29 Australian Poetry by Writers of European Descent

Ms. Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty

Content of the chapter:

1.  Objectives:

• This module intends to give a comprehensive idea about the Australian poetry by the writers of European descent.
• It will introduce the major Australian poets of European descent.
• It will offer a critical overview of the major poems by the Australian poets of the European descent.
• The module will further analyse how these Australian poets of European descent engage with the Australian themes like bush poetry, outback, mateship and the Australian nature tinged with beauty and terror.

2. Introduction

Australia emerged as a country which contained a number of colonies at the early phase of Western domination. The first generation of Australian writers came from these places where people from various European countries arrived and settled for generations. The first flowering of Australian literature unfolded through the works of these Australian writers of European descent. As the European influence is prominent in the first literary works, the early Australian literature often shared the English literary traditions. Poetry occupies a significant portion of the early Australian literature. Gradually Australian literature has grown to be more Australian in tune and theme. The writers of European descent have imbibed the Australian culture in their works and Australia emerges anew through their works. Australian poetry by the writers of European descent followed the same trend.

3. Early Australian Poetry by the Writers of European Descent 

The early Australian writers of European descent share their awareness of belonging to a settler community. Their writing represents a celebration of pioneering Australian values and a deep attachment to the land, its nature and people. The early Australian poets of European descent like Charles Thompson and William Wentworth tried to capture their experience in the new land and their sense of local pride as they were born in the colony in their work ‘Australasia’ (1823). The first volume of Australian poetry by the writers of European descent is Barron Field’s First Fruit of Australian Poetry (1819) which was published in Australia. The writers in the colony often expressed their nostalgia for ‘home’, their ancestral roots in European countries. A sense of exile haunted the poems of the convict songs and the Bush ballads of that time.

In this early phase of Australian poetry by the writers of the European descent, Charles Harpur’s poetry presents the feel of nineteenth century British Romanticism. His poems paint the Australian landscape in the same tune which we find in William Wordsworth’s landscape poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s idealism and American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas were also quite influential on Harpur’s romantic poems.

Nationalistic feelings were in the rise in the Australian poetry of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century and the pioneering Australian journals like Bulletin promoted Australian literature for the Australian people. Australian poets of European descent also began to ‘write Australian’ and Henry Lawson emerged as the poet of the people. Another important contributor in the Bulletin was A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson who was hailed for his Bush ballads. These two classical Australian poets, Lawson and Banjo Paterson were entangled in the well-known ‘Bulletin debate’. This debate presented these two poets’ perspectives on the Australian nature of life. Lawson wrote about the hard realistic life of the Bush while the Romantic Bush life comes alive in Paterson’s poetry.

Other important Australian poets of European descent are Henry Kendall, Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsey Gordon. Henry Kendall’s Leaves from Australian Forests (1869) brings his poetry of forests and mountain streams. His poetry focuses more on the sounds and descriptions than on actions. Christopher Brennan’s poetry is characterized by the traditional style of poetry, containing many classical allusions. He concentrated more on his Symbolist poetry other than local preoccupations with nationalism. His poems in the volume Poems 1913 (1913) delved deep into the sources of spiritual restlessness through the use of myth and archetypes. Adam Lindsey Gordon’s poetry presents the traditional representation of Australian life. The poem ‘The Sick Stockrider’ from his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes conveys a sense of comradeship and detailing of Bushman’s world.

Another popular poet of this time, C.J. Dennis, reoriented many of the bush attitudes to the inner city through his verse on the Sentimental Bloke.

Modern Australian Poetry

Modern Australian poetry begins not in the superficial depiction of Australian land and nature, but through a philosophical engagement with the spirit of Australia as rendered in the Australian stories. The poet, Dorothy Porter seeks to tell the stories in a way so that “they sear into the soul and can never be untold”. This Australian spirit celebrates its ‘unaffectedness’ by any European schools and traditions and presents its ingenuity. This willing seclusion enables a poetic vantage point. The nature of modern Australian poetry is varied and quite debated by the writers of European descent. Sometimes it is cosmopolitan in nature; sometimes the nationalist hues are dominant. Often it is laconic in expression. Amidst its wide variety in tunes and expressions, some thematic strains can well be discerned. A deep engagement with the Australian landscape and how the poets imagine it-is something central to the modern Australian poetry. A kind of experimental writing is gaining the center stage. During the early decades of the twentieth century, two poetic movements arose. These movements intended to define the modern Australian poetry, but from two different perspectives. These two movements, the Jindyworobaks and the Angry Penguins began in Adelaide. These two movements played a significant role in shaping the modern Australian poetry. Besides essentially Australian qualities, other national, social and urban issues are delineated in the contemporary Australian poetry in both realist and surrealist manners. Modern Australian poetry by the writers of European descent took many forms- sonnets, free verse, prose-poems and the unique verse-novels. Australian Performance Poetry and the Australian Poetry Slam are other popular poetic schools.

The Jindyworobak Movement 

The Jindyworobak movement began in the 1930’s. It was a movement of poets who propagated a unique Australian poetry which would depict the distinctive Australian natural landscape such as the desert and the Bush in Australian terms. These poems would also incorporate the Aboriginal cultural elements and the Aboriginal perception of the Australian nature. Rex Ingamells was the pioneering figure of the poetry movement of the Australian poets of European descent. Conditional Culture (1938) was the manifesto of this movement in which Ingamells talked about the specific aims of this movement- “a clear recognition of Australian values, the debunking of much nonsense and an understanding of Australia’s history and traditions: primeval, colonial and modern.” For the Jindyworobaks, the European culture is a conditional culture. They nurtured the literary nationalism further in Australian poetry. Unabated Spring (1942), the book of poetry by Ian Mudie, one of the founding members of Jindyworobak movement, imbibed aboriginal Arrente words like ‘Alcheringa’ (spirit of the place) in the poems. Rex Ingamells also wrote two volumes of poetry- Gum Tops (1935) and Forgotten People (1936) as an outcome of the movement. Another important Jindyworobak poet was Roland Robinson. Beyond the Grass-tree Spears: Verse (1944), Language of the Sand: Poems (1949), Legend and Dreaming (1952) and Black-feller, White-feller (1958) are the major books of verse of Robinson. The last two books contained components from Aboriginal culture and dream stories.

Angry Penguins and the Literary Modernism in Australian Poetry 

Another important poetry movement began in Adelaide in 1930s centering on the publication of the literary journal Angry Penguins, founded by a group of Adelaide poets like Max  Harris, Geoffrey Dutton, Sam Kerr and Paul Pfeiffer. This poetry movement promoted the possibility of experimentation, use of impressionism and surrealism and abstraction in writing poetry. For the leading poets of this journal, the Jindyworobak movement is limited in its scope.

The Ern Malley Hoax 

Max Harris and the other poets like Reed and Nolan of Angry Penguins promoted the poetry of Ern Malley, a fictional poet as modernist poetry. The publication of the poetry of Ern Malley and Harris’ propagation for this poetry was known as the great Ern Malley hoax in the history of Australian Poetry by the writers of European descent, as Harris failed to realize the fictional entity of Ern Mallley.. But the legacy of Ern Malley relives through various paintings and fictional texts. Sidney Nolan and Gary Shead chose Ern Malley as a theme for their paintings. Peter Carey’s novel My Life as a Fake is based on the theme of the artist as hoax and derives from the Ern Malley hoax.

Meditative Verse and Other Developments of Modern Australian Poetry by the Writers of European Descent 

Besides the descriptive verse, the Australian poets of European descent moved to meditative lyrics. A new symbolic understanding of Australia emerges in the modern Australian poetry. Besides the poetic giants, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright, Douglas Stewart, James McAuley, David Campbell, Rosemary Dobson and Vivian Smith enriched this tradition of meditative verse. A.D. Hope’s poetic fabric is textured with the satiric, witty and allusive tunes. His poetry often shows the influence of the middle style of John Dryden, the English neoclassical poet.

We find a more emotionally charged poetic verses in Judith Wright’s poetic oeuvre. Douglas Stewart’s Collected Poems 1936-1967 (1967) brings in a meditative understanding of natural world in which Stewart conceives a deeper cosmic morality. James McAuley’s fine verses like ‘Pieta’ and poems of Music Late at Night (1976) present a different facet of the contemporary Australian poetry.

Les Murray’s poetry in the late twentieth century brings in his allusive voice. His poetry concentrated on the secular world of spiritual realities. In his volume of poetry like Dog Fox Field (1990), he is concerned to find the importance of poetry in ordinary life. Bruce Dawe’s Sometimes Gladness (1993) represents Dawe’s journalistic, contemporary poetry. Robert Gray in his verse volumes like Piano (1988) and Certain Things (1993) wrote spare lyric poetry. Robert Adamson’s The Clean Dark (1989) and John Tranter’s The Floor of Heaven (1992) presents modern experimental poetry.

The later part of the module will concentrate on the detailed discussion of the major Australian poets of the European descent in the latter half of the twentieth century.

A. D. Hope’s Poetry

A.D. Hope as an Australian poet of the European descent was quite conscious about the effect of the ancestral English poetry tradition and a simultaneous claim of ‘writing Australian’ on the Australian writers of the European descent. Actually, the Australian literature was primarily written in the language of the settlers, in English. But the thematic structure is rooted in the soil of Australia. Besides the modern urban landscape of advance technological progress derived from the Western society, the Australian life of the Bush and the dessert, the ragged geographical reality of the vast continent reside side by side. This paradoxical understanding of Australian life and nature characterize the poetry of A.D. Hope. He is observant and individualistic in his response to the basic human experience. Allusive and often erotic, his wit is poignant in his poetic expressions. His poetry turns to the conservative side; he is not a man of vernacular Australian. His poetic structures consist of both dialogic and ironic perspectives. His worldview presents a dialogue between the classical European poetics and the Australian spirit. His understanding of Australia is paradoxical as presented in his famous poem ‘Australia’:

A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey

In the field uniform of modern wars

Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws

Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

‘Australia’ opens with this tone of ironic understatement. The Australian nature is painted with ‘drab green and desolate grey’ and the first few stanzas of the poem portray the geographical as well as the intellectual and emotional landscape of contemporary Australia. An Eliotesque urban Australia comes up in the following lines of the poem where a sense of cultural deprivation is predominant. At the end of the poem, the poet anticipates the coming of the prophet out of ‘lush jungle of modern thought’ to cure the ‘cultured apes’ of their intellectual barrenness.

Hope’ another brilliant satiric creation is ‘Standardization’ which mocks at the superficiality of the man-made creations and celebrates the power of nature which produces volumes of shapes and sustenance-

I see, stooping among her orchard trees

The old. Sound earth, gathering her windfalls in,

Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees Pause,

and I see her grave, malicious grin.

For there is no manufacturer competes

With her in the mass production of shapes and things.

Over and over she gathers and repeats

The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.

Hope thinks that nature as the mother figure “standardized his ultimate needs and pains”. Therefore, the man’s understanding of standardization is fatuous; rather the fall of morals and human values is criticized in this poem in Hope’s characteristic biting satire.

Judith Wright: Championing the Australian Land and the Aboriginal Rights

Hailing from the family of the pioneering pastoralists who settled in New England, Judith Wright was conscious of her ancestral liberal humanist tradition. Her gradual realization of the deprivation of the Aboriginals and the destruction of the ancient Australian landscape in the hand of the colonial settlers and her ancestor’s participation in the process of annihilation moved her to a kind of expiation through her poetry. Besides the direct and emotional textures of her poetry, Wright’s writings campaigned for Aboriginal rights as well as propagated the conservation of Australian land and people. As Partha Pratim Dasgupta points out, Judith Wright celebrates Australia “covered with the misty aura of oral narratives, native myths and stories that have the capacity of constantly haunting an ardent lover of this rugged, jagged country, where life is harsh but the well-earned fruits of labour essentially sweet.”

Judith Wright’s famous poem, ‘Woman to Man’ poetically renders the creation of life through the sexual intimacy which is presented by beautiful symbolic expressions of the moments of physical togetherness of the woman and the man.

The eyeless labourer in the night,

The selfless, shapeless seed I hold,

Builds for its resurrection day-

Silent and swift and deep from sight

Foresees the unimagined light.

The emotional immediacy of the experience, the fruition of love in the physical intimacy and a spiritual understanding of creation of life characterize the poem. Beginning from the creation of life in the first stanza, the poem traces the process of growth through love.

Besides ‘Woman to Man’, another popular poem, ‘Woman to Child’ of Wright’s book, Woman to Man, tells the story of the mother-child relationship. The poem celebrates the maternal love between the mother and the growing child within the womb. On another plane, the poem symbolically presents the relationship between the motherland and her inhabitants.

Her poems try to converge the two worlds- the world of the indigenous and the world of the non-indigenous settlers. As a conservationist and as the champion of Aboriginal rights, she not only campaigned for the preservation of the Aboriginal culture and people, but she succeeded in translating the Aboriginal experience in many of her poems. According to John Williams, In her own way she has taken a step further for us in the expression of Australian national, spiritual and environmental values in her poetry.

Kenneth Slessor and R. D. FitzGeralds’s poetry

Kenneth Slessor and R. D. FitzGeralds’s poetry brings in modernism in Australian poetry by the writers of European descent. Slessor’s volume of poetry, Earth- Visitors (1926) and Five Bells (1929) focus more on image and symbols. Forty Years’ Poems (1965) and Product: Later Verses by Robert D. FitzGerald (1977) by Robert D. FitzGerald are much more committed to philosophical poetry. Their later poems deeply engage with the varied concepts of history and time. According to a critic, Kenneth Slessor was probably the most talented one to have written in Australia, and the first renovator of twentieth century Australian poetry. Slessor’s career as a poet ran in tandem with his life as a hard-working journalist. He seems to have been able to turn off the raucous babble of everyday Sydney, like a radio, and to produce the piercing, rinsed-clean order of words that characterize his best poetry.

The Poetry of Rosemary Dobson and Gwen Harwood

David McCooey, in his introduction to Rosemary Dobson’s poetry, points out that Rosemary’s poetry is haunted by ‘visitations, apparitions, omens, annunciations, prophesies and premonitions’. Her poetry is also light and lucid in tone as we find in her books of poems like Convex Mirror (1944), and Ship of Ice (1948). Renaissance paintings were one of the major shaping forces in her poetry. Her poetry ranges from the formal verse to free verse.

Gwen Harwood’s poetry is tinged with her bright intellect and witty undertone. Her straightforwardness and a rare ability to reach the heart of the matter make her poems poignant and biting. Fluidity of identity and preoccupation with the complexity of motherhood is some of the recurring themes of her poetry. Her finesse as a librettists endowed her poems  with  a  beautiful  musicality.  The  Lion’s  Bride (1981)  and  Bone  Scan (1988) are Harwood’s major works.

Literary Realism and the Poetry of Chris Wallace Crabbe

The 1960s and the 1970s saw the emergence of intense literary realism in the poetry of the Australian writers of European descent. Francis Webb (1925-1973) wrote poems on the themes of religious exploration and nature of poetic creativity. Realistic engagement with the socio-political circumstances and often satiric presentations occupy the poetry of Chris Wallace Crabbe, Bruce Dawe and Vincent Buckley. The poetry of Bruce Dawe represents his satiric portrayal of the social and political issues. Religious overtones and traditional literary realism can also be traced in his poetry, published in his book, No Fixed Address (1962).

The satiric realism is evident in Wallace Crabbe’s Eliotesque portrayal of the private hell of the citizens of Melbourne in his famous poem ‘Melbourne’. The wry urbanism is evident in the concluding lines:

Highway by highway, the remorseless cars

Strangle the city, put it out of pain,

Its limbs still kicking feebly on the hills.

Nobody cares. The artists sail at dawn

For brisker ports, or rot in public bars.

Though much has died here, little has been born.

The city is represented in negative terms where the citizens suffer disgruntlement. Intellectual and emotional barrenness plague the city which is becoming claustrophobic for the citizens of Melbourne.

Verse Novels of Dorothy Porter and Les Murray

One of the oldest poetic genres, the verse novel, was revived in the hand of a distinctive poetic voice in the history of Australian poetry by the writers of European descent. Other than her books of poetry The Bee Hut (2009) and Love Poems (2010), Dorothy Porter reached eminence through her five verse novels- Akhenaten (1992), based on the Egyptian Pharaoh of that name and told as a series of dramatic monologue; The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a verse satire on the local poetry scene; What a Piece of Work (1999), dealing with a psychiatrist’s perception; Wild Surmise (2002), engaging with the double perspectives of a woman astronomer and her dying academic husband; and El Dorado (2007), a thriller set in Melbourne.

Les Murray’s poetry brings in a sense of deeper commitment to his perception of the real Australia, his ‘vernacular republic’, which is located in the rural Australian landscape as the Bush and the detailing of the Bush life. This committed understanding of the nationalistic Australian identity provides a kind of unity in the richness of variety of his poetic tapestry. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature discusses Les Murray’s poetic style in the following way-

The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity – respect, even reverence, for the pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character; admiration for that special Australian character, down-to-earth, laconic (‘we are a colloquial nation’) and based on such Bush-bred qualities as egalitarianism, practicality, straightforwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime (‘the country soldiers’); and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment.

Besides the famous volumes of poetry like The Vernacular Republic (1976) and Dog Fox Field (1990), Les Murray also contributed in the flourishing of the genre of verse novels. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Fredy Neptune: a Novel in Verse (1999) are the verse novels written by Murray.

What We Have Learnt?

Australian poetry by the writer of European descent began its journey under the influence of the European poetic traditions. A sense of nostalgia and exile also haunted the poems of the early Australian writers of European descent. But their gradual consciousness and attachment to the Australian landscape and the Bush life endowed their poetry with a distinctive Australian flavor. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were the major poetic voices in the early Australian poetry by the writers of European descent. In their poetry published in the leading Australian literary magazine, Bulletin, they represented two perspectives of the Bush life- one realistic and other a romantic celebration of Bush people’s lived experience. Henry Kendall, Christopher Brennan, Adam Lindsey Gordon and C. J. Dennis were major poets during this phase of Australian poetry.

Modern Australian poetry contemplates more on the philosophical engagement with the nature of being Australian, by retelling and reshaping the Australian stories, its myths and symbols. Two poetic movements- the Jindyworobaks and the Angry Penguins debated two aspects of Australian poetry. The Jindyworobaks intend to present the Australian culture in propagating a kind of literary nationalism, while the Angry Penguins promoted experimental, laconic verse. Poets like Douglas Stewart, James McAuley, David Campbell, Rosemary Dobson and Vivian Smith wrote meditative verse. The satiric and allusive poetry of A.D. Hope and the emotionally enriched verse of Judith Wright present a convergence of the two worlds of the indigenous and the non-indigenous literature and culture. The texture of modern Australian poetry by the writers of European descent is varied, experimental and rich with philosophical and mythical meanings.

References

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2. Bennett, Bruce, and Jennifer Strauss, Chris Wallace-Crabbe eds. The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Oxford University Press. 1998.
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