Australian Poetry

Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Published online before print August 6, 2015, doi: 10.1177/0021989415589833

When Judith Wright travelled to Europe in the “loaded spring” of February 1937, the 22-year-old poet found herself witness to “a break in the consciousness of Europe”. This article argues that Wright’s experience of being an outsider in Europe at this crucial historical moment had profound implications for her poetics, in the form of a compound and productive series of displacements. Her peripatetic encounters with European cultures-in-crisis caused Wright to despair of Europe as a source of political and creative renewal, and exposed fault lines in her own cultural orientation. Sundered from her Anglophile cultural inheritance, and able to reflect on home with the distance and imaginative ambivalence of an outsider, Wright invoked Ulysses — that archetypal poetic wanderer — whose experience of archipelagic journeying came to express for her the contingencies and hauntedness of Australia’s palimpsestic identity. This essay positions the shifting perspectives and excursive patterns of Wright’s developing poetics in relation to concepts of outsideness and embodiment, drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and phenomenological philosophies of mind.

Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.

Kath McLean and Louise Poland (with additional research by Jacinta van den Berg). A Case for Literature: The Effectiveness of Subsidies to Australian Publishers, 1995–2005. (Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, May 2010 (released October 2010)): 1–68:
Over the ten-year period under examination, at least 800 titles were subsidised by the Literature Board. This project examines the range of titles and publishers supported by the subsidies, and considers the extent to which those titles made a significant contribution to Australian literature, either directly, in recognition of their value, or indirectly through the contribution they made to authors’ careers and reputations, and to the reputations and lists of the publishers concerned.

BARRON FIELD, WHO IS TODAY A LARGELY FORGOTTEN FIGURE, WAS FROM 1817 TO 1824 the highest judge in New South Wales. His place in literary history rests on his First Fruits of Australian Poetry of 1819, which, as the title announces, was the first book of poetry to be published in that country. At almost exactly the same time, Field was promulgating the first known formal statement of terra nullius in Australia. As such, Field is a crucial figure in the history of Australian literature’s intertwinements with colonial genocide: he was the founding father, so to speak, of the poetics of terra nullius.

Beginning with a description of a Year 10 poetry unit taught by the writer, the article argues that despite apparent decline, poetry teaching in secondary literacy programs for years 7–10 remains vital because of its potential for deep personal engagement and for its promotion of a diverse range of literacy competencies. The article offers suggestions for enhancing poetry teaching and nurturing greater focus on poetry, not only in literacy and English classrooms, but across the curriculum.

Poet, editor, and school teacher Flexmore Hudson is best remembered as a long time, if sometimes reluctant, supporter of Rex Ingamells’ Jindyworobak Movement. However, unlike many of his nationalist counterparts, Hudson was interested in internationalism and the encouragement of ‘self-conscious world citizens.’ In 1947 Hudson was writing the educational comic Discovery, which he would later describe as ‘hack work’, in a failed attempt to keep his highbrow magazine Poetry financially afloat. Though Hudson was doubtful of the literary merit of Discovery, both texts show signs of his concerted effort to promote respect and communication between people ‘regardless of their colour, race or religion.’ This paper will use a range of Hudson’s little studied literary output to demonstrate his simultaneous support for ‘world-mindedness’ and the Jindyworobaks. Though this double allegiance yielded tension, Hudson took advantage of the ideological intersection that saw the environment become crucial to both nationalism and new world-minded thinking. Hudson’s overtly ‘placed’ poetry, written while a resident of rural South Australia, resonated with the Jindyworobak call for literary attention to ‘environmental values’ and gave him a curious advantage as an adherent of world-mindedness.

As John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’. 1 Perhaps drawing upon Donne’s reflection, Syd Harrex has described his inheritance as islandic. His island-self was created in the Australian island State of Tasmania where he lived out his first three decades. Stories of shipwrecks and imagined maroonings shaped Syd’s boyhood games; his island childhood influenced not only by the visceral experience of living separate from the main, but also by the literature of islands, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Barrie’s The Coral Island, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In adulthood, Syd had a long association with Kangaroo Island in South Australia. It is in the tranquil town of Penneshaw that Syd’s more recent writing-self had found a place of solace, inspiration, and respite. Overlooking Backstairs Passage, the narrow body of water that separates the island that locals call KI from the South Australian mainland, Pen...

This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.

Drawing on Bernd Mahr’s model theory, this volume offers a new theory of Romanticism in contemporary (sub)urban Australia. Taking a transcultural approach, it brings together two writers: David Malouf and Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson. In this first book dedicated to these authors’ poetic oeuvre, comprehensive readings reveal an ironic dialectic underpinning how they write from within a disjunct of culture and environment following colonisation. Irony enables an evocation of place, even as it acknowledges the impossibility of ever achieving a unified sense of place in Australia’s palimpsestic layers of histories and myths. The theoretical framing of Romanticism in this book effectively rehabilitates Romanticism as a productive paradigm in contemporary Australian poetry.

There is a strange phenomenon which is caused by war. It is something quite extraordinary and somehow spiritual, even for those who hold no faith in God or eternal life. When young men go to war, they take with them only four things; their life, their youth, their memories and their hopes. For some, they bring all these things back home with them, and for others, they bring home some of these things. But for many, they bring nothing home, for they would be killed in war and lose all their worldly possessions.

This article seeks to illuminate the entwined aesthetics of Vicki Viidikas’s poetry. Viidikas was a Sydney poet: she lived in Balmain, and spent long periods of time in India later in life. She was part of the generation of ‘68, which revelled in the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and 70s. Viidikas published three books of poetry in her lifetime: Condition Red (1973), Knäbel (1978), and India Ink (1984), as well as a book of short stories and prose poems, Wrappings (1974). Between 1985 and 1998 she published only a handful of poems in journals; India Ink would be her last book.

The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.

This research focuses on analyzing Clarence Michael James Dennis's character and works that illustrate the atmosphere of natural beauty and romance in Australia when during and after the war. In this paper also explained that the development of literary works in the UK affect the development of literary works in Australia. The works sampled in this study are the works of C.J Dennis made before World War 1, until after World War 1 was completed. The values of humanity, the atmosphere of war, and romance became the characteristic of C. Dennis's poems. The study concludes that C. J Dennis is a world writer thanks to his synchronized work and is relevant to the issues that can be absorbed by the world community, as well as explaining how the first world war from the standpoint of the army world.

Thomas Harpur, not to be confused with Australia's first native-born poet, Charles Harpur, lived in Australia for only eight years, dying at Cecil Hills on 22 October 1848, aged 51. His poetry is unknown under his own name - and obscure under two pseudonyms 'Harmonides' and 'Cecil Hills'. Nonetheless his family retained their belief in his stature as an 'Australian poet'. His grand-daughter Rosa Praed, born three years after his death, had this background of published writing to buoy her belief in her own ability.

Judith Wright, the great Australian poet, writer, environmentalist and activist for Aboriginal rights, was asked at a celebration for her 85th birthday what year had been the best of her life. She chose not one of the years of great public achievement - not the year her first book of poems was published or the years she won the ASAN World Prize for Poetry or the Queen's Gold Prize. Her best year was when she was 27. It was the year she met Jack McKinney.
In her autobiography, Judith Wright wrote: 'He alone knew how much I owed to his searching mind, his wit and his help and support in my own work.'

In this paper I consider the ecological term 'biodiversity' as a metaphor within that of the more generally metaphorical term 'field', specifically in relation to Christopher Brennan's unusual work, the Musicopoematographoscope. The term 'field', in the literary context may not preclude, but does not suggest, biodiversity: it suggests instead evenness, tamedness, industry, fighting or sport-and settledness. I use the ecological figure of biodiversity not as an indication of a relation between writing (poetry) and natural environments per se, but as a way of signalling attention to survival. A literature that can be compared to a biodiverse ecosystem-rather than a field-suggests the wholeness that health is derived from. JASAL 12.1 Field, Curriculum, Emotion FARRELL: Christopher Brennan and Biodiversity

This paper reevaluates the work of late Australian poet Philip Hodgins (1959-1995) in the context of related inquiries into the work of other late poets Jennifer Rankin and John Anderson. The emphasis is on Hodgins's 'landspeak', or the unusual capacities for his lines to both delimit Australian country and to leave open the potential for what is unknown and/or unseen. This relates to tropes of provincialism and of geopoetics in other Australian poetry. The paper argues that, despite the apparent conservatism of his poetics, Hodgins's work actually interrogates the foundations of colonial Australian places.

First of all, I'll set difficulty as my default mode and mood for today's inquiry; and I shall not try to make it easy, I must confess it has never been easy, this strangeness of brushing my living mind's desire against the persistent, plaintive whisper of some dead poets' call. The fourth way of being difficult will be all mine, I beg you to forgive me this urge.