Two Essays on Australian Poetry

by Dr. Ian Irvine (copyright 2005-2008 all rights reserved)[Mercurius Press (Bendigo, Australia), Formally Asphodel M&ES]

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?

1. Who were the Jindyworobaks?

It is a ghost that walks before birth.As a faithful promise it comes.To have known it is to yearn with heart and eyesfor the long hushfor the long, long hushunder starlight in the desert with the winds,waiting the sun’s rise.2

The ‘Jindyworobaks’ were a loose ‘club’ of Australian poets who wanted to forge a 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 20 th 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, 19403 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

2. Critiques of Jindyworobak Critiques of Australian Culture and Society

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.

3. Restless Ghosts: Jindyworobak Contributions to an Emerging Australian Anti-Colonialist Ethnopoetics

US l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poet and literary/political theorist Bruce Andrews in discussing the capacity of poetry to highlight what he calls ‘unsuturable conditions’ in society at large writes:

‘Writing’s method … can suggest a social indecidability, a lack of successful suture. Tiny cuts: syntacted glare, facts en bloc, circuit breaking in which a break renders, syntax as demolition derby. This

7 In summarizing decades of academic critique under the general banner of Jindyworobak ‘excessiveness’ John Daily, in ‘The Jindyworobaks: Literary Philosophers or Literary Victims?’ (p. 7, 1986), wrote:

‘Some readers would find Ian Mudie’s “Resurgence” an excessive political comment upon alien influence. Most would find Ingamells’ “The Gangrened People” not only excessive in its polemic but excessively bad poetry. And as for the Jindyworobak experiment of using aboriginal words in their poetry, “Moorawathimeering” was proof positive to many readers that aboriginal culture was no substitute for good old English culture.’

8 Cultural snobbishness is one way of reading A.D. Hope’s early critiques (1941) of the movement: ‘Mr Kennedy and the poet he quotes, Mr. Rex Ingamells, may, for all I know, write with their spears and throwing sticks beside them…’ From ‘Culture Corroboree’, Southerly, Vol. ii, No.3, Nov. 1941 reprinted in The Jindyworobaks, ed. Brian Elliott, p.249.

In other cases ‘associative racism’ is clearly directed against the movement.

displacement or social unbalancing has more than nuisance value … Instead, it offers a guide by which matters outside do not hang together—an unsuturable condition: where norms are contradicted & and where you can recognize that therefore they can be contradicted …’9

It seems to me that the Jindyworobak ‘poetic’ highlighted wounds, absences, imbalances which made it clear that ‘matters outside’ did not properly ‘hang together’—i.e. agreed upon histories of Australia, the state of Australian poetics, prevalent opinions regarding Aboriginal culture, the unspoken unease/alienation many non-indigenous Australians felt in regard to their relationship to the land, etc.

These lacunae, repressions, flaws, omissions leave a culture open to hauntings—the flip sides of a normatively defined ‘reality’ (mid-century heimlich history) are uncanny (unheimlich) alternative realities/histories. The Jindyworobak intervention signified a preliminary assault on the collective ‘screen memories’ that blocked any attempt to open up to alternative (particularly Aboriginal) readings of the past—epitomized most spectacularly by early-to-mid-century non-indigenous historical narratives. Thus the Jindy reaction against early 20th century Australian and imported European poetic traditions exposed open wounds in the national psyche—in both the imaginative and historical senses their poetics raised the dead in order to contest normative conceptions of Australian identity and history. These ‘unsuturable wounds’—implicitly discussed in Ingamells’ manifesto, Conditional Culture (1938)—were probably fourfold:

A) The unacknowledged mis-treatment of indigenous Australians by non-indigenous Australians.

Although Ingamells, consistent with mainstream views of the time, prematurely pronounced on the ‘passing of the Aboriginals’ in part IV of Conditional Culture he clearly laments this state of affairs in certain of his poems, in particular in ‘The Forgotten People’ of 1935. More importantly he unambiguously links Aboriginal suffering to the affects of colonization, stating: ‘After the white man came, the black man lost/ His hunting-grounds and camping grounds.’ Also: ‘His waterholes were stolen or defiled,/and all his sacred tjurungas were tainted.’10

In his prose Ingamells also made use of groundbreaking anthropological studies to contradict then prevalent white myths about Aboriginal culture that served as justifications for assimilation and further dispossession. In Conditional Culture, for example, he writes: ‘Contrary to general conception, the passing of the Aboriginals meant the passing of a culture that was age-old.’ And in the same section: ‘I am strongly conscious, often unhappily so, of much in our colonial tradition.’ Likewise, in order to

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’.

counter accepted ‘simplistic’ constructions of Aboriginal culture he wrote of the 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 19th-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:

11 In the same section Ingamells also wrote approvingly of: ‘the fertility of the Aboriginal mind in imagination and poetry based upon the realities and mysteries of environment’.12 Kennedy—Flaunted Banners 1941, reprinted in The Jindyworobaks (1979 p.232,) ed. Brian Elliott— writes: ‘The only true and sincere Australian race is that of the Aboriginal race because it has sprung direct from its own pre-existing conditions.’13 From Rex Ingamells, Conditional Culture, 1938.

Though to the West—where once the bushland plainStretched primal from these ranges to the sea

The white man’s city has, in spreading, slainNature and hardly left a memory …

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.

C) The Issue of Cultural Autonomy

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. D) Intimation of a Euro-American Culture Crisis

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.’

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 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.

4. A Haunted Poetics of Landscape and Belonging

‘[Compared to Lawrence] Ingamells, with a dry eye, and inured to broader horizons, instinctively removed his locus further inland. … His landscape was no longer topography in a descriptive sense. It was tense with feeling, but not insistently visual. He perceived in the land (a favorite word) a character of immemorial, elemental antiquity. … In the context of this native antiquity he looked upon the Aborigine as the true symbolic continuum.’ 15

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.’

15 Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, p.239.

It is arguable that the development of ‘affectional bonds’, inscribed in a new language (not actually ‘Aboriginal’, despite the remonstrations of the Jindies) between non-indigenous Australians and the flora and fauna of the land was an early step toward a less exploitative environmental ethic. 19th and early 20th century poetic attempts to recreate the homeland (Britain/Europe) were conditioned by language codes that, when let loose on the indigenous landscape, constructed its flora and fauna as ‘abject other’, inanimate ‘resources’ or ‘vermin’ to be exploited or annihilated. Though select landscape phenomena were often ‘idealized’ it was usually by resort to second-hand European ‘imagery’, thus aspects of the lost ‘homeland’ haunted—if we’re looking at the signification process—‘stock’ descriptions of gum-trees, birds, etc.. Given the fact that these European signifiers were simultaneously expressive of Colonialist/Enlightenment ideological configurations, Ingamells’ critique of such image making in Conditional Culture surely represents an act of attempted poetic ‘exorcism’. It can also be understood as an act of ‘affectional transfer’, from European flora, fauna and language/intellectual codes to new ones, ones only tangentially, as it turned out, related to indigenous codes. The attempted ‘recovery of (Aboriginal) origins’ actually produced a new hybrid poetic which was itself later critiqued and altered. This partial (re)giving (‘re’ in the sense that the Jindies saw Aboriginal naming as primary) of a supposed indigenous, in actuality ‘new’, language to the Australian landscape marks the most revolutionary feature of the Jindyworobak poetic. Can we classify this strategy as an example of belated Romanticism?

Paul Kane has suggested, in Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, that Australian poetry never truly experienced a ‘Romantic period’. In the case of the Jindies I tend to agree, the work of the major Jindy poets was almost always tempered by what Kane would no doubt call a form of ‘negativity’, an awareness of ‘absences’ or ‘loss’. 16

It is this sense of ‘absence’ and ‘loss’ (inspired perhaps by a crisis in signification) that contributes to what is unique about Jindyworobak poetics. As a result of their questioning of agreed upon historical ‘truths’ language codes enter into a state of radical indeterminancy, invoking, perhaps, that state of ‘ontological flicker’ described by McHale in Postmodernist Fictions—certainly a kind of haunting since so-called social ‘truths’ become unheimlich, i.e. uncanny.

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

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.’

spectre, ‘a ghost that walks before birth’, arguably appears in Ingamells’ ‘Desert Dawn’ (1940) (see the quote that opened this study).

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:

In a colonial environment (and colonisation can be 'post' only in discourse, not in reality) … indigenous presence is continually suppressed, 'assimilated', denied, or controlled. Furthermore, the rural spaces I have spent much of my life in have been devastated by European farming practices - the destruction of the topsoil and the removal of trees and scrub (that would normally keep the water table down and prevent salinity leaching up to the surface), has led to widespread salt. 17

The unease felt at the time by mainstream Australians at Jindyworobak reassessments of Australian history is evident in the following extract from a particularly interesting critique of the movement written by F.J. Letters in 1948.

Jindyworobakism raises the possibility of a double allegiance, of two conflicting patriotisms, in a single nation. If as lovers of poetry we are to revere the black culture, as students of history we shall find ourselves facing a question the merely political unimportance of the Aborigines makes no easier to answer.

That question is: ‘How far have the blacks been ill-treated by our ancestors?’ As far as I know there is really no authoritative answer to this terrible poser … Australian historians have exhibited first class agility in avoiding it. 18

Perhaps the major Jindyworobak achievement was to contribute to the construction of what we might call ‘discursive spaces’ in Australian culture where indigenous revisions of ‘history’ might flourish. In this sense a bevy of Aboriginal artists, writers, thinkers and activists now speak for themselves instead of relying on non-indigenous mediators. Nevertheless, such ‘spaces’ have always been circumscribed to some extent by the brute reality of non-indigenous dominance. Likewise, even these ‘spaces’, for dialogue and protest, revisioning (of histories) and catharsis/grieving (indigenous and non-indigenous), for political change and so on remain contested, endangered, by the incursions of powerful political and economic interests. The current Neo-Con/Neo-liberal alliance, for example, has spawned revisionist historians such as Keith Windshuttle who, as Bain Attwood argues in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, insist upon ‘the primacy of white Australian history’ and are ‘deaf to Aboriginal voices.’19 The same alliance often seems deaf to the concerns of indigenous and non-indigenous environmentalists.

17 John Kinsella, ‘Landscape Poetry?’ at John Kinsella’s web-site, accessed July 2005.18 First appeared in F.J. Letters’, In a Shaft of Sunlight (1948), this extract reprinted in The Jindyworobaks, (1979, p.276) ed. Brian Elliott.19 Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, Allan and Unwin, 2005, p.105.

Most worryingly, new ‘ghosts’ and ‘spectres’ arising out of unresolved white ‘shadow stuff’ (to make tentative use of Jung for a moment) are being created apace; in illegal ‘detention centres’, in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on …

References

—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 29/3/2006http://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 Press1996 —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

 This paper aims to contribute to a new Australian poetics of socio-political engagement; a poetics committed to exploring important social trends that have not yet been explored adequately using tools unique to the poet. I want to concentrate on the work of some current politically engaged Australian poets. The idea will be to begin to trace the outline of a poetics capable of exposing (and opposing) current human rights abuses carried out in the name of Australia’s citizens. There is no need to re-invent the wheel here, John Kinsella, and others, have done much work already.

Recent political developments in Australia mean that it is now dangerous for writers and poets to adopt a posture of socio-political ignorance and/or apathy. The passage late last year (2005) of the government’s anti-terrorism bill to federal parliament signified an ideological attack on the nation’s literary/intellectual culture; this attack extends into the most intimate realms of artistic creativity. The ‘sedition’ sections of the new legislation, in particular, represent a direct threat to fiction writers/poets, artists, intellectuals, teachers, publishers, broadcasters, musicians and journalists. Put simply freedom of expression/speech (including ‘freedom of the press’) is now under threat in Australia.

Despite widespread protests drafts of the sedition laws were not seriously amended in the parliament before the passage of the legislation. Australians now face a future in which these new vaguely worded sedition laws could be used in tandem with other ‘anti-terrorist’ laws to suppress dissent among writers, academics, publishers/broadcasters and social activists. The relationship of every writer capable of ‘critique’ to the Australian government and to Australian society generally has thus become increasingly problematic over the past twelve months. These facts have profound consequences for practicing writers and artists, and also for teachers of writing and literature courses in schools, TAFEs and Universities. It is no exaggeration to call it a full-blown cultural crisis one squarely rooted in the mutation of neo-conservative ideology into a form of right wing extremism not previously encountered in Australia.  Australian Poetic Responses to the Current Crisis 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: 

These soldiers will not marry.They are wed alreadyto the daughters of uranium.

 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:

 grasp the creature cloth betweentwo fingers consider

its fleshy fabricplunge the needle through

pull down the upper lipjoin the seam fast

denial needs no nourishmentlimbo is no loss

we stitch our storiessew ourselves silent

 Peter Minter’s poem ‘Australiana’ (a section of which was published in Overland, 179) attempts to outline the more general malaise afflicting Australian culture: 

what field of yellow lies grows tough and wide

 now poetry seems to fail us,

its lies no longer big enough? You said the Official language is spritely as an adder in the breeze, blasphemous tonguessaccharine 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 pack blindly follows its fixated leader.

 The gathering crowdcan do little to alleviate the disaster.

 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: 

Your cry in my hearingyour children your childrenthe salt wastethese depths these deathsmy abasementYour feet in my shallowsyour hands at my shoremy guns at your faceinquisition

 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:

1) Confessional/Expressionistic (basically existential) and Neo-Romantic poetics remains strong down-under. There is thus little public support for ‘experimental’, particularly ‘political-experimental’, poetry. In this sense ‘language poetry’ has made limited inroads against this prevalent ‘confessional realism’.

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.’

John Kinsella: Portrait of an Australian Poet-Activist 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:

 Lorca and Baudrillard, protagonists, real possessors, looking

for refreshment,though speech is the only old-growth forest left standing,all forests are data and material for houses,all signs in LANGUAGE …

 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:

 … They kill to make us grow

to feed the population. There’s a chain of profit as perpetual and cyclicalas a teething ring

 

He follows this piece up with another entitled ‘The Shitheads of Spray’. Both pieces represent the voice of the poet-activist. It’s a voice that having taken all due precautions against the adoption of an uninformed, merely prejudiced position, makes a literary, a poetic, stand from a deep knowledge of the available thinking on oppression, on human destructiveness, on what most people formulate as human rights/social justice. The poems say: I have a baby, I don’t want the baby poisoned in the name of profit. I want that plane to stop dropping deadly poisons on the wheat.

After describing some of the crimes committed against the land and its flora and fauna… a fox was impaled … /bounty hunters call it ‘poling’ or shishkebabing./ Its what you do with ‘foreign muck’. A sharp taste/ in their food brings it on—Kinsella turns to the question of community. The alienation of the visionary artist from the callous ‘automaton conformity’ of his inherited ‘community’ is central: 

Belonging to this is not desirableUnbelonging I make conversation with like-minded people. A wedge-tailed eagle is seenon a fence post and none in the party want to shoot it. I selectthis society. The guns will overwhelm you! a sceptic declares, safein the anonymity of the world wide web. We will absorb consequences

 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?  Human Rights with a Theory of Oppression at the Centre 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 

- Agenda, (UK), Australian Contemporary Poets edition. Editor, Patricia McCarthy. Vol. 41 Nos.1-2. Spring/Summer 2005.

- Aitkin, ‘On Terror’, The New Matilda, p.18-21, Issue 62, Wednesday November 2nd 2005.

- Borghino, Jose, ‘Editorial’, ‘Urgent Call to Action’, ‘Sedition’, in The New Matilda, pp 3-12, Issue 62, Wednesday November 2nd 2005.

- Editorial, ‘Arrest sets off alarm bells on security powers’, The Age, Pg. 14, Sept. 14th 2005.

- Fraser, Malcom, ‘A betrayal of trust and liberty’, The Age, Opinion pages: p.17, October 20th 2005.

- Garret, Peter, ‘A Policy for the arts?’, in The New Matilda, pp 47-54, Issue 62, Wednesday November 2nd 2005.

- Gray, Paul, ‘Bill of Rights debate unclear’, The Herald Sun, October 2005.- Higson, Rosalie, ‘Terror laws could trap artists’, The Australian, (sect: The

Nation, p. 4) October 31st 2005.- Hirsch, Edward, How to Read a Poem, Harcourt Books, 1999.- Hobson, Ian, Dream-Dust Parasites, IUniverse, 2003.- Hooker, John, ‘The Murderous Maniacs’, The New Matilda, p. 22-24, Issue 62,

Wednesday November 2nd 2005.- Keren, Michael, ‘Resisting Big Brother’ in The Citizen’s Voice: Twentieth

Century Politics and Literature, University of Calgary Press, 2003. - Kinsella, John, The New Arcadia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005.- Kinsella, John, Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, Fremantle Arts Centre

Press, 2003. - Leonard, John (ed), New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian

Poetry, 2001, Five Islands Press.- McCooey, David, ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’ in

‘Australian Issue’ of Agenda (UK), Vol 41, Nos: 1-2, ed. Patricia McCarthy.- McCooey, David, ‘A Language of Intense Connection,’ The Age, Review, Oct. 1st,

2005. (review of John Kinsella’s The New Arcadia).- McKenzie, Kirk, ‘Howard’s Choice—A Police State?’ in The New Matilda, pp13-

17, Issue 62, Wednesday November 2nd 2005.

- Mitroupis, Angela and Neilson, Brett, ‘Academia Inc. and the (Culture) Wars’, in Overland, p.15, 179, Winter 2005.

- Murray, Les (ed.) Best Australian Poems, 2005, Black Inc. Publishing, 2005.- Murray, Les (ed.) Best Australian Poems, 2004, Black Inc. Publishing, 2004.- Nelson, Robert, ‘Stop Laughing, this is seditious,’ The Age, A2, Culture and Life,

pg. 19- Phelps, David, ‘ Remember South Africa—and Fear for the Rule of Law’, The

Age, (Letters Page) October 2005.- Porter, Peter (ed.) The Best Australian Poetry, 2005,- Savage, Chas, ‘How’s this for sedition? Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny’,

The Age: Opinion pages, 13, Oct. 24th 2005.- Sidney, Sir Philip, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’, in The New Penguin

Book of English Verse, Penguin 2001.- Steketee Mike, ‘Human Rights Under Threat in the Fight Again Terror’, The

Australian (October, 2005)- Toscano, Joseph, ‘Remember Egon Kisch? Well, it’s happening again’, The Age,

Letters, Pg. 14, Sept. 14th 2005.