘placid pastoral’ Australian government.
Kinsella’s poetry is a vast deconstruction into all the hidden consequences of this
cultural complicity, especially as it is unleashed upon the landscape by both country
people, directly, and by urban Australians in fantasy. The deconstruction, however, has a
purpose. The poet wants ‘justice and mercy’. In the The New Arcadia he takes apart the
signifying processes of an outdated romanticism and what emerges is a partially new,
partially, one must say, almost indigenous relationship to the Australian landscape. His
international admirers have noted the importance of this task, likewise, its challenge to
European and North American conceptualizations of landscape (Kinsella’s project, for
example, contains a powerful critique of the psychology of colonialism). If we adopt for a
moment an indigenous attitude toward the land (i.e. that it is central to culture) as a
starting point, we should perhaps note that a vast re-conceptualisation of landscape such
as Kinsella undertakes is perhaps the fundamental political act. Every one of his poems
on salt, for example, and salt is a central symbol in his poetics, hides a subversive critique
of the dominant hegemony.
If a poet can invite the reader to a different perspective on the land he can perhaps
inspire in the reader a sense of outrage at what is being perpetrated. There may well be a
Romantic element to this re-visioning, certainly a utopian element—Kinsella treasures
rural life, it’s the central concern of his poetry, he is a close observer of the bush, of
farming, etc. His intent is clearly political, he’d like farmers to plant natives in their over-
farmed paddocks threatening salt. In that clarity we locate the poet’s unease with pure
postmodernism. The following lines from his ‘Second Essay’ (in Peripheral Light, pg.
129) express this sense of ambivalence well:
On the one hand a postmodern poetics opens up space for a language capable of
critiquing grand narratives, for example the grand narrative attached to the ‘pastoral’ in
the West, capable also of exposing the violence that is concealed by sign systems as they
reify our perceptions of the suffering of others. On the other hand, out in the ‘real world’,
trees are still being turned into houses and furniture, and species are still being made
extinct in record numbers. Likewise salt continues to spread across the landscape—the
ultimate symbol of our unbalanced relationship with nature and society. Kinsella invites
us to have a perspective on all of this, he is angry, furious at times—furious in a way no
true postmodernist could be (given the commandment to moral relativism, each to his
own). In ‘Crop Duster Jerk-Off: A Poetry of Abuse’ (from The New Arcadia, pg. 113)
Kinsella’s narrator watches a plane dropping pest-control chemicals over ‘green light’
wheat, he writes:
This issue of the social critic’s place in the ‘community’ is precisely the issue many
members of Australia’s intelligentsia have been contemplating over the past few months.
Is there something in the Australian psyche that craves authoritarianism?
Kinsella’s poetic stance perhaps points the way for other Australian writers and artists
concerned about the human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of any ideology, leftist,
rightist or fundamentalist.
However, general insights about social trends, as articulated by experts on the
same, do offer something of a starting point for those concerned about the current
direction of Australian society and culture.
Mullaly in outlining the complexities associated with the concept of ‘oppression’
in contemporary society talks about the dichotomy between a politics of ‘solidarity’ (e.g.
as encouraged by classical Marxism) and a politics of ‘difference’ (as typified by
Postmodern interventions). Both strains exist within the ‘global humanism’ described by
thinkers like Paige. I agree with Mullaly, that we need to articulate clearly the grounds for
‘solidarity within and among oppressed groups’, this solidarity should certainly
incorporate ‘a progressive politics of difference.’ (Mullaly, p.25) I think that a complex
understanding of the phenomenon of ‘oppression’ is an essential element in any socio-
political literature. Another is a heart-felt commitment to national and international
human rights agendas. Finally, a thorough understanding of power and its functioning is
also essential – here of course Foucault is mandatory reading.
The challenge for Australian progressives generally is to get current insights to the
public in a form they can digest (and not just intellectually, but emotionally) and apply to
their own circumstances and the circumstances of others. The great sociopolitical
novelists, poets and filmmakers of the 20th century did exactly this. One task is to
contrast ‘global humanist’ agendas on human rights etc. with the increasingly unstable
and destructive agendas associated with mutated neo-conservative forms of globalization.
Australia needs more creative thinkers prepared to take their unique perspective to
ordinary people; perhaps using media forms that circumvent monolithic media structures
—Pilger, Moore and Chomsky have show us that this can be done. Similarly there is the
need for the development of a cohesive national and international strategy capable of
opposing the kind of ‘media fascism’ outlined in books like What Liberal Media, by Eric
Alterman and Global Spin, by Sharon Beder, and prophesied decades ago by Orwell in
his novel 1984.
It is useful to list a range of social and political challenges in need of intelligent
and sensitive treatment by contemporary Australian writers. This list is on top of
(certainly not instead of) the many concerns that have engaged Australian writers during
the nineties and will continue to engage them into the near future – e.g. institutionalised
poverty, the environmental crises, the treatment of indigenous Australians, gender
discrimination, and so on. Many of the following issues, to some extent off the radar at
present, will demand sustained treatment in the years ahead: 1) the ideological dominance
of Neo-Liberalism in the realm of economic theory (which I view as a kind of species
disease/parasite); 2) the dangerous alliance between hyper-capitalism and the cult of
scientific and technological progress; 3) renewed colonialist/Imperialist trends in
international politics (as a result of Neo-Conservative and religious fundamentalist
triumphs over ‘global humanist’ agendas); 4) attempts, at national and global levels, to
silence human rights perspectives/ideologies, (e.g. Australia’s new sedition laws); 5) anti-
democratic trends (especially the erosion of the independence of nation states in the face
of economic and cultural forms of globalization/imperialism); 6) the erosion of civil
society through the privatization of public infrastructure and space; 7) global forms of
‘media fascism’; 8) attempts by governments to control dissent by increased levels of
high tech surveillance (e.g. electronic tracking devices); 9) increased evidence of a crisis
in subjectivity (particularly increased levels of mental illness related to ‘the
fragmentation of the subject’ [derealisation]);10) the development and spread of powerful
‘opiate institutions’ (media based and pharmacological) leading to a culture of (and
normalization of) legal and illegal ‘addiction’; 11) increased levels of international
discord as ideological and religious totalitarianisms act to destabilise relations between
countries; 12) the accelerated colonization of inner space by corporate interests – the
need to defend ‘cognitive liberty’; 13) the fragmentation of community and the family
due to all of the above stresses; 14) the mutation of patriarchal forms of religious
fundamentalism and, in some cases, a resultant alliance with neo-conservatism.
From the perspective of poetry, Australian poets need to respond to these
phenomena in something more than an ad hoc fashion. It begins, as always, with
questions about ‘poetics’. On the international stage, of course, there is a great deal of
debate right now about the capacity of language poetry – the dominant ‘progressive’
poetic in the US for past thirty years - to respond to the above conditions effectively.
Given that this poetic has all but bypassed Australia – or has only been taken up in
selective fashion – the task of outlining an effective ‘progressive poetics’ for the new
millennium is even more urgent. This is not, of course, a task for poets alone.
Australia is at a point in its history where it needs more socio-politically astute
fiction writers and poets. It needs writers who will address the key issues of the age with
subtlety, empathy and a deep understanding of the crucial cultural role of the creative
artist. It is in need of writers with a social conscience who yet do not propagandize, but
instead explore, like George Orwell, Doris Lessing and Margaret Attwood internationally,
like Judith Wright and John Kinsella, the complex relationships that exist at any point in
time between the state, civil society and the private sphere. What is required, perhaps, is
the reconfirmation of a politics of ‘solidarity’ under a broad social justice/human rights
banner that simultaneously acknowledges the ‘politics of difference’.
Selected Bibliography