28 Aborigine Australian Poetry

Mr. Dwaipayan Mitra

About the chapter:

This module will look into the background of Aboriginal Australian Poetry and some major Aboriginal Australian Poets. Aboriginal Australian Poetry is marked by a note of protest against the oppression perpetrated by the White Settlers. Indigenous Australian poets through their poetry create an alternative discourse to counter the processes of exclusion.

The context of Australian Aboriginal Poetry

It is extremely difficult to strait-jacket the literature produced in the continent of Australia as Australian literature, simply because of the variegated roots to which the inhabitants of the country belong. Historically speaking, the convicts who were transported from the prison houses in England formed the initial settlements in Australia. But to pre-suppose that there was no population before the arrival of these settlers would be huge blunder. The native tribes of Australia, who are known as Aborigines were already settled in many parts of the land. But it is the cultural superiority and hegemony of the white skinned Europeans that denied the native Australians any space in the country’s literary and cultural history.

Before investigating the politics of suppression and erasure, it is worthwhile to take a note of the form of literary activity that was doing the rounds of the Australian outback. To begin with, there was no written literature to show for. The oral songs of the native Australians were passed from generation to generation without ever being put down in printed formats. The focus has been to unearth these songs, not to determine their literary value, but rather their importance in the field of social anthropology. Later came a period when the songs of the convicts and the ballads of the people settled as farmers and cattle owners, known as the bushmen, were incorporated to what is called literature of Australia. As a result of changes, Australian bush poetry was born. Sea shanties that had rhythm and rhyme, which were mostly composed by illiterate English and Australian sailors, may have influenced the development of bush poetry’s structure. Many free settlers entered into commercial enterprises by meeting the needs of convicts, guards, soldiers and administrative personnel of the colonies, with the supply of food, clothing, timber, horses and bullocks for transport. While oral bush poetry was accessible to the masses, written bush poetry was slowly evolving with stories of people and current events throughout the community, in addition to recording existing bush poetry. While bush poetry was not always accurate in facts, many poems demonstrated the spirit of the people, the general lifestyle and reflected community attitudes.

However, the influence of England haunted the literary artists. The British settlers brought with them the English way of life and values and the literature of Australia started suffering from the anxiety of influence of their English forefathers. Some believed that in the absence of a literary model, the best thing to do was to follow the British traditions. Others, however, wanted to sever all ties with the ruling nation to forge an identity of their own. But in these controversies, the Aborigines were marginalised and their voices were silenced and the root cause can be traced to pre-discovery European imaginings of Australia as ‘Terra Nullius’, which means empty land. Australia’s cultural and historic past had been effaced and their history re-written which had no mention of the native population. This was done so that the land could be legally claimed by the coloniser’s without any consideration for any earlier claims by Aborigines who lived there before. But thankfully, in modern times Aboriginal poetry has come to the forefront and has slowly started giving voice and identity to the native culture. The White Settlers in Australia had all but erased the culture and history of the native Australians. Their voices were silenced and led to almost a cultural imperialism of sorts. Indigenous writers have stated giving voice to their suppressed self. The themes of the earliest Aboriginal writing mainly dealt with public or contemporary events, dealing with topics such as love, marriage, birth and the mythical narration of the beginning of the universe. The historical importance of this tradition is that it talks of a way of life before the invasion of the European settlers. Recent poets have become more critical, more evaluative. In spite of the rich heritage that the Aboriginal people possess, their history becomes available to the English speaking world from 1960s. There have been some attempts by White Australian writers to represent their voice. However, they were not authentic enough. They were mostly narratives of sympathy rather than narratives of experience. Writings by the Aborigines offer a more reliable depiction of the plights, poverty and injustice. They bring before our eyes the wails of the marginalised sections of society clamouring for freedom and equality.

DID YOU KNOW?

1. The Process of colonization in Australia began with William Dampier whose ship reached the Western Coast of Australia.
2. In 1770 Captain Cook landed at the Eastern Coast of Australia and took possession of the whole Eastern Coast.
3. In 1786, the British Government decided to establish a prison house at Botany Bay.

Major Themes of Australian Aboriginal Poetry-

Australian Aboriginal poetry circles around five major themes: Stolen generation, Assimilation, deprivation of land, Incarceration and Reconciliation. Australian Aboriginal verse has always been censorious of the process of nation formation in Australia. Different issues like land rights, Assimilation, curse of Stolen generation point out the fragments of nation. In the hands of Aboriginal poets, poetry issues out of the miseries of life. Writing becomes a tool for resistance, to conjoin the fissures within the imagined conception of nation.

The policy of Assimilation was employed by the Australian government to monopolize the aboriginal people. The police of Assimilation was ensconced on an idealistic premise. In her book, ‘Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre’, Maryrose Casey says that ‘Assimilation in Australia meant that Aboriginal people were expected to shed all cultural traces of Aboriginality. Assimilation was adaptation and this adaptation was conceived as exclusively one way’. In reality, there was a wide gap between theory and practice. The strategy of assimilation proved to be an ignis fatuus; a hegemonic strategy to wipe out the Aboriginal culture. The nefarious curse of the Stolen generation and the resultant problem unleashed a cultural genocide. Many Aboriginal Australian poets through their writings articulated the need to counter the strategy. For example, in ‘Assimilation –No’, Oodgeroo vehemently protests against this heinous policy. These poets have unmasked the wolfish interest of the Government. The slogans of protection and assimilation acted as a pretext for exploitation, annihilation.

Loss of land is a recurrent theme in Australian Aboriginal poetry. Australian poets have written on this theme extensively. The Aboriginal people are attached to their lands. They consider it as a part of their being. It is not only a place of inhabitation. It is a part and parcel of their life. Dispossession also erased the cultural practices. Like a viewer watching landscape from outside, the earliest settlers never incorporated themselves with the land. Australians poets like Oodgeroo, Graeme Dixon, Gordon Hookey articulate the piercing pathos that emanate from dispossession. The original inhabitants of the land began to feel ostracised in their own land. Oodgeroo’s ‘We are Going’ and Hyllus Maris’s ‘Spiritual song of the Aborigine’, for example, deal with this theme.

Another important theme of Aboriginal Australian poetry is ‘Incarceration’. Fragmentation of the self is a corollary of incarceration of young Aboriginals in Australia’s welfare and penal system. Many a poem has been written on the themes of brutal practices in custody. Aboriginal imprisonment was a part of larger process of colonialism. Alf Taylor’s ‘My Mother’ is critical condemnation of the policy of incarceration. The inhumane torture that is meted out to the inmates is laid bare in these poems.

Closely allied to the theme of Incarceration is the theme of ‘Reconciliation’. According to the Aborigines, the result of Assimilation was far from satisfactory. That is why writers have called for ‘Reconciliation’ to walk toward the future without the abandonment of cultural traits. However, all Aboriginal poets do not champion the Reconciliation policy. For them, it is a double-edged sword. A typical poem is ‘In the Spirit of Reconciliation’ by Kerry Reed-Gilbert. In another poem entitled ‘Treaty’, Gilbert advocates sovereignty to put an end to such injustice. In Jack Davies’s poem ‘Integration’ we find the similar plea-

“Let these two worlds combine,

Yours and mine.

The door between us is not locked,

Just ajar.”

Poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal 

Oodgeroo is the doyenne of Australian Aboriginal poets. She took part in many protest movements. Since 1960 Oodgeroo had been associated with FCAAISS. Her poetry is coloured by social concerns. She is truly the voice of Aboriginal people.

Her poetry is a reaction against the dispositifs of colonialism. It goes without saying that the process of colonialism is not merely an economic and political process. It is also an intellectual project- a civilising mission that acts as a facade. The drainage of wealth was accompanied by the erasure of cultural moorings. What was perceived as barbaric among the natives was simply rituals and social practices unknown to them. Oodgeroo’s verse resists such attempts of straitjacketing. She revives the pre-colonial past to foreground the prestige of indigenous population. She had the knowledge about the past, a ‘ historical sense’ , as Eliot would say, that is a precondition to genuine poetry. She acknowledged her debt to Julie McConichie and Henry Lawson. Their social and literary activities cast a spell on Oodgeroo.

Her first book of poems ‘We are Going’ was censured by critics. Critics made an excoriating review of this book labelling it as a kind of nonsense verse. They also found fault with the propagandist approach of Oodgeroo’s poetry. Some also accused her of lacking metrical skill. However, we must remember that we should not judge her poetry by the standards set by the White Settlers. Her poetry is a strategic reaction to dismantle such hegemony.

Her poetry shows concern for the dispossessed. Through her poetry she raises compassion for the indigenous people who are hapless victims of white racism. She calls into question the typical tendency of colonialism that hurls a section of people to the zones of periphery, exclusivity and non-existence. A typical poem on the issue of land and dispossession is ‘We are Going’. In this poem Oodgeroo criticises the White –Australians who have usurped the land of the Aborigines. It is packed with symbolism. The white people are likened to ants. They are typical business-minded people always concerned with their profit and loss. Oodgeroo depicts how the original inhabitants are feeling like foreigners. The traditional landscape of the natives has been changed to a civilised town. With them the traditional customs like corroboree dance have also vanished. The poem turns the myth of ‘Terra Nullius’ upside down.

Search for the past is a key issue in the poetry of Oodgeroo. The colonial discourse represented the pre-colonial period as a blank, unmarked by any sort of significant action or achievement. Oodgeroo’s poem ‘The Past’ is a response to this type of stereotypical attitudes. The poem is full of nostalgic moments. Another thing worth noticing is that Oodgeroo does not always praise the Aboriginal culture and customs. She is equally sensitive to the evils of Aboriginal culture and points them out for their betterment.

Poetry of Jack Davies

Jack Davies is another noted name in the field of Australian Aboriginal poetry. Born in Perth in 1917, he was the fourth of eleven children to Aboriginal parents who originally came from the North-West of Australia. On his mother’s side, there was a descent from the nineteenth century Afghan community. When Davies was less than a year old, he travelled to the South-West of Western Australia with his family, where his father was appointed foreman of a timber mill at Yarloop. This ‘bush childhood’, and the period after he left school from age fifteen to seventeen were happy times, as Keith Chesson’s biography demonstrates, and as Davies reveals in poems such as ‘The Children’ and ‘Retrospect’ in ‘The First-born and Other Poems’. After primary school and before his son started working for a living, Bill Davies arranged for the boy to go to the Moore River Native Settlement to learn trade and other skills. Davies recreates scenes from that period in his plays ‘No Sugar’ and ‘Kullark’. Davies was a quicksilver personality. Subjected to the pressures of poverty, he worked as a windmill man, a timber worker, a horse breaker, a drover and also as a head stockman. Such diversity of experiences enables him to get a first-hand knowledge about the culture and its problems. His poetry is not elitist.

One of his important themes is camaraderie. He sets great store by the notion of friendship. Davies felt a sense of camaraderie with the other black stockmen with whom he worked in the North. His poem ‘Aboriginal Stockmen’, in his first book of poems ‘The First-Born’, expresses a sense of mateship with these tough but light-hearted men who kept control of the cattle and kept their dreams to themselves. But many poems deal with the difficult lives of indigenous people and the injustice and suffering wrought upon them by white Australians. The poem ‘Family’, for instance, was evoked by the sentencing of two Aborigines to three months gaol for leaving a country reserve without permission at a time when curfews were imposed. This poem leads forward to the ‘John Pat and Other Poems’, with its poems of protest against wrongly imprisoned Aborigines and their brutal treatment. The title poem, with its haunting refrain about the death of a young Aboriginal man in the Roebourne police cells in 1983, was set to music by Archie Roach.

A theme that is often neglected about the poetry of Davies is his faith in Christianity. During the Second World War, Davies returned to the South-West and joined the Brookton Aboriginal Church, taught in the Sunday school there and considered entering the ministry. We need to remember that the Christian outlook of his poetry issues from a practical urge. He does not don the mantle of a preacher. He is guided by humanitarian zeal.

Davies wanted to bridge the gap between the White Settlers and the Aborigines. He does not preach the theory of exclusion. His is an unadulterated humanism that refuses to think in terms of binaries. The Aborigines and the Settlers do not belong to two watertight compartments divided by the wall of their hatred for each other. Despite the trials of his life, Davies held no bitterness and was strongly supportive of non- Aboriginal peoples’ involvement in the political and artistic issues of reconciliation. His poem ‘Integration’ is an example of this philosophy.

His description of nature is also praiseworthy. His celebration of nature and natural resources corroborated the rich legacy of Aboriginal society. Poems from the collection ‘Jagardoo’ are conspicuous for their beautiful descriptions of nature. Davies’s legacy to Australian studies in the twenty first century is a close-to –the-earth outlook, a concern for the underdog and reminders in his writing of a humorous and at times theatrical personality.

Poetry of Kevin Gilbert 

Kevin Gilbert is a major name in the field of Australian indigenous verse. He was born into the Wiradjuri nation in New South Wales, but also had Kamilaroi and Anglo-Irish ancestry. Brought up as a Wiradjuri boy, Gilbert completed fifth grade at Primary school. In 1957, at the age of 24, he was sentenced to prison for life, and during his long stay within prison, he started writing. Gilbert’s verse is marked by a note of directness. He is as much a socially committed poet as is Oodgeroo. However, Gilbert’s poetry shows advancement from the verse of Oodgeroo. Gilbert’s verse is more strident than Oodgeroo; he does not plead for reconciliation. Nor is he submissive in his tone. His verse evinces a caustic tone. He does not look at the real situation through the spectacle of romance. That is why his verse is not always mellifluous and sugar-coated but corrosive and pungent.

Gilbert’s poetry was so much coloured by a note of anger that he fell a prey to the editorial politics. His fist book of poems entitled ‘End of Dreamtime’ was bowdlerized by the editor of the Hyland Press. The editor deleted lines form many poems because of overt violence. Gilbert was offended by this and he published the original poems in 1978 under the name ‘People are Legends’. Poems in ‘People are Legends’ are diverse in themes. A number of poems of this volume are built around the theme of violence. It forms a part and parcel of his poetic output. His poems such as ‘Maureen’ and ‘Duffed’ depict the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women in Australia. They also make a satiric dig at the legal system. Here he unmasks the facade of civility. The truth is laid bare without mincing matters. Critics have accused him of using harsh words in verse. However, we have to remember that his verse issues out of oppression, injustice and the militant voice is the inevitable outcome of it. His poem ‘Mister Man’ is a denunciation of the process of ‘Othering’. This poem reveals how the

Aborigines are connected to their land. Any attempt at knowing their culture from the outside can only be futile. Therefore, he enquires,

“Mister man

Have you stood on this rock

Have you come close to this ghost-gum tree

Have you stood on green fingers of grass

And felt deep their life surge like me?”

Poverty and resultant frustration are the themes of a number of poems in ‘People are Legends’. The White Australian settlers have monopolized the employment opportunities and the indigenous people are hurled to a parlous situation. Gilbert’s poem ‘The Black Drunkard’ reveals the existential dilemma of an Aboriginal because of the lack of employment. As a last resort, the person takes recourse to alcohol. Alcohol acts as a soporific to make them oblivious of the harsh reality. The sense of frustration is also depicted in ‘Not Choosing’. Nowhere do pathos and combine in a better way than in ‘Not Choosing’. The poem is subtle delineation of the Aboriginal psyche.

Gilbert also protests against the Reconciliation process. Some writers like Oodgeroo have supported the Reconciliation process that was aimed at creating sympathetic attitude to the Aborigines. According to Gilbert, this is another version of oppression, a different technique of wielding power. His poem ‘Consultation’ is a response to the policy of Reconciliation. Here he expresses his disgust at the objectification of the Aboriginals through different practices like interviewing. For him, the attempt at knowing is another way of exercising control. The revulsion at the process of Reconciliation is also expressed in the poem ‘The Flowering’.

Poetry of Lionel Fogarty

Lionel Fogarty is a noted Aboriginal Australian poet. Born in 1958 at Barambah in Queensland, Fogarty has been associated with Aboriginal activities from his teenage years. His brother, Daniel Yock, died at the hands of police in 1993. Among the Aboriginal poets, he is chiefly noted for his experimental verse. His work has some aspects of surrealism. He admitted that his initiation into poetry came as a result of interaction with Murri people in Cherbourg and Murgon.

Major themes that loom large in his poetry are issues of land rights, concerns of health for Aboriginal people, black deaths in custody. His first collection of poems was entitled ‘Kargun’(1980). His poetry is characterised by the note of anger. In ‘Consideration of Black Deaths,’ Fogarty gives vent to his pent-up feelings. Here he advises Wakka Wakka people to strategically hit with words. This conception of language can be termed, what Halliday calls, as an employment of anti-language.

Fogarty did not accept English language as his own. Language question has been central issue in postcolonial world. Language and empire have always been inseparable in case of colonial and postcolonial societies. Language was one of the tools with which the colonizers everywhere sought to neutralize the feared barbarism of the natives. The domination of a peoples’ language by the languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized. In postcolonial literatures, the issue of language becomes a key site of ideological contestation. While Oodgeroo appropriated the English language, Fogarty invalidated it. For this, he has employed many traditional  Aboriginal words into his poems. Labelled as a ‘Guerrilla poet’ by Mudrooroo, Fogarty cared a straw for the traditional English syntax. He preferred Creole language to Standard English. Fogarty himself said in one of his interviews, ‘I think that with my little bit of Aboriginal language, I think what people should do is read my poetry, in an Aboriginal way, take the Aboriginal side of my language, and then reflect back on the English side. That’s the only way you’re going to get a balance of understanding. I think my most important thing, like I always say, is to revitalise or to get a full language into practice of the detribalised areas, of the urbanised, so- called, Aborigines.’ This reflects his love for his native tongue and a refusal to speak the language that emanates authoritative discursive practices. The use of Creolised language gives a blow to the pillar of colonialism. His poem ‘Ain’t No Abo Way of Communications’ shows this kind of ‘anti-lingual’ aspects.

Another feature of Fogarty’s writings is his concern for environmental hazards. The Aborigines consider themselves part of nature and acknowledge the dependence of human existence on ecological balance. For the theme of their legends and myths, they mostly include different elements of nature. They even show the wisdom in order to feel the need for biodiversity and are very careful to preserve each and every species. Fogarty is critical of the effects of modernist technologies which have an adverse impact on the lives of Aborigines. To him ancient Australian landscape is an ideal locale; an idyllic place that has been destroyed by the White settlers. His poem ‘Weather Comes’ is a bleakish vision of humanity suffering under the threats of environmental disaster. He depicts how the harmonious relationship between man and nature has been destroyed by environmental changes. ‘Ringbarking-the Contract killers’ is another poem that shows his concern for environmental hazards. The poem is structured around a conversation between the poet and tree. This poem foregrounds Aboriginal practices. His constant references to the natural world- trees, water, sky, wind – speak volumes for his preference for traditional Aboriginal landscape.

Reference 

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