Paper: 07; Module No: 29: E Text

(A) Personal Details:

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator: Prof. Suchorita Chattopadhyay Jadavpur University

Coordinator for This Module: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad

Content Writer: Ms. Sanchayita Paul Bankura University

Chakraborty

Content Reviewer: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad

Language Editor: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad

(B) Description of Module:

Items Description of Module

Subject Name: English

Paper No & Name: 07; Canadian, Australian and South Pacific Literatures in English

Module No & Title: 29; Australian Poetry by the Writers of European Descent

Pre-requisites: Basic understanding of English Language

Objectives:  Introducing Australian poetry by the writers of European

descent.
 Engaging with specific Australian themes and poetic
styles.
 Major Australian poets of the European Descent.
 Critical analysis of the major poems by the Australian
poets of European descent.

Key Words: Australian, Bush land, European Descent, Jindyworobaks.

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Content of the Module:

1. Objectives:
1.1.This module intends to give a comprehensive idea about the Australian poetry by the
writers of European descent.
1.2. It will introduce the major Australian poets of European descent.
1.3.It will offer a critical overview of the major poems by the Australian poets of the
European descent.
1.4. 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

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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

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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

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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

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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’:

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 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

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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,

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 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

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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.

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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.

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 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

1. Acharya, Indranil. “Challenging the British Inheritance: The Poetry of A. D. Hope and Judith
Wright in Jaydeep Sarangi ed. Australian Literature: Identity, Representation and Belonging.
New Delhi: Sarup and Sons.2006.
2. Bennett, Bruce, and Jennifer Strauss, Chris Wallace-Crabbe eds. The Oxford Literary History
of Australia. Oxford University Press. 1998.
3. Cornwell, Tony. “Australian poet Judith Wright (1915-2000): an appreciation” from
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/08/wrig-a31.html
4. Dasgupta, Partha Pratim. “The high lean country full of old stories”: Judith Wright and the
Birth of a Nation’ in Jaydeep Sarangi ed. Australian Literature: Identity, Representation and
Belonging. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons.2006.
5. Hope, A. D. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. 1973.
6. Dobson, Rosemary. Collected. Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2012.
7. Mead, Philip ed. Kenneth Slessor: Critical Readings. Australia: University of Queensland
Press. 1997.
8. Modern Australian Poetry from www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-
story/modern-austn-poetry.
9. Murray, Les ed. The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse. Australia and New Zealand:
Oxford University Press. 1996.
10. Phillips, A. A. The Australian Tradition: Studies in Colonial Culture. Melbourne: F.W.
Cheshire. 1958.
11. Sarangi, Jaydeep edited, Australian Literature: Identity, Representation and Belonging. New
Delhi: Sarup and Sons.2006.
12. Wilde, William H., Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews ed. The Oxford Companion to Australian
Literature. Oxford University Press. 1994.

13. Wright, Judith. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. 1971.

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