ARTISTS IN QUEENSLAND FOCUS ON

JOHN STRUGNELL r r /9

iv

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute /

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute 'i'i' *i'i" i'i' ''J'ii i'i 'i'i' i'i" i'i" i'i' Is'i 'i'i' i'i i'i" i*i" "i'i 'i'i' 'i'i' 'i'i' 'i'i' 'i'i' 'it'i' i'i i'i' i'i "i'i" i'i' ."»\..'«". ."*". 7»" yt\ yt--. .•'(•: yt--. yt\ yt\ ..-v.. ..-i\...'«", ./»\ yi\..'«"./»". .?•".."»"..?»"..%" ..-*s. ..'f.. /»\ yt-.. yt\ ye:, David Rowbotham

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Artists in Queensland : Focus on David Rowbotham ^ '0. By John Strugnell

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University of Queensland Press

i^}^]i^}^]i^}^}^]i^]^}^}^3^}^^;^-^^>^^;^;^}^^ Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute (c) University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1969 Set in Baskerville and printed and bound by Dai Nippon Printing Co. (International) Ltd., Hong Kong.

National Library of Australia registry number Aus 68-2394 Designed by Cyrelle This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publishers.

The endpapers show David Rowbotham talking to John Strugnell. Photograph by Robert Walker.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute PUBLISHER'S NOTE

We feel that our series on Artists in Queensland requires a few words describing the intent of the series and the method of its composition. The idea was first conceived in early 1966 when it occurred to us that Queensland was responsible for a great many artists — either as a birthplace, an inspiration, or as an in­ fluential region. Some of these artists were famous and some were not as well known; most of them were comparatively young — perhaps too young for a full-scale critical work. Moreover, we felt that it was necessary to keep away from the usual area of critical analysis. Indeed, as the idea for the series took shape, we began to feel that we should eschew criticism to a great extent and that oiu* series should be more in the way of introductions to and explanations of Queensland artists. In fact, the ideal would be to get each artist to write about himself There were obvious drawbacks to this but these were overcome by using a tape recorder and choosing a close personal friend of the artist as author. We tried carefully to commission people who would be sympathetic and sensitive to what the artist was trying to do. Armed with a tape recorder and his own questions each author set out to probe the background and artistic thoughts of his subject. Most recording sessions were of several hours' duration and in every case several sessions were needed. From the raw material on his tapes the author then wrote his own version of his subject's life and artistic career. Naturally, there is little imiformity among the individual books in the series. Not all authors have seen their subject in the same light, neither have they asked their subject the same questions. What has emerged, we hope, is a description of each artist and an introduction to him by someone who is privileged to know him well and is passing on his conversation and his thoughts to a wider public.

Published in this series: Focus on Charles Blackman by Thomas Shapcott Focus on Milton Moon by Dennis Pryor Focus on Judith Wright by W. N. Scott In preparation: Focus on Andrew Sibley by Rodney Hall Jon Molvig Focus on David Rowbotham by John Strugnell Ray Crooke

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute ACKNO WLEDGMENTS

I should like to thank all those to whom I am indebted in the preparation of this book: David Rowbotham for his help and patience, for his making available maniiscripts, letters, and reviews, and for his permission to quote from both his published and unpublished work; Douglas Stewart, Nancy Keesing, and Mary D. Miller for permission to quote from their letters; Angus and Robertson for permission to reprint poems from Inland, Bungalow and Hurricane, and Australian Poetry 1968; Jacaranda Press for permission to reprint poems from All the Room; Lyre-Bird Writers for poems from Ploughman and Poet; the Bulletin for the poem "Lion's-Gate"; Poetry Magazine for "Statement of Discovery"; Robert Walker for the photographs of David Rowbotham.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute It has been one of the conflicts right throughout my life: this business of wanting to be secure yet also wanting to be a writer.

David Rowbotham was born in the country town of Toowoomba, on the Darling Downs in Queensland, on 27 August 1924. An item in the Bulletin in 1951 is worth quoting since it provides a good sketch of his early career. There is also a certain appropriateness in allowing the Bulletin to introduce any account of his life since it was the literary section of the Bulletin, the "Red Page", which printed many of his poems and encouraged him to persevere in writing poetry.

David Rowbotham ... is one of the youngest of The Bulletin's younger poets, a native of the Darling Downs (Q.). Boot-making has been the Rowbotham family trade for a long time; his great-grandfather built the first boot-factory in Toowoomba, and his father. .. still makes boots. David attended Toowoomba Grammar, one of whose Old Boys was A.G. Stephens. After clerking in a foundry David went to the Teachers' Training College, Brisbane, and was teaching in the Queensland back- blocks when he enlisted in the R.A.A.F. in War II as a wireless-operator. After the war he stripped corn and milked cows for a living, then entered the University of Queensland, where he edited the university magazine and won the Ford Memorial Medal for poetry. Before his first Bulletin poem appeared in 1946 he had collected 30 rejection slips, and remembers with a chuckle an "Answers to Correspondents" comment: "Your drought poem drove the Religious Editor to drink." Coming to Sydney, he con­ tinued his studies at Sydney University, where he won the Henry Lawson prize for poetry. Mixing university studies with a variety of jobs, he plugged away also as a freelance v^iter; then Angus and Robertson put him on as an editorial assistant on The Australian Encyclopaedia under Alec Chisholm. David Rowbotham's verse has appeared in the Angus and Robertson Australian Poetry and the Jindyworobak anthologies, and in George Mackaness's Poets of Australia. A book of poems. Ploughman and Poet, is prepared but not yet published. A shy, studious-looking, slightly- built young fellow, he might have been a Methodist minister if an early addiction to Byron and Edgar Allan Poe had not guided his steps to the Inky Way.i

1- iSutom (Sydney), 27 June 1951.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Inevitably what was merely intended as a news item demands elaboration. No artist likes being labelled and the title "Bulletin poet" lacks its earlier power to excite. Nevertheless, a label which David Rowbotham would gladly accept is that of "Queensland artist". It suggests a pre­ occupation with the local scene and, on the basis of his anthologized poems, he may seem to be such an artist. Many of these poems reflect the area of southern Queensland where he was born, where he grew up, and where he got his first jobs. Although such poems form only part of his total published work, and although these poems now seem less characteristic of his work than they once did, he admits: "No matter what I write about, this background is so deep down inside of me that it will always come out somewhere in the mood of the poem." His hometown of Toowoomba, the atmosphere of which can be appreciated from the "town" section of his volume of tales and sketches, Town and City, has remained a focal point for him throughout his life. He says, "Toowoomba and the Downs are atmospherically three things to me. They are as they were when I was a boy there in the 1930's — the town sitting on the edge of the Great Dividing Range whose edge I explored and played on, with weekend excursions from my Range suburb into (at that time) a depressed town, and where, as well as the feeling of height and wildness, I had the feeling of the natural gently rolling cul­ tivated plateau of the Downs, south, north, and west. The southern Downs in particular, in a good season, are one of the wonders of Australia. They are also as they were when, in the early years of the 1950's, I worked for the Toowoomba Chronicle and reported on a more prosperous place changed into a city and travelled the Downs more or less intimately as I once explored the Range side. They are also as they are now in the last years of the 1960's, more and more something to which my thoughts hark back because I have changed just as Toowoomba has continued to change. Its houses and suburbs are spilling dowm the Range, though the Downs themselves seem eternally beautiful." It is easy for him to be nostalgic about the boyhood years but there was another side to life in a country town in the thirties and this other side has left perhaps a deeper impression on him. "I was a child of the depression years, and my Toowoomba years were marked pretty much by my Dad's struggle to remain in work. I think this effect of struggling for a job, struggling to keep the family together — this became embedded in my nature. This is why today — all my life — my wanting to be a writer (one of the most insecure vocations that a person could ever take up, especially if you're a poet) is bugged by the fact that one must earn money, one must get a secure job. This has been one of the conflicts right through my life: this business of wanting to be secure yet also 10 wanting to be a writer."

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute In his final year at school he was awarded the Dickens Fellowship Essay Prize and had the pleasure of seeing his first poems in print in the Toowoomba Grammar School magazine. He says, "My writing interest was determined in my early boyhood years when I sat in the apricot tree of our big Toowoomba backyard and wrote stories and poems in an exercise book, breaking off at proper (and more fruitful) intervals to pick and eat apricots." However, he still had to get a job. After leaving school, he became first of all a clerk at the Toowoomba Foundry, a job which he detested, and then a clerk in an accountant's office, from which occupation he was, as he puts it, rescued by a scholarship to the State Teachers' College in Brisbane. His first teaching post was at Oakey State Primary School on the Darling Downs. It was now 1942, the Second World War was in its third year, and he was old enough to join one of the services. He tried unsuccessfully to join the navy and then volunteered for the R.A.A.F. The R.A.A.F. accepted him and trained him as a wireless operator. During the war years he was stationed in Australia itself, in New Guinea, and in the Solomon Islands. Discussing the impact of the war service on him, he says: "The war was the thing that took me further away from Toowoomba than anything else. The war "hit" me in this respect, and in respect of war being a most unpleasant affair per se. I never ceased to be homesick, to feel threatened, just as my parents in Toowoomba never ceased to be grieved or worried at my absence. I never regarded for one moment the war as an event that gave or confronted me with opportunities to see new places, do new things. I hated that damned war, and realized its dangers and tragedies when I was posted to Bougainville, heard the guns going and saw the wounded, and finished up myself, quite ungla- morously, with a tropical disease in a Field Hospital full of all sorts of casualty cases. Yet the war did train or prepare me for subsequent absences and further departures into other places when I returned to civilian life." He rediscovered his interest in writing during his R.A.A.F. service. "I kept a poetry notebook, a diary, and compiled my own dictionary in my active service years, and took a journalism course by correspondence. This helped me fight the war, or my owoi war, besides keeping my owm hand in at writing." During the five or six years after the war he made a sustained attempt to establish himself as a writer. He spent a short period at university and did a variety of jobs but his main concern was the stories, articles and poems he submitted to magazines and newspapers. It was in this period too that he began working as a journalist. He acknowledges Alec Chisholm, under whom he worked in Sydney on The Australian Encyclo- 11 paedia, as the man who provided him with a start in journalism. Journalism

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute seemed to provide a solution to the problem of being secure yet still fulfilling one's vocation as a writer. "I thought that I might be able to get a good compromise by becoming a journalist. It was at least a writing activity." As part of this practice in journalism he became Sydney cor­ respondent for the Queensland provincial press. These postwar years were an exciting time. There was the impact of the social life of the big city, in this case Sydney, upon someone whose background was that of the small country town. This impact is reflected in the "city" section of the book already mentioned, Town and City. For David Rowbotham it also proved to be an exciting and stimulating period in Australian literature. He explains what it meant to him as a young writer: "Ironically the war, which I hated, was instrumental in leading me towards occasions in my life that I immensely enjoyed. It made three years of my life totally military but then it gave me, as a returned ex-serviceman, the opportunity to enter university full-time as a Postwar Reconstruction Course student. First I drove myself like mad to get my Senior matriculation in one year instead of two (this was one of the stipulations of the course), but then, once at university, I settled down in a more leisurely fashion to the business of enjoying books. In fact, I was too leisurely. My academic career at that stage became unstuck. But I found, for the very first time, the occasion for really getting stuck into something else. I really began to write — poems and stories — and to be published, mainly in the Sydney Bulletin. For four years my income was a government cheque of seven pounds a fortnight. Admittedly I was single then but I still don't know how I would have managed without a bank account which had accrued over the years I was in uniform. I had allotted most of my service pay to my mother and she — bless her — did not use the money but banked it on my behalf. These savings were far from being large; I had to be careful of every penny; but still I felt princely. I was free to pursue my love of writing right up to the hilt, to go into the whole adventure of writing. How exciting it all was! I did not dream of riches, but I did dream of recognition, and the period in Australian literature was extremely stimulating. I have not felt the equivalent of such a period since. Kenneth Slessor's One Hundred Poems had come out and Judith Wright's The Moving Image. Hardly a week went by without a poem by Judith Wright or R.D. Fitzgerald or Douglas Stewart appearing in the Bulletin. Every week I rushed to the street newspaper stall to buy a Bulletin and scan it with feverish expectation for sight of some of my own work. No young Austrahan writer today has the same sort of constant expectation available to him — and it is a shame that he has not. No present avenues of publication in this country can match the regularity with which the Bulletin then featured stories 12

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute and poems, sometimes published a whole large page of verse, and every Christmas expanded itself into a big literary number. These were great days for me. I met Judith Wright in Brisbane, at the University Val Vallis was a fellow student and poet, and, when I went to Sydney, although I engrossed myself into getting to know the city at large, I also naturally horned in on some of the literary circles, personalities and places that proved so valuable to me, helping me to sustain my dream of becoming a substantial writer. I don't mean materially substantial, of course. I couldn't entertain ideas of materialism while the Bulletin paid sixpence a line for a poem and three guineas for a prose sketch. In Sydney I met Ken Slessor, Doug Stewart, Nancy Keesing, Rosemary Dobson, Roland Robinson, Miles Franklin, R.G. Howarth, John Thompson, and the Bulletin black-and-white artists who illustrated my work. I can remember the flush of these Sydney years, and I am grateful for the interest older writers took in me. When, for example, I took off for England and the Continent, I carried a letter of introduction to Philip Lindsay and George Johnston from Ken Slessor, and letters to Richard Church and journalists in London from Doug Stewart." This visit to Europe, which occasioned the Bulletin item quoted at the beginning of this book, took place in 1951. He went not merely as a tourist but with high hopes of continuing in England the kind of life he had been living in Sydney. However, the following year found him back in his birthplace, Toowoomba. He explains how this happened. "Europe was yet another adventure, and a chance to visit the world from which my own Australian family stemmed. I did my tilting at Fleet Street, for I entertained a practical writing interest as well as a poetical one. My bank savings finally dwindled. I grew thin on my enthusiasm and on my freelance journalism earnings. But I never lost my enthusiasm even though I often enough felt stumped. I took all sorts of jobs in London to keep my spirits up, and a little currency in my pocket. When I got married — to Ethel Matthews, a trained nurse from Canterbury Plains, New Zealand, whom I had met on board ship — my wife and I pooled our earnings in order to see the Continent. We were a couple who used youth hostels, and cheap Left Bank hotels, and lived on soup and bread and lots of tea. We left Europe in the end completely penniless. Con­ sequently, when we got back to Australia, I undertook moves that were governed primarily, at last, by my wish to gain the best form of material security in accordance with my general interests as a writer. I had previously avoided this sort of security. In the end, the Toowoomba Chronicle offered me the best salary I had ever encountered up to that time, and this took me into full-time journalism. So I returned to Toowoomba." 13 When he joined the staff of the Toowoomba Chronicle as columnist and

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute reporter, he accepted the need for settling down and for making some kind of compromise between his desire to be a writer and his desire for security. He worked as columnist and reporter for the Chronicle from 1952 to 1955. In that period his first book of poems. Ploughman and Poet, was published, his first daughter, Beverley, was bom, and he was involved in lecturing for Adult Education and in writing talks for A.B.C. radio programmes. In 1955 he joined the staff of the Brisbane Courier-Mail and moved from Toowoomba to Coorparoo, Brisbane, where he still lives. His second daughter, Jill, was bom in Brisbane in 1958. The period between 1955 and 1964, when he worked for the Courier-Mail, was filled naturally with his work as a reporter and with his reviewing of books, plays and films. He toured Queensland for Adult Education and gave Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures. He managed to complete his B.A. degree by part-time study. He also had four more books published: two volumes of poetry, Inland and All the Room, and two volumes of fiction, Town and City and The Man in the Jungle. A further volume of {X)ems, Bungalow and Hurricane, appeared in 1967 after he had been appointed as senior tutor in the Department of English at the University of Queens­ land. His involvement in full-time work raised many problems for him as a writer but, on the whole, he feels this time of settling down helped rather than hindered his work. He says: "In Toowoomba and then in Brisbane with the Courier-Mail I had the sense of settling down, and this was good in that it meant for me a definite purpose and direction. I learned a lot from the experience — both of bread-winning and of writing for the press — that did benefit my poetry. Twelve years of daily journalism is, in fact, big experience. I believe too that by being suburban, a husband and a father, I gained an appreciation of an area of life that is supremely important. In a sense, this is life. Even if I have felt confined by my suburban condition, that condition has opened out my views upon the world. I have been lucky in the matter of family affections: writers are not easy to live with! These affections have become linked, for me, with the whole concept of family in terms of the regional, national and now global sense of history that I think vital to a poet in an urban setting. The process of settling in as a suburban bungalow member of civilization may offer its frustrations, but it also offers further vision. I think it has done so for me. All of my books have been published in my married life, one when I 'came home' to Toowoomba, the rest here in Brisbane."

14

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Although I was writing poetry at a very early age — as a kid sitting up apricot trees — my early ideas of being a writer were very romantic ones. Later on I realized that one had to be extremely careful, one had to have the proper load of talent to make a go at the writing game.

Success as a poet did not come easily to David Rowbotham. As has already been pointed out, it was not until 1954, while he was working with the Toowoomba Chronicle, that his first book of poems, Ploughman and Poet, was published. It may seem appropriate that Ploughman and Poet should have been published when David Rowbotham was back again in Toowoomba, living and working in the area which provided the back­ ground and much of the imagery of his verse. However, he was all too conscious of the length of time it had taken him to get his collection of poems accepted by a publisher. David Rowbotham had been contributing poems to newspapers and periodicals since 1946 so that some of the poems in Ploughman and Poet were, as far as he was concerned, nearly ten years old. If his old school magazine could say "This volume estabhshes his position", for the poet himself it was more a reminder of the problems that faced a writer. It had only been possible to publish the volume with help from the Commonwealth Literary Fund and a group known as the "Lyre-Bird Writers". "It was extremely difficult in those days", he says, "to get a first book of poems pubhshed by a real hard-back publisher." "Lyre-Bird Writers" was a publishing group that existed for this kind of situation. It included Roland Robinson, Ray Mathew, and Nancy Keesing. On 12 September 1952, Nancy Keesing wrote to David Rowbotham: "Thanks for your letter. Roland, Ray Mathew and self met this week, and talked it over. The position is that from our knowledge of your published work we'd be very happy to publish your book." While David Rowbotham found this a difficult period in which to pubfish a first volume of poetry, he did have the good fortune to begin sending his poems into newspapers and magazines at a period when the "Red Page" of the Bulletin, under the editorship of Douglas Stewart, was a significant part of the Australian poetic scene. The Bulletin provided young poets like David Rowbotham with the necessary patronage and 15 criticism. Remembering how much the magazine fostered his own poetic

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute vocation, he says: "It's a shame the Sydney Bulletin no longer publishes the volume of poetry it used to. When it changed from the old to the new Bulletin, I think this was a sad loss for Australian poets." The encouragement the young poet got from seeing his poems in print was only part of the story. Much more important, in some ways, was the practical criticism of individual poems provided by Douglas Stewart. By sending his poems to Douglas Stewart for scrutiny he learnt the difference between romantic inspiration and poetic craft. "I realized that one had to be extremely careful, one had to have the proper load of talent to make a go in the writing game." David Rowbotham is quick to acknowledge the help he received from Stewart early in his career. "I can't say too much for the direct help in the matter of technique that I received from Doug Stewart in days gone by. If a poem wasn't any good, he'd send it back with crossing out and suggestions, and, if it was out- rightly bad, he'd say so — try again! This was invaluable. This was practising the craft. I might have been full of high thoughts and feelings but they just weren't coming off the paper." He has kept many of his early submissions which contain Stewart's pencilled comments. Douglas Stewart's comments were remarkably detailed for an editor who was having to cope with many more young poets than David Rowbotham. Among these sheets of paper is a letter that he still regards as one of the most significant letters he has ever received. Faced with more rejections than acceptances, he had asked Stewart the inevitable questions: Did he have what it takes? Was he good enough? Stewart's reply might be considered a model "Advice to a Young Poet".

The question you ask is one asked by every young writer, and there's really no answer to it: it depends on yourself— how hard you are willing to work and to study to improve your technique, how much you really have in you. Only time can give us the answers: what you've shown so far is that you do work hard and persistently, that you have the feeling of poetry in you and that in recent weeks your technique has improved a lot. You should certainly be able to keep up and improve a publishable sort of rhyme, which is worthwhile in itself, and more than hundreds of other contributors can manage. You should read all the poetry you can. What you seem to need for a start is a course in the modern writers: Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Spender, MacNeice — not to imitate them, but to learn that poetic language and even rhythm must be handled freshly as each new generation comes along to the task — Wordsworth didn't write in Shakespeare's style, nor Shakespeare in Chaucer's. You will find the ideal rule for modern poetry in Yeats's dictum: "Use the natural words in their natural order. All 15 archaisms and inversions are bad." That is for the general background.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Regarding yours specifically as nature poetry, you should make a study of W.H.Davies, Edmund Blunden and the American Robert Frost; also Shaw Neilson. The king of them all is Davies. To make a nature rhyme into a nature poem is a matter of the isolation and clarification of the image. Don't deal in large, vague generalities, but present some particular object that has inspired you — bird, tree, paddock, whatever it may be — exactly as it has presented itself to you: richly itself, yet burning with such intensity that it becomes a visionary object. If this sounds difficult, have a look at Davies's robin or De la Mare's snowflake, and see how simple it is. At all times: simplify, clarify, and if you are making lyrics, keep them melodious. It is not too much to say that the words "simplify" and "clarify" became key words in David Rowbotham's poetic development. His first book of poems, Ploughman and Poet (1954), is separated from his most recent book, Bungalow and Hurricane (1967), by a long process of simplification and clarification. Douglas Stewart had written to him on another occasion, In general, you need to purify your style. You are using too much jargon, sometimes "poetic" — the use of the counters "beauty" and "magic" — sometimes "modern" — "voiced fists". This sHghtly strained romantic language that was evident in David Rowbotham's early poetry was to be replaced by the more disciplined style that characterizes the bulk of his more recent poetry. The manner in which Douglas Stewart's advice could influence a poem can be illustrated by comparing the earlier and later versions of a poem entitled "The Fence" (see overleaf). The first version of this poem was submitted to the Bulletin by David Rowbotham in September 1949. When the typed manuscript came back, Douglas Stewart's pencilled com­ ments and criticisms appeared against each of the stanzas. At the top of the sheet he had written "Too wordy and diffuse. You pad out lines and stanzas for rhyme and the rhymes are often weak when you get them." He pointed out that the whole of the first stanza could have been con­ densed to the one sentence: "The old fence shambles between the green paddocks Where the farms went slack and the teams died from the track." In the second stanza he questioned the adjectives "festering" and "piquant", he suggested "restless" in place of "occasional", and advised cutting out the phrases "Or for nest-feathers" and "Restless in this uncommuted place". He wrote that the first four lines of the third stanza were "Hardly needed" and that the beginning of the fourth stanza should be condensed. Against the first half of the fifth stanza, Douglas Stewart wrote, "All you need here is one line about 'Bluebells, rusty bracken, long grass'". Against the second half of the stanza he wrote "Too vague 17 and wordy". He also pointed out that "pull" in the last line of the sixth stanza was a "clumsy word".

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute THE FENCE L The fence is an old fellow, shambling between The paddocks, clumsy as a smear in a green Spring world. None have bothered to stand him straight, To take his lean from the mildewed gate And as with a gaping string of beads thread His splintered posts upright to the head Of the river since, long ago, the farms went slack, Like the wires, and the teams died from the thistled track. But the birds come still: the wren at morning, the crow At festering noons, the wagtail riding for show Or for nest-feathers the kookaburra's back With its piquant chatter, and the eagle black And occasional in the long days of peace. Restless in this uncommuted place. And they keep company the old fence. With the wind combing the wires and the cypress branch That strokes with foreign finger, harp-like, a song Undesired in blown-winter evenings, coarse and strong. And the dingo comes, from the hollow iron height, Tangling its leathern call in the knotted night. And comes the heifer, truant from its scrub. Fidgets like a barn fowl, hazards a rub With a quaking post and, having ventured, turns To untenanted cover where now no rod burns Symbols of yard or bail on angular hide. Nor whips strike insignia in air, where ride No more the farmers, landlordly and proud. To the hoof rhythms that halted like their blood.

2. There are a few bluebells and some bracken Inaudibly rasping rust where the wires slacken. And long grass climbing from splinter to broken splinter Out of pliant spring to the anvilled winter In the smithy of this abandoned territory. Once known for immeasurable prophecy And a thousand sparks of hope like stars, that fell To nothing because the years wore flint to shell. 18

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute And there is a legend left that whispers To the swagman bending on his deepening shuffles Like the old fence, of action put away Now, of an epic behind curtain fall. Of rising suns that set before the day Was full, of labour relinquishing its pull. And the country quaffs the legend — voluminous mouth Upon a small sweet endeavour that soured. For those who laboured, the summer of the south — And thrusts a mystery at questioning where flowered, Once, homestead roses and a heritage. And the old fence, dim fellow, turns yellow like that age.

THE FENCE The old fence shambles where the farms went slack, Between the paddocks, beside the dead teams' track; But the birds come still: the wren at morning, the crow At noon, the wagtail needling from its resting-place To ride the kookaburra's back, and the eagle slow And restless in the long days of thistled peace. And the dingo comes, from the hollow iron height. Tangling its leathern call in the knotted night; The heifer stumbles from the scrub and turns Past splintered posts where the brander no more bums Symbols of yard or bail on angular hide, And whips strike insignia in air, nor ride The farmers and their sons, landlordly, proud. To the hoof rhythms that halted like their blood. Tall grass, bluebells, rusty bracken remain Where the fence wires rasp in the combing wind and rain; A thousand sparks of hope like stars here fell To nothing, because the years wore flint to shell. There is a legend of action put away Now, of an epic behind the curtain fall. Of rising suns that set before the day And the labour that might have nourished it were full. And the country quaffs the legend — voluminous mouth Upon a small sweet endeavour that soured. For those who laboured, the summer of the north — And thrusts a mystery at questioning where flowered. 19 Once, homestead roses and a heritage Held by the fence in forgotten acreage.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute The strikingly different second version of "The Fence" appeared four years after the first, in Southerly, September 1953, and was also included in Inland. The first half of the poem has been condensed into two stanzas. Not only is the poem changed in the way Stewart suggested but there has been a general tightening up of the language. The poetry is simpler, clearer, more direct. Douglas Stewart could provide encouragement as well as criticism. An example of this is the letter he sent to David Rowbotham about the manuscript of Ploughman and Poet. At the beginning he wrote: The collection of poems reads very well indeed. You were wise to wait until your technique had matured for now you have got not only a good standard of writing but a book that builds into a world — a re-creation of your home country — and a very pleasant sunlit world it is. I can't think of any other Australian book of poems that sets down a country town — village, landscape, history; the continuity of the land in time — so completely and compactly.2 David Rowbotham's early poetry made him a member of what has been called the Bulletin school of "minor nature poets".3 However, the preoccupation with the Australian scene was remarkably widespread in Australian verse of the time. A reviewer could note of the poetry in the Angus and Robertson anthology Australian Poetry 1953, "Its strength is in the lyric, and in the evocation of AustraUa, sometimes in landscape and sometimes in history."* In whatever way he might find himself classified, David Rowbotham insists that he was not deliberately joining anything like a poetic movement. The question arises not only because he contributed to the Bulletin at a period when a number of poets were work­ ing along similar lines^ but because he also contributed to Jindyworobak publications.6 "I contributed enthusiastically and freely to Jindyworobak publications, although I didn't believe in all that they were trying to do. You see, I'm not that Australian: I don't want to be assertively Australian in this direction. I'm sure that a lot of people thought I wrote about the Darling Downs just to be Australian. "The funny thing was I cropped up as a poet just as this sort of thing was going on though I never thought consciously about this kind of move­ ment. I think it's terribly important to stress that I was a sort of natural plant. I didn't try to force myself to write about the countryside."

2. Letter fi-om Douglas Stewart, 20 February 1950. 3. Douglas Stewart (ed.), Modern Australian Verse (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1964), p. xxxii. 4. Bullclin (Sydney), 30 September 1953. 5. David Rowbotham comments: "The Bulletin at that stage published David Campbell, 20 Douglas Stewart, Rosemary Dobson, Judith Wright, and these people were writing about the countryside — or shall we say nature — so, to that extent, I was conscious of being in some kind of poetic movement." 6. The Jind>M.vorobak movement, which began in the late thirties, aimed at self-consciously Australian poetry reflecting Australian landscape and aboriginal culture.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute To me these poems represent the response of a young man born in that country and writing about it just automatically. . .compelled to write. . .so I feel the subject-matter may well be the young poet too.

David Rowbotham's first two books of poetry. Ploughman and Poet and Inland, might be described as a series of lyrical responses to his own locality. He has never written a formal Preface to these earlier poems although it would be possible to compile one from his own writing. The statements that follow are an attempt to pin down what he feels to be the distinctive nature of "Queensland verse". Such generalizations are open to question, but they form an appropriate introduction to David Rowbotham's own early poetry. (One notes) the continuing existence in Queensland verse of a dis­ tinctive regional quality, a rich inherent lyricism. Hazel de Berg, during her tour of Australia for the National Library to record poets reading their work on their own home ground, instantly spotted it, and described it as the important difference between northern and southern verse-writing. Such a difference might be attributable (again) to the simple circumstance of place. A Melbourne poet peering from his window may see an overcast sky or the boredom of back yards, and wax resultantly introspective, "intellectual", habitually formal; whereas his tropical fellow will more likely gaze on sunshine and, never too far off, the bush — a more "lyrical", optimistic or romantic prospect. . . We can at least legitimately state that the pulse of locality in the blood of Brisbane, or more correctly, "Queensland" poets. . .makes them less subordinate to foreign "schools of thought", more independent even among themselves.'^ It is the simple recognition of essential province in the universal; and Queensland, when experienced deeply enough, with either affection or despair, leaves an indelible mark... It is a territory which. . . can somehow render right the habit its territorials have of calling their artists "Queens­ land artists" — once these have been acknowledged below the border as AustraHan artists. I have never heard of anybody being called, with equal regional justification, a "New South Wales artist" or a "Victorian artist".8 21

David Rowbotham "Brisbane", Current Affairs Bulletin (University of Sydney), XXXIV, No. 6, 93. Review of the first three volumes of "Artists in Queensland" (published by the University of Queensland Press) in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 January 1968.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute In Queensland the regional sense is stronger than the urban; which is why Brisbane, population factor aside, has less urbanity than Sydney and Melbourne. The capital is "cornered" by its State. Some artists feel as cornered, especially any who want to be urbane — because of what they see on looking south.^ To me, there appears to be no value in becoming impatient of even seemingly overt material nationalism: impatient towards, for instance, the frank pastoral poem or provincial one, towards the versified scene or landscape. No artist's world can be thought insufficient or deficient because it is limited or small. . . (Of Wordsworth's "Song of the Spinning Wheel"). . . Hearing about that wheel we are aware not only of a lyric poetry, but also of a people, people of a certain blood, soil, tradition, scene. This is the special service which the poem renders; and although it is particular, regional, provincial in its setting, with its subject belonging to an earlier day and a specific place, its art gives to it universality, and to its subject, or object, time- lessness. . . So, adherence to nature and the nature poem could be a needed sanity. Even if it were not, even if it became a romance to the extent of sentimental illusion, yet it might be a more acceptable means of opposing civilisation. . . than the act of bolting oneself inside some redoubt and sniping at society's defaults with satire, or wrangling over them un- relievedly with the intellect. That also would have its unreality. Anyhow, there is really no such thing as a "nature poem". If I have featured this term, that is because it is common usage and does in fact embrace the biggest body of the type of verse that Synge calls human . . . Few nature poems are absolute; entirely descriptive or pictorial, that is. Most contain some thought or reflection, by implication or directly, which makes them philosophic straight away, or mentally aware.'"

The poems in Ploughman and Poet, a title which David Rowbotham now finds a little pretentious, are as much, then, about inner human nature as they are poems about outer environmental nature. This is also borne out by the quotation from John Donne that he says he would now like to place at the beginning oiPloughman and Poet:

We are but farmers of our selves, yet may. If we can stock our selves, and thrive, up-lay Much, much dear treasure for the great rent day.

"Farmers of our selves" rather than "ploughman and poet" suggests the mood of the poems. David Rowbotham, in his first volume of poems, did not break any new ground either in subject-matter or language. Kenneth Slessor made this point when reviewing Ploughman and Poet for the Sydney Sun. 22

9. Ibid. 10. David Rowbotham, "Poetry and Place", Makar (University of Queensland English Society), October 1964.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute His style is by no means revolutionary; he is content to work in traditional forms, in which he is gradually acquiring the mastery which only a knowledge of self-discipline can bestow, and his effects are of quietness and depth rather than fireworks." As can be gathered from his spirited defence of "nature poetry", David Rowbotham would not protest about being labelled a "traditional" poet. Inevitably, Ploughman and Poet was praised in the local Queensland press for its evocation of the Darling Downs country. The merit of the volume seemed to lie in what Douglas Stewart had called "a re-creation of your home country". A number of reviewers of David Rowbotham's early poetry, however, were less impressed by this aspect of his work and rather more impressed by his "lyrical" gift. This was a verdict passed both on Ploughman and Poet and on the volume of poems that followed. Inland. An example of such criticism of Ploughman and Poet appears in James McAuley's review in the Sydney Morning Herald. Two poets have been at work in David Rowbotham's collection of poems, sometimes collaborating in the same poem. One poet, who may safely be called David Rowbotham, has a quiet, authentic voice, primarily lyrical in its impulse. . . The other poet is not David Rowbotham at all, but the voice of the fashion and conventions within which his work has developed.. . One can hope that Rowbotham will assert himself and expel the second voice from his next volume. Otherwise it will swallow him up, and a genuine talent will be lost.'2 A similar division of the poems was made later by Thomas Shapcott, writing in Brolga Review. It seems. . . that in Ploughman and Poet the author is faced with two directions to follow: he must either recede into a second-rate second-generation bush balladeering symbolist (at worst), or he may become that infinitely rarer thing, a true lyric poet, with quite uncommon sensitivity (I am tempt­ ed to say "a sort of Shaw Neilson with guts, so to speak").'^ There is a similar divergence in the prevailing moods of Ploughman and Poet. This was brought out in the review of the volume on the "Red Page" of the Bulletin. It is an odd fact that the best and deepest poems in David Rowbotham's Ploughman and Poet. . .are not the most typical. "Dust", "Mist" and "The Bushman's Girl". . . are three excellent lyrics of desolation, clear, compact and musical: but it is not desolation but rather its reverse — fertility — which is the fundamental theme o{ Ploughman and Poet.^^ The more sombre mood, suggested by the word "desolation", is present no in Ploughman and Poet to a much greater extent than is stated in this review.

11. Sun (Sydney), 8 December 1954. 12. Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 1955. 13. Brolga Review (Recording Society of Australia), No. 7 (January 1958). 14. Bulletin (Sydney), 17 November 1954. Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute The best poems in the volume, represented here by the contrast of "Apres-Midi" and "Dust", are haunted by a sense of nostalgia. They deal with the themes of change, or the loss of a traditional way of life, and of the bitterness of experience. Through them, as David Rowbotham himself now feels, one can glimpse the problems of the postwar world and the pressure ef contemporary living. "Apres-Midi" describes a visit to a ruined house — an imaginary one although it combines memories of a house David Rowbotham knew in North Sydney with impressions of an old house near Toowoomba. He also made use in the poem of a Toowoomba story about a local resident who died in a chimney:

APRES-MIDI You keep on underneath the broken shade Of the pines, gently trundling the stones with your toes. Until, in the mountain afternoon where the blade Of the bright ridge bites into the vine-rows. You stoop beneath the trestle of wrens and roses And breast the gate almost unawares. You are welcomed to the garden and the old house's Acres of misrule by unusual airs Of a long-ago century, which, genteely preserved In wild lavender and roving orchards. Responds as austerely as it was once loved; For this was the solitude of Mr. Richards. You will wonder as you finger the sun on grapes Greener than the memories they invoke, As you touch the trees that no more bear, as shapes Of forested winds form as though you spoke. What kind of man lived there. The house seems now Merely a projection of the fissured path. Or something windowed and heavy drawing the bough Of the great camphor-laurel down. The verandah is smooth StiU in its glazed and checkered stone; but the dust Has burred the broad steps, and along the ledge Binding the chipped walls in a band of rust Twist tongues of leaves licking the lantana hedge. Time and the mountain storms have prised the roof Into a macabre jest, iron from rafter, And folded the spouting into a solution-proof 24

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Attitude. And Time has withered the witless laughter And the footfalls of lonely soliloquies, and Storm Distended small silences into eternities. Observe the wandering old fellow's tomb That harboured him for months, the chimney, obese But narrow-tunnelled, into which he climbed And died incredulous, struggling and calling unheard In a resolute jacket of stone. His old clock chimed His struggles out, and his soul — perhaps a bird. As you tap and pry for secrets among the rooms You will see there is no redolent romance. Nor in the fireplace any remains of glooms To speed the blood; just the irony of chance, Which is life crossed by a destiny, kneeling In a figure of Atlas made mortal in dull oak. And you will find no bats upon the ceiling. Nor chains in comers; only a bellows that broke And which some hand (Mr. Richards', likely) laid In a bracket on the parlour door. Yes, you keep On underneath the blowing bunyas' shade And turn, at the end, in someone else's sleep.

"Dust" is a good example of the shorter lyric which recurs in all his collections of verse:

DUST Dust on my hands Like death's ash clings Where the sun bums blue And the crow sings. Dust on my lips Has death's tang Where the silence seethes And red airs hang. Dust in my throat Dries song to a croak. Oh to speak beauty, 25 But dust first spoke.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Between his first two volumes of poetry David Rowbotham published a prose work — a volume of stories and sketches entitled Town and City (1956). Like the poems in Ploughman and Poet, the contents of Town and City were by no means new. All except one had been contributed to the Sydney Bulletin. Town and City collected together his early prose work, completing a phase in his writing rather than beginning one. He says, "I never felt the need to write more short stories. This is where I suppose I must be considered more a poet than a prose writer. In any case, I think I simply stopped writing short stories because there was really no place to publish them." In some ways Town and City, with its memories of Toowoomba and Sydney, is much more a piece of local colour writing than Ploughman and Poet. There is some danger that the merits of Town and City may be over­ looked. It has a marginal interest even for the author, who regards verse as his chief preoccupation. However, Town and City reflects not only the amount of prose writing that he did in the years after the war but also a sureness of touch often lacking in the early verse. It is also something more than a collecting together of items previously published. In ex­ plaining the book's structure, David Rowbotham is delighted to recall a comment by Kenneth Slessor. "Some years ago Kenneth Slessor, review­ ing a new translation of Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Mill, said that two Australian collections of prose-sketches which can be compared with Daudet's pastorals are my Town and City and Colin Thiele's The Sun on the Stubble. Slessor said that Thiele and myself have the same regional poetry as Daudet's. We have shown (Slessor said) what can be done with Australia's country towns. I could never have wished for a better mention, a better comparison. My 'towTi', of course, is Toowoomba, along with its countryside. By way of contrast the 'city' of the book is Sydney. I divided the book into two sections — 'sketches' and 'tales' — both dealing with town (and the country) and city. That is, besides creating a contrast between town and city, I created a distinction between a short prose form and a longer prose form in which a sense of 'plot' is much more evident." Town and City is based on David Rowbotham's own background and experiences and this inevitably raises the question of the autobiographical nature of the book. He admits, "Even the 'tales' in Town and City are basically autobiographical. I have never been a good inventor. I need some actual experience of my owm to start off with. Even 'A Schoolie and a Ghost', which has been my most antholo­ gized short story, and which is now going into German translation — even this depends considerably on my own early experience as a very young school teacher, though the story itself is set in the Gippsland district of Victoria where I have never taught. The idea for the story came from 26 an older teacher who had taught there and who brought the whole area

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute and its history alive for me. I remember that I read up on the Gippsland and earlier Victorian days in the Public Library, Sydney. This sort of research was in keeping with the research I also did for my historical sketches about the Darling Downs. "If I say that my work is largely autobiographical, this doesn't neces­ sarily mean that it is biographical in regard to the other people or characters in it. This reminds me that I withheld from republication in Town and City one of the best of the stories I ever wrote. This story, deriving from my 'city' years, was first published in the Sydney Bulletin, but its appear­ ance caused hurt to people who stepped into the shoes of the story's characters. "A writer needs actual people, living and dead, but they are only a starting point. What comes out in the end is really fiction. In other words, when I look back on my stories, I can see the presence of myself (or my experience) much more than I can see the presence of any other person who might have been original to the story. What I can see is simply other persons and places as I have finally created them. In the long run the fiction, not the fact, is the reality." Before Inland was published in 1958, David Rowbotham had joined the literary staff of the Brisbane Courier-Mail. However, as its title suggests, this was a country, not a city book, even though it surveyed more of Queensland than the Darling Downs. As with Ploughman and Poet the volume was a gathering together of poems that had appeared earlier. It was a more mature, more assured book than the earlier one. It was, as David Rowbotham says, perhaps more in condemnation of Ploughman and Poet than in praise oi Inland, "a much better book", the sign of which was its immediate acceptance by Angus and Robertson. Although Inland, for its inspiration and imagery, draws heavily on outer landscape, the book is much more about the poet's inner landscape than Ploughman and Poet. To explain the title David Rowbotham quotes Wordsworth's lines: Though inland far we be Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither. It is meant to suggest the experience of the universal in the provincial. The poems in Inland divide themselves into two groups in much the same way as the poems in Ploughman and Poet. The poems in David Rowbotham's Inland. . .are of two kinds, quite distinct from each other. The first kind, which gives the book its general tone and flavor, is a pastoral verse of Queensland, warm, full of feeling for the land and its history, technically very uneven. The second kind is of more 27 personal lyrics of love and death and wonder, on the surface looser in form than the others but in fact technically delightful, written in a natural speech-rhythm which imposes its own discipline.'^

15. Bulletin (Sydney), 25 March 1959.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute The second kind of poem in Inland anticipates the direction taken by David Rowbotham's later poetry. It suggests he was already moving away from a poetry of "landscape'^ towards a more highly personal form of poetry. In view of this slight shift of emphasis it is interesting to note that a number of the reviews of Inland raised the whole question of the ultimate worth of "landscape" verse. Gustav Cross, in his review, wrote: "Below Capricorn", "Border Country" and "Redgums at Nightfall" are good nature poems, but sensitive evocation of landscape is not enough. We expect the poet to make experience meaningful, and this is what Mr. Rowbotham just fails to do.'^ G.K.W. Johnston's review in the Observer made this point rather more elaborately and rather more forcefully. The review began: One remarkable feature of Australian poetry is its obsession with landscape. A glance at any anthology will show that in this respect our poetry is where English poetry was fifty years ago. . .As a result we have hundreds of poems whose chief raison d'etre is description of the shapes of shadows on hills, the fierceness of the sun, the flight and cries of birds. A personal reference is usually present, too, but very often seems merely added. The pictured scene isn't genuinely the source of the poem's mood or even symbolic of it. We usually get ten lines of description rounded off with a commonplace or pious reflection. These generalisations don't apply so much to the work of the better Australian poets, who either escape from inanimate nature into human nature or else are able to relate stocks, stones, and sheep adequately to humanity. But to the rest they apply only too often. Mr. Rowbotham's volume raises these issues in a particularly acute form. . . '^

The review ended in the same way as the review by Cross, /K/AK^, Johnston wrote, "reminds us that landscape is not enough". The changes that have taken place between David Rowbotham's earliest and latest volumes of poetry suggest that for him also "landscape is not enough". Even Inland contains a wider variety of poetry than the quotations from the reviews suggest. David Rowbotham's "landscape" verse had not been written to a theory, although he was prepared to theorize about it. It was the inevitable result of his response to his own background and environment. He says, "My response to it was extremely personal. To me these poems represent the response of a young man born in the country and writing about it just automatically. . .compefled to write." The contrasting kinds of poetry in Inland are represented here by "Redgums at Nightfall", the love lyric "Draw Down the Blind", and the dramatic narrative of a "Mullabinda", one of David Rowbotham's best known and most anthologized poems, which stands somewhat apart 28 from the others in the directness and economy of its language.

16. Sydney i\lor,iw« Herald, 23 May, 1959. 17- Observer (Sydney), 7 March 1959.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute REDGUMS AT NIGHTFALL What was it there, among the gums Whose trunks of vivid and dry fire Sizzled in a cloud of high green leaves As into the swift blue channels of air. Like anvil-fevered pillars of iron End-dipped in rapids shadow-cool. The searing summits of their brands Burst in a deliverance, beautiful — What was it there that by a stroke No deeper than a peel of bark Drove to the fire's sap and core And drained all colour into the dark, Transfused the furnace-rage to a star And laid it burning on the hill Meteor-bright but small as a spark. And turned the seething forest still? It seemed as if the sinewed earth, Straining under, with rooted hands In the last effort that breaks life's heart Thrust the raw richness of those brands Suddenly too far, immersing fight In total sky, when the vivid red And green and blue became one gloom Underneath and overhead. What then has the entirety's strength Compounded of keen fragihty And sense of vulnerable place or time That with a tap it can plunge a tree And every tree in a world of night, But save the passion for a star? What was it there, the quick unseen Assassin among the gums of fire ? Living and burning like the redgums. There were men who would have known. Who holding their minds towards rapids found Deliverance, beauty, fury their crown And in the last darkening shock „„ With breaking hearts looked down, but then Were silenced as they saw and laid By the mystery among the stars of men.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute DRAW DOWN THE BLIND

Draw down the blind and let the dark Around the spinning starlight mark That there's a stillness in this room When Love the planet circles home.

And, from its chaliced beauty, lays And legends of the world's first days Move to our lips, from which shall flow Another lay that earth may know

When men and women worshipping In far centuries at evening Are glad our stillness and our song Were here a legend of their own.

Draw down the blind and now between The Eden and the ending sun Cleave ages and evade all death Like the planet that we lie beneath.

MULLABINDA

A fig-tree, a falling woolshed, a filled-in well: The acute corners of one man's figure of hell.. . When the tree was young and the well deep and the shed Mullabinda, these three and Campbell's sheep Were Campbell's pride — before this northern sweep Of channelling shallows marked the Queensland-side; Before death speared and drained the day to dark. And Campbell, riding home, heard no dog bark.

His broad and glaring mare snorted at the ford And splashed cold fear into his eyes and beard With hooves restlessly obedient and ominous. Upstream, on the highest bank, through the blowing rows Of wind-break coolabahs, the cypress pine Of Mullabinda, slabbed between the shine And pillared strength of bloodwood, rose a violence, A smokeless shock of fortress stormed by silence. 30

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute He heeled the mare to the gallop in his heart. "Keep clear of the trees, close to the house. At night Bar the door and open to no stranger," He had said, then kissed away the rape of danger In her eyes, and (gently), "Take the gun to the well And when you water the fig." A voice replied, "I will. .." Inside the coolabahs the broad mare shied. And a wind struck through and broke down Campbell's pride,

"I found my wife murdered at the well. The boy with a bucket in his hand and a spear In his back beside the fig, the girl on a chair In the house, clubbed like a little animal. I beg Your Excellency's kind permission to kill. I remain Your Excellency's humble servant — Campbell." The graves were heaped, and the special licence came, And Mullabinda Campbell rode after game.

The target-circles of black breasts, glistening, hung Thick-nipple-centred over the billabong. And paddling and playing in pools of water and sun, The piccaninnies turned plumb bellies to the gun. Teasing the tiny apex of the steely sight. . . The legends ricochetted with each report; Till stone thoughts filled the well of his heart, and age Made a crumbling woolshed of his slab-hard rage.

Time grooved him like the bloodwood; but deep in the dried And channelled country of his being where pride Once flooded to the full, whispered and grew the fig-tree, Fruitless, but a wild, green and rooted memory, Growing on, long after the vengeful spear. Thumping his shoulders out of the quiet air. Acquitted him of hate, and of tree, shed, well — Mullabinda Campbell's estimate of hell.

The following poem, also from Inland, is reprinted here because it bears comparison with some of the verse in David Rowbotham's next volume. All the Room. It has the compression of language which characterizes ; 31 much of his later verse. I

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute THE LODGER That air yields body room: That is the thing. More tenable than home, And greater than spring Driving the bull-like dream From its hidden haunt For wedlock on the farm. To still all want: The lodger's thought that you are; No more, not less; Of substance, as a star, In the universe. The straw-like volume you hold In your clenched hand, The world, when kneeling you fold, And unfold as you stand; Your delicate place in the dream — Not the dream — are the things More tenable than home And sensual springs.

32

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute One encounters in these new environments new problems.

David Rowbotham's next volume of poetry. All the Room, was not published until 1964. The gap between Inland and All the Room was not merely one of time. The new volume reflected the distance he had moved both physically and mentally from the subject-matter of Ploughman and Poet and Inland. All the Room contains themes that David Rowbotham feels, however, to have been inevitable. "Think of the course my own life has taken from the Downs, through teaching, the war experience, London, Europe, since when my time has been lived mainly in the cities. One encounters in these new environments new problems. I think that my interest in these new themes might be considered inevitable as a result of the change in the course of my life." Since the publication of his earlier volumes David Rowbotham's time and energy had been absorbed by his career in journalism. In some ways, then. All the Room was a means by which he could discover not only the direction that his poetry was taking but also whether it was taking any direction at all. This is why he says about the volume, "'All the Room to a certain extent was a crucial volume because I hadn't had a book of poems published for so long and I hadn't written poetry a great deal. So it was terribly important that the book should come out. Once it came out, it set me on the track." All the Room is a volume of his poetry that David Rowbotham is prepared to talk about at length, not because of its merits but because of its significance in his development as a poet. "All the Room was a kind of marking-time volume. The gap between Inland and All the Room is a gap of six or seven years and I hadn't written all that much poetry over those years. I hadn't stopped — but these years marked my definite settling in to a city atmosphere: living in a suburb and being thoroughly committed to the business of earning a living. I think that the subject- matter of some of these poems might in fact deal with the problem of sitting 33 still, the problem of coming to terms with daily living. Someone once

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute pointed to the sense of confinement in the poems. This is precisely what the title impHes, indeed anything that can be implied by the word "room". It means first of all confinement, but it also means, in the larger dimension (paradoxically speaking), the little time that we have on this earth. "It's a strange volume. The book did mark a definite change in my work. I'm very fond of All the Room because it contains poems which to me are crucial, and they do lead to Bungalow and Hurricane. "All the Room was a surprise after Inland. The book is itself a good illustration of the case where the author has reached a stage in his career where he really needs to have another book published and that book (for his sake) ought to be published even if it's not so good — because it's going to keep him going. Some people believe that a poet should pubfish as much as possible, and Douglas Stewart, I think, getting the credo from A.G. Stephens, believed it was terribly important for a poet to produce bulk, that bulk is important. For example, some of these small pieces in the volume were candidly fill-ins. Some of them had been written years before and repolished for this purpose of publication. "I think All the Room might be taken as an example of a book that came just at the end of a period when I was beginning to feel that I'd come to something of an end. In fact the book proved to be a turning- point. Although there had been quite a number of years when I wasn't writing nearly as much poetry as I had done previously, after All the Room the output has been prolific." Apart from what David Rowbotham calls the "small pieces", the majority of the poems in All the Room deal not with a particular landscape but with some general reflection on contemporary living. Good examples of this new direction in his poetry are the three poems, "Shake Hands", "The Continent" and "A Twentieth-century Man". These poems may be read as direct statements of the themes that were only hinted at in Ploughman and Poet: the bitterness of experience and the pressure of con­ temporary living. On the other hand, the attachment to landscape that characterized the earlier volumes has been replaced by a sense of isolation. These poems deal with the search for meaning in a world which is no longer in touch with traditional values. "Shake Hands" deals with the search for meaning in one's own personal life, "The Continent" deals with the search for meaning in the Australian environment, and "A Twentieth-century Man" deals with this search in terms of contemporary man. The poems act as a parable of David Rowbotham's separation from his own earlier subject-matter. The language of these new poems in All the Room contrasts with the characteristic language of his earlier "landscape" verse. While the language of his landscape poetry was generally relaxed, even diffuse, the 34

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute language of poems like "Shake Hands" was severely tightened, even to the point of grammatical obscurity. Vivian Smith commented on the language of some of the poems in the Bulletin review. Early critics of Rowbotham's work were quick to point out his over­ indulgence in heavy polysyllabic words, and while this tendency has been curbed, it has still not been completely eliminated. Poets are often criticized for thinness of texture, but there is an equal danger — usually overlooked — of forcing too much into a poem, of over-packing it. Some of Rowbotham's poems lack balance in this way.'^

The following poems illustrate the change of emphasis and poetic language in All the Room.

SHAKE HANDS

Shake hands under death. See it drifting there, Over us. One more's one less breath Lifting what we bear To cover us.

Living's all the room Meeting finds, the lone Light we have. Then meet well. Time's loom Otiickly winds to stone What sight we have.

Speak above men's dust Laid along these roads Under us Words to walk with, trust. Twisted tongues make goads To sunder us.

Strangers waste goodbye; Reach out empty, poor. Ending thus. Shake hands then to die Richly down, with more 35 Befriending us.

18. Bulletin (Sydney), 17 October 1964.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute THE CONTINENT The continent booms. Among its oceans stayed, A mammal of light that looms From the most frozen shade. Over it blow Great birds of solitude. Inhabitant and foe. And its Sinai's burn and brood. But Jehovah wrought No smoking covenant there; Too late it rose for thought. Too far for wanderer. It roared alone; And loner in the sea-dark Knew no old men of renown. Rainbow, raven, ark. But, dawn begun. In lone desire it bore, Slow shadow to its sun, A brother of stone but more: As its sea, dark. And aged in the image of this. An ochred patriarch, Abiding genesis. From its body leapt Water animal. Animal water-swept, Lost in a stone-brown call. Its thunders made Mountains, and its mountains seed, Then withering inward laid Dust on its fiercest need. And of dust grew Its most vast firmament. Creating birds that flew Preying on fertility spent. 36

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Continent mine, Mine you are not, but your own; Risen, you boom, you shine In labour of these alone. Adam I came Of mysteries others live. Bringing the banished name You will not let me give. Were dwelling more Than what I, dying, bear, I would inside your shore Turn Sinai wanderer: And find a cloud. Which, to us both the lord. Might strike a covenant loud And bind us with the Word. I would beg the rod To smite your tomb of space. And in that shock of our god Release a chosen race.

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

He is lonely in his death of care. He sees no saviour, friend. He is his own man, bent to bear A weightlessness, an end. For who shall find him but they seek Unwifled, and lost as freed. In servitude to nothing, too weak To master, love or need? And knowing this, he would not dare Say by word or soul That any man should meet him there 37 (None ever meet in whole).

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute He whispers Eli; disbelieves — For so the name out-stands Extremities where no one grieves Or folds or holds up hands.

Walled in, he hears the wind toll bells And the night nail stars; He would not cry for grace in cells Or press against the bars.

He was the man who, living, tries To seize (before they slip) Fidelities from under lies. From jargon, fellowship;

To strike a sabbath from the rock And slake the thirst of dreams; To let no beauty's answer mock The miracle it seems;

To found and be a memory's fact, Too prized to doubt or mourn (What could he in creation's act Promise the unborn?);

To learn, living, what voice grows Angels in dying eyes. And arch the dark where absence flows With gleams of paradise —

Till the last surviving day when truth Shatters and is complete: The way for hope is heedless youth, For discovery, defeat.

He closed his own cell door and wept. Caring, yet, to be; Then turned and killed the care he kept In mercy's dignity.

The century's Judas minutes roar; He waits, an unreached loss: What prophet spoke to make him more Once he out-racked the cross? 38

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute ROOFS

Beetle-backs at a standstill under the rain. Streaky red, seaweed green, dun grey. Hunched together similar, dissimilar. Streaming with the weather fogging the bay:

Uncouth tops of crowds with sunken legs And heads withdrawn beneath their angled shards, Urbanised on a great sea coast, like a local Columbus-thought cramped blindly near the words

To give it transmutation into action: Dead roofs carpentered on living flesh. On loving, hating hearts, iron covers for wasted Dreams undiscovered by circumstance or wish:

Corrugated simplicity, something that grew From hammered-out endeavour, then stood still In utter dull content beside the sea That challenged, and the unattained hill.

The introspective note of All the Room contrasts with the tone of another book by David Rowbotham published later in the same year. This was a novel, The Man in the Jungle. Begun as a serious psychological study, the novel became a mystery-thriller, set against the background of sub­ tropical rain forest. The story concerns a search party for a missing news­ paperman, himself lost while looking for a plane crashed in the jungle. The novel retains something of its original intention in that it depicts the manner in which man's basic nature is exposed once he is uprooted from his civilized environment. A quotation from Emerson appears at the beginning of the novel:

At the gates of the forest the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. . .

The novel fits into the category of what Graham Greene has called an "entertainment", a word which David Rowbotham himself uses in the dedication. In some ways The Man in the Jungle is closer to the themes of All the Room than would be expected. Like the poems chosen here from 39 All the Room, the novel deals with the search for understanding.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute The novel was widely praised when it appeared but, while David Rowbotham has not wanted to lose contact with prose as a medium of expression, he has always seen the writing of the short story or novel as a stepping aside from his vocation as a poet. In wTiting The Man in the Jungle, he drew on some of his experiences in journalism. Flowever, he was no longer working as a journalist when his fourth volume of poetry, Bungalow and Hurricane, was published in 1967. In 1965 he had accepted a position as senior tutor in the English Department of the University of Queensland. Against the background of his search for the artist's freedom and his search for security, university life seemed to offer a good compromise. It was the compromise he had hoped to find in journalism. "I thought that I might be able to get a good compromise by becoming a journalist. I thought here at last I am in an occupation where I'm writing, which is pretty close to what I want to do anyhow. Of course I soon found that there is some difference between writing for journalism and doing one's own writing." This opinion did not prevent him from defending the poet who was also a journalist in a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald. He was replying to an article by A.D. Hope, which had referred to the lack of professional poets in Australia.

He perceived. . . that the heart of the matter was the belly; a poet cannot eat his muse or live on reviewers' crumbs. But the professor wanted to know why the average Australian poet collected news. Quite apart from the consideration that the poet might have been a cadet journalist long before he began making sorties up Mount Parnassus, this could be because he thought he saw in Australian journalism, which is not yet so cockeyed as London journalism, chances of a reasonable com­ promise. Or, when he was naively young, a promising avenue of "wraiting" — especially when journalism has made, and occasionally still makes, a fairly solid contribution to literature. The assumption persists that journalism is a wrecker of creative writing. But is it any more damaging than, say, professing at a university?'9

University life provided David Rowbotham with a greater freedom to write than he beheves it possible to find elsewhere. Nevertheless, as he had anticipated in his letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, the university can, like journalism, raise problems for the writer. Some of these problems are explored in a number of poems that he placed at the end of Bungalow and Hurricane. The poem "The Hood", which refers to the occasion on which he received his B.A. degree in 1965, mourns the need for the writer to earn a living and mourns the subordination of creative to academic work. 40

19. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 February, 1955.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute THE HOOD

I take at last this hanging hood. Like any executioner. To kill my was which spoke of would And be the is that others were.

I am, with Aristotle, wise: The poet cannot live in school; The poet needs his ideal lies And is, without them, scholar, fool.

I am therefore as much the dunce. Poor arbiter of all the truth My poet's lies exalted once. Diminished by a hank of cloth.

Yet now an honour is conferred. I bow and hear the blind applause. For learned, not created, word. And mourn the liar that I was.

The kind of conflict and tension that David Rowbotham has ex­ perienced both through being a journalist and through working at university cannot, he believes, be avoided by the poet. He finds himself facing constantly the problem of poetic vocation and daily occupation: ". . .Journalism and University, despite any conflict, have been the most vital experiences of my life I think, because so closely linked with my determination to win bread. I think it was Spender who said the poet must not be a parasite; the world does not owe him a living. The poet must compromise and go to work with others, else die disgruntled in a garret. I am actually proud that I held my ovn\ as a journalist, and I pay tribute to the best parts of journalism, just as I am prepared to pay tribute to the best parts of University. "I cannot stress too strongly this matter of poetry and occupation, because I know, from the letters, phone-calls and visits I get from as­ piring or would-be young poets, that the young writer is torn between his wish to be a writer and his wish to earn a living. My advice to the young poet especially is — for Godsake, whatever you do, hold down a job. Don't play around with the romantic fiction that the Muse will 41 keep you fed. Earn your keep in the community.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute ". . .1 have never asked, or wanted, my family to expect less in the way of provision from me because I was a poet. "I have paid some price in wear and tear. But everyone suffers wear and tear."2o The title of Bungalow and Hurricane was meant to suggest in particular the tensions within the writer, although it also suggests more generally a contrast between stability and change, restriction and freedom. In All the Room a number of the poems had dealt with the position of man in the modem world. This theme, in particular as it relates to Australia, is even more in evidence in Bungalow and Hurricane. To this extent. Bungalow and Hurricane can be seen in retrospect as an inevitable line of development from All the Room. The major difference was provided by the greater variety of poetry in the new volume, and by the feeling that David Rowbotham was more sure of himself as a poet. A number of the most significant poems in Bungalow and Hurricane are poems about man's place in history and about the nature of history itself. Revealingly, the book is dedicated to an historian. Professor Gordon Greenwood, and the quotation from Shakespeare's Henry IV, "There is a history in all men's lives. . .", appears at the front of the book. Whereas he once took his environment for granted, David Row­ botham now says that he is more and more concerned in his p>oetry wdth putting his own experience in a wider perspective. This wider perspective is suggested by two poems, "Reflection at Homcastle" and "The Great Pacific Basin". He comments: '"Reflection at Horncastle' is really an attempt to relate my position as a Toowoomba born boy who became a poet, living now with my own family and my own children (whose future I don't know), — to relate all this to the issues of AustraUa in this part of the world." The poem also reflects the time he spent in England. It is typical of his work that some time elapses between any experience and its recording in poetry. "Much of my poetry has been delayed-action stuff", he says. This applies also to his time spent in the Solomon Islands during the war years. "It's a funny thing that twenty years .afterwards my experience in the islands is coming out in my poetry. The Pacific has become a vastly important thing in my imagination. My owm experience in the islands I can now relate to any vision that I might have of our future in the Pacific. Is this a preoccupation with national identity? It can be related to other poets' discovery of themselves — and of AustraUa. The Pacific has become an important symbol." The Australian past and the Pacific region do not provide the only perspectives for David Row­ botham's more recent verse. In poems like "To St. John the Divine", he makes use of more traditional Biblical imagery to meditate on man's possible future. 42

20. Letter to John Strugnell, 13 March 1968.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute In some ways Bungalow and Hurricane is the most important of his volumes of poetry since, in putting it together for publication, he became more aware of his aims in writing poetry. He not only wished to write a poetry relevant to the Australian situation but also to create an equally relevant poetic language. He was therefore particularly delighted to receive a card from writer Mary Durack in which she wrote. It is a thrill to find you striking your plough into new ground and con­ cerning yourself with our immediate dilemmas seen in perspective against our past. I am delighted too that in your pursuit of precision of expression you have not lost sight of the poetic qualities I find lacking in much modern verse. 21

He feels very strongly that Bungalow and Hurricane has broken new ground, and that one of the most important elements in this volume is his attempt to find a poetic language that does justice to contemporary experience without breaking radically with tradition. Before its publication he wrote: . . . my new book of verse is so different from my previous ones that I decided to try to examine why, and use my conclusions as an introductory statement to my book — a dangerous indulgence but hardly a hasty one. My conclusions come down to this matter of language in respect to working methods.22

This "statement" did not, however, appear as part of the published book, but was printed separately in Poetry Magazine, Sydney. It seems appro­ priate, however, to fulfil something of David Rowbotham's intention by including the "statement" here as preface to a selection of poems from Bungalow and Hurricane.

STATEMENT OF DISCOVERY In a place like Australia whose language has been transplanted from long twilights, the poet who is more native than his language sooner or later finds himself engaged with it as though it were a theme of its own accord, less a medium than something to be expressed, expressed or let grow towards discovery in another light. The native is the new, the exotic is the old, and the issue has to be joined to draw the whole world in and out upon one member. The poet in Australia is a part of the past his language traces, but his language has to be part of the life that is nearest to him, and the life that is nearest may refashion the past; Australia is a pendant of two histories. West and East. So the subject-matter of this book is something besides some concept of the movement of races, rise of nations; of oceans around, scenes within, the skies of Austral-Asia above; of daily living in the littoral urbanity of a land

21. Letter from Mary Durack Miller, 3 December 196/. 22. Letter to John Strugnell, 23 December 1965. Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute not long ago possessed totally by nature; of problems much the same as men know elsewhere in the world; of a sense or view of history which cannot elsewhere be as similar. It is, in the end, what language, unconsciously engaged as a theme and given the questioning role, has discovered about such things to one person writing in a country outside which its major language was born; and this, more than self-evident subject-matter, more than speaking idiom, is what finally marks a poetry as belonging; this is what secures it, even when the poet voices not one place alone but new society as a whole. The means the language appears to have adopted towards discovery, here, are textures of words characterising a coming-to-terms with vague dictates and responses (chord, concept, mind of language, mind of poet, mould of poem) the resolution of which is their liberation: and the resolu­ tion occurs within forms the language has assumed from other literatures across the centuries, forms with which it continually wrestles without falling away from them; they are too strong. If metre makes verse, form gives force, and, as an optional property of form, rhyme can be the finest of reasoning and feeling instruments, or the sharpest of finding ones. There is no cause, especially not that of difference-seeking or modernity, for any poetry in debt to English violently to break the moulds in which good poets, building, have conducted so much surprising experiment. To work too far outside an art's traditional identities, which preserve, is often to take transport into nothingness; "ancient salt" is still "best packing". Within form, which it frames as it finds out context, the language seems to have met the need to be clear and the caution that not even simplicity should be contrived; and so, since the poem is less expression of the poet than of itself through him as medium, word-textures and tone alter from poem to poem, from theme to theme, evading dogmatism or the ego-tangle in which the poet, after the writing of the poem, has discovered little or nothing he did not hold before. Nowhere else than in a new nation is such a personal regulation of the ego more vitally required. The founding language, though it should not, and can not, pull itself away from the distant earlier and contemporary cultures it encloses, warrants every room in which to grow freely in fresh ground, to shed or reshape bents and leanings of thought and effect inherited from a thousand years but not proper to a mere two hundred in another hemisphere. If from this process, a measure or a standard could be separated out, it might be called attempt at trueness, doing duty, a plain rather than a sublime labour with a literary not layman's language to arrive at a poetic speech recognisable as yet vernacular, or not unnatural to its place and people, and not removed from other places and other people. Inside the distinct speech and identity of form, there must be some resemblance to all, for as many as possible who can care, and the resemblance will nourish in the poet that diflference of his own which he should cherish but not impose upon his poem. One lesson to be learned is that lavished imagery wears out, or turns unfamiliar or grotesque, in other times and '*'*

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute places alienating people because its application then or there seems the less apparent and so apparently less relevant. The quality that lasts is the melodic line, whose sound of feeling sustains the image of the thought, the image that does not have to be figurative, because thought in imagination does not always ask a metaphor; it can create and be its own emotion, in lyric, story, argument, being received and remembered when set in the arrangement of right words whose order is harmonic: and although, as in prose, there can be in verse the kind of harmony which clear meaning itself creates, the value of a poem resides in a fuller creation whose harmony reveals the beauty of hidden meaning as well, and the meaning and beauty of the poem as a reality of art. Upon the proved melodic line can be built, most really, the spirit and image of thought which is Australia's. The transplanted tree in particular may not imitate its roots. The issue is two-in-one: psyche and language in the land. Let this be cultivated through the poet in tune with the nature of his talent, and nations, if they listen, will see another nation, and, when the poet speaks experience that has no frontier, will hear the bodied, not a baseless, voice. The thing styled "universal" stems in the singular light. A "poetic statement" is a risky undertaking for a poet; his views or his work are liable to change, often what he sees in his work cannot be seen by others and may not, in fact, be there. But the risk has been taken.23 The poems from the volume reprinted here deal with man's position in relation to the past ("Reflection at Homcastle"), the present ("The Great Pacific Basin"), and the future ("To St. John the Divine"). How­ ever, it is interesting to compare such poems with two others in the volume, "The Try" and "The Gardener". These two poems deal with the poet's own family and, in some ways, have an emotional impact which his more ambitious poems lack.

REFLECTION AT HORNCASTLE, ON THE RIVER BAIN, LINCOLNSHIRE {To my father, Harold) I Where, here, rose Banovallum, wall of Bain, Before gold Caesar's building legions came Came up the bronze and iron men of Spain, And one of these I own hewed out my name. His metal new but long his craft, for still Over the broken wall the bootshop stands That brought me from my stranger south to fill 45 My mind with kinship struck from hammering Lincoln hands.

Poetry Magazine (Sydney), No. 3, 19b6.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute II My grey grandfather, elder beard and nose Bent biblical, followed another line, In Simeon's house among the tribes God chose Found Rehoboth in pride and Palestine: Had not Jehovah set a promised place In holiness for all who mended shoes? The beard became the burning bush, the face Forgetful of the pagan this north village knows.

Ill I track the tribesman of my different choice And meet the fair and Celtic girl who made Him islander and changed his darker voice: Towards my Toowoomba father's patient trade What generations grew within this wall. What wanderings without, what travelling love? And one there was whom I could captive call Who served the legions somewhere in that river grove.

IV I wonder what lord Roman whipped his bones Or praised his work, that far forbear of mine. That sheepskin Briton with his tools and stones Who forged his conqueror nails; and did he whine Or smile subjection in his hut of wood. My slave of Banovallum, marshland bred. Or hunger in his dark Iberian blood To drive a nail hard into his lord Roman's head?

V I think how, garrisons and emperors gone. Those barbarous other kingdoms, Saxon, Dane, Flooded from where the Elbe and Weser run To that same sea receiving this small Bain, How they, like vanished golden Rome, invade My tongue today and this wide lowland's speech; The wave subsided but the waters stayed Levelled in English fens within my searching reach. 46

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute VI And, as time passed, the greatest conqueror And last, the cruel manorial Norman lord. Rode from his castle mailed for game or war. His hunting horn as hated as his sword; The falcon flew where once the eagle ruled And under both my serf's tree slowly bore Escaping flight into a further world. To coasts as old as these where first sires walked ashore.

VII Now, great-grandfather WilUam, take my thanks For being my own voyager, to me More famed than those whose monumented ranks The nations raise to piUar history; In these the boyhood fields of Flinders, Bass, Whom few remember as discoverers here, You weighed the ages, one among the mass. And deemed them burdensome as so they always were.

VIII By Winceby where the sombre Cromwell won And Somersby where flowed the pebbled brook Of your most grave and quoted Tennyson, In this paved square of Sorrow's gipsy book And leper-windowed church whose chapels hold Crosses of St. Augustine in each cleft. By this bleak stream, ancestral lanes as cold. You were compelled to value other things; so left.

IX So I walk foreigner by wall. Bain, fen. My origin no certain soil or place But time's contending tribes of shifting men MingUng by night fires into one more race: In what nativity will my blood, then. In my land under Asia end, begin? But for that answer none has yet the pen; 47 Unheralded the ways that we shall wander in.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute X I see huge distance through a narrow door And think my father, parent of this sense, Whose shop bench I was never fitted for. Deserves some better truth and eloquence: He, constant to his craft, bequeathed to me The sound of hands hammering ancient stone Which fashioned my departure, destiny. The shoes I wear today on paths my living own.

THE GREAT PACIFIC BASIN

I troll viith my fingers, imagination rolls. The world spins and all its parts are wholes, And none more whole than this great half that holds The mifiion fragments of all scattered worlds.

So many broken bloods are met, it seems, Around and among these blue global streams They are watered to one coloured unity. But maps may differ, and blood still break the sea.

Yet atlas eyes are not without their vision, i The perfect abstract turns upon precision. Something flows and something brims, and men ' Revolve the waters they troll their fingers in.

In the wake of mine across the hemisphere Swims and follows the sharp white fin of fear That darkens every coast like cruising fire. And would be drowned if coasts could feel entire. '

This, I believe, is why in this sea fashion I draw my line from island out to nation. Over and over, to catch and suffocate ' The cleaving blood-drawn body in our fate.

Troll with me, brother, belong to the great ocean, j Spin its scattered parts for some full solution. All we imagine in the blue globe as it spins j Might exactly measure where the light begins. 48

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute TO ST. JOHN THE DIVINE

Shall just an ark of saints survive that curse?. . . I am not scientist or astronaut But, living in their century, feel their force. Their rising revelation in my thought,

And, swept along by my loud civilization. Am but similar Christian, as unsure, So hear beside your own vast revelation Man's — making your new earth and heaven more?

Assumption rules the premise, but I see That if Isaiah prophesied the lord Whom we say died the saviour on the tree, You too could have uttered as true a word:

Sun and the seven angels shall pour death. The rivers, seas, and mountains pass away; But after that red Omega, rebirth, The lord again, and someone left to pray —

And where else this but in the walks of space ? Do we prepare our second own salvation, Timely evacuation of the race To some fine further star or constellation?. . .

Last night, since astronaut might be next raven Proving your vision's Alpha and my worth, I watched the smallest wink of light in heaven And, near beUeving, whispered to it, "Earth?"

THE TRY

I have with many midnights tried To write a poem to two whom most I love, but never found it simplified, Fit for the lesson of their trust.

I mean my daughters whom I would When they themselves know children's trust Have knowledge of my gratitude 49 As now I care amazed I must.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Beverley, Jill, remember this, That I lacked words exactly just To celebrate your gentleness Before the times burned spring with frost. Then dear my daughters, think of me, Your poet father, father most, Who, thus surprised, worked yet to see Father by poet once surpassed. Strange incapacity of sweetest love. . . All that is given and possessed No art can further own or give; Best call it miracle and rest.

THE GARDENER I watched my father digging in his garden. His spade, with a sound like the palm of a huge hand Against a huger tree, struck through the soil, Lifted, turned, let fall. He pounded with care Each stubborn clod and broke it into earth That flowed between his fingers; And the peewit came from the nest in the camphor-laurel And, with a bird's simplicity, like a child's trust, Stabbed for worms in the shadow of his knees. You can not know the kindness of a man Till you see him in a garden with a spade And birds about his feet.

50

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute The poems that last are those in which the language brings the subject-matter off.

It is interesting that, although David Rowbotham's later poetry is concerned with a number of contemporary problems, the "statement" which he wished to place at the beginning of Bungalow and Hurricane shows that his primary concern is with the language of the poems. In the end, he insists, the success of a poem must depend on the success of its poetic language — "The poems that last are those in which the language brings the subject-matter off." David Rowbotham's "poetic statement" generalized about the problem of poetic language for the Australian or indeed any poet. In conversation he is able to be more specific about the language of his own poetry. He is aware that, partly as a result of being a Queenslander and partly as a result of his own temperament, his verse stands apart from what might be regarded as the current mode. Here he discusses his attitudes to poetic language, and some of his aims in writing his poems. "I'm very conscious of wanting to do the best by language. I want a {X)em to mean something to a person who is going to read it today. For anybody to read a poem and understand it, the language has to be a modem language. Where the conflict comes in is that many of the forms that we are heir to are very, very traditional forms. I have worked best in these forms. I like the pentameter, I like rhyme. Now you could say that to this extent my poetry is traditional because its form looks traditional. I sincerely hope that people can see that inside this apparent traditional form there is a conscious modern use of language. I should hope that this comes out. "What I want is the simplest language that I can attain. Even in working under this principle you find that the simplest language demands the poetic turn of phrase: the slight inversion comes in quite naturally. I am in the traditional line. I rather agree with Yeats that "ancient salt makes best packing". The old line is pretty solid and anybody breaks it at his peril. Of course many have broken the mould and done wonderful 51 things that way, but others have broken the mould and come to grief

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute "I hope that I'm writing more concisely in my later poetry than I did in the earlier poetry. I think that by comparison my earlier poetry was diffuse. There was a tendency to use rather more a kind of romantic language, and even the clichd. These have, I hope, disappeared. I haven't self-consciously thrown them overboard. The thing is I have never at any stage written according to any particular plan. "Had I Uved outside Queensland, in an area where there's greater poetic activity and a greater meeting of writers and poets with new trends, I might have become more quickly aware of perhaps the old- fashionedness of some of the things that I was doing, and therefore got onto newer things more quickly. What you've got to bear in mind is that, fiving in Queensland, I have been aUowcd to grow completely in my own way. If my development has been a slow one, perhaps it has been a more natural one. "I think it can be a bad thing that the Queensland artist is isolated. It's a bad thing in that there's not much interest displayed in the arts in Queensland so that the writer here does find himself being, almost against his will, very much an individual, living his own existence. This absolute indifference can kill a writer, it can lead him to a full stop. On the other hand the good thing is that he can grow naturally apart from the perhaps overstressed modern tendencies in poetry elsewhere. I like to think that I have gained in this way." In summing up what he is trying to do in the language of his poems, he says, "If I'm conscious of anything at all when I'm writing a poem I've been conscious of the fact the poem must be as clear as possible — as clear as I can make it." Although much of what he says here about the language of poetry seems to provide a good deal of information about the way in which his verse is written, he still finds it extremely difficult to be precise about the manner in which his poetry is created. Any answer to the question "How does the poet create?" is bound, he feels, to be a tentative one. However, he found himself addressing high school students in Townsville, in June 1967, on this subject — "How the poet creates". At the beginning of the lecture he stressed how much the particular poem taking shape on the page depends on the poet's vision.

I am referring to the circle, the vision, within which the poet lives and works. This is the circle, or circle of vision, of which every poem on the page becomes the centre in the moment of creation. It is a vital part of how the poet creates. What do I mean by vision? Vision is what the poet pays attention to. What he pays attention to may be something unknown as well as 52

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute anything known, and he may not be aware he has paid attention till time, his poetry and experience tell him that he has. In other words, vision can take in a kind of hindsight, which then contributes to the poet's outlook on the present and the future, and to his view of the world. . . Many people besides poets are capable of vision or of a visionary view in their lives. Many people, like poets, are endowed with a poetic faculty, but the difference between them and the writing poets is that, as Words­ worth. . .noted, they lack "the accomphshment of verse". Here is where poets have a peculiar problem. For them, the vision is bound up with the symbolism of language. . . The vision and the verse-making are one, or go together — so much so that the true subject-matter of poetry could be called, firstly, language. This is why I need to use the idea of vision. Vision suggests that a poet is born or built to pay attention to things, and things behind things, and in that vocation he has to pay attention also to the wonder of words. My answer, at the outset, to our question is that the poet has to listen for his language and trust it when it comes. Of course, in getting that language down he is forced to apply the pressure of his writer's craft. We do not want a puzzling pudding; we want some firmness and order (at least, I do).

This does not mean that a poem is merely the putting together of different kinds of verbal effects, although, he says, people often assume this. "How did you get, or come by, that line, that thought, that feeling' that poem? By the use of imagery, assonance, consonance, alliteration, onomatopeia, etcetera, etcetera?" My answer, for a lot of the poems that have happened to me, can be: "No, not by any of the elements you suggest as conscious methods or means. I got or achieved or came by that line, that thought, that feehng, that poem, by sitting down among my uncertain­ ties and doubts and waiting, waiting for the poem and its parts to break out of their shell." Waiting — waiting for hours, for days, weeks, months, years — can be, as much as anything else, an agent to how a poem gets created.

In the course of this lecture he quoted from an article which he had written for the Sydney Bulletin. First of all, enjoy it though I may, I mostly find the writing of poetry very hard work — a struggle either to hang on to the concept and the mood while engaged with the form they can demand, or., .to seize on the spirits of unforeseen dimensions or changes of concept which the weird alchemy of mood and form can give off, and incarnate them. Since the constant factor in both these courses of battle — which may overlap — is mood, at all times I am concerned with the melodic line which is its proof and which has to sustain it. If the melodic line breaks down and cannot be repaired, then the mood is gone, the concept caves in, the poem 53 is a flop. All I have left is meaningless form.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Later in the lecture to Senior students he went on to stress how much creating poetry was a "struggle". It is the sort of thing that the writer, Joseph Conrad, described as the business of "wrestling with the Lord for my creation". I have at least been conscious of having had a wrestle. At times in this wrestle I have been outrightly defeated, and failed the possible poem. After writing dozens of drafts in order to try to draw the lurking poem out, I have had to give in or retire from the fray. Sometimes I have technically completed a poem, then thrown it into the waste-paper basket because I have realised that, despite my struggle, the poem still is not true. I have lost that listening connection; my language, hence my thought, has not come right. In the end, how you write depends on how you feel. .. . half the time, if not all the time, the emotion creates its own technique. Emotion, feeling, a state of grace or engrossment, is a pre-requisite to poetry. Mind you, emotion or feeling does not actually do the writing of a poem. The head does, and this is where conscious composition or craft comes in. Yet, it is the heart, not the head, which, in my opinion, first fathoms out the level of theme or subject-matter worthiest of craft. I do not beheve that any conscious craft-effort can be put to proper use on any thought or concept that has not initially been felt.

All this is to speak generally. Something further may be learnt from studying the growth of a particular poem. As an example of the way a poem is created, one may take the writing of "Prey to Prey", a poem which David Rowbotham included in Bungalow and Hurricane. It describes a scene in which birds and fish are preying upon one another. Commenting on the writing of this poem, he has this to say: "When I wrote that poem I had a very clear visual image of what I wanted to write about. I didn't have any idea of how it was going to come out but I had a picture in my mind of the birds swooping down to attack the fish and the bigger fish under the water leaping up to attack the birds. I knew immediately that what I wanted to do was to relate this picture to what was going on in the world around us. Were we becoming so cold-blooded and emotion­ less that we could start killing one another off in the manner of the crea­ tures in 'Prey to Prey'?" Not all David Rowbotham's poems begin with one clear impression. He says, "There are also the many occasions when I've begun to write a poem just with a vague feeling or concept — and no clear picture at all." Whatever the origin of the poem, there remains the struggle to translate the vision into words, the struggle that he described in "Statement of Discovery". Thinking of "Prey to Prey" in particular, he says, "The big problem of the poet is that if he has a vision he also has to grasp that 54

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute vision in language." The difficulty of fully realizing a particular vision is illustrated by the many versions of the poem "Prey to Prey" that are scattered through one of the notebooks in which he sets out his poems. It appears in eighteen different versions, many of the versions complicated by innumerable crossings-out and emendations. The reproductions of pages from his notebook illustrate this search for a language which will satisfy the original vision. It is interesting to note how the poem changed from being "Sonnet from the Queensland Coast" to the present four stanza poem, illustrating the difficulty the poet had in finding a satisfactory ending. The poem in its final printed version appears on page 58.

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Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute PREY TO PREY

The birds come Uke fishes out of the air And fishes out of the encountering sea, like birds. And meet in the murderous limit that they share. Fins and wings thunderous, without words. And fishes into the air, birds into the sea. Die, and the wind and water scatter their death; And whatever in nature made them enemy Made them as prey to prey, without wrath. And this is the cold compulsion to be feared If men as heirs to these should likewise meet, Humanity to nature nothing or unheard. The hunger total, battering without retreat, With none from the encounter as none even here Being borne back though the world they inhabited wait. But all in their own wounds and the floundering air Sea-dead, having died so without even hate.

58

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute If I have any mission at all, it is to go on writing, and to me it will not matter what I write about so long as I have written well on whatever comes to mind.

David Rowbotham is now gathering poems for a new volume of poetry. Although the arrangement of this volume is occupying most of his time, it is not the only work awaiting publication. There is also another novel, Mingga. Mingga is an example of David Rowbotham's continuing interest in prose although he says he will never again write short stories. The novel was begun a year or two before he left the Courier-Mail, and has been revised a number of times. It deals with life in a far western Qjaeensland township, particularly with the colour problem. He originally intended to call the novel White as an Angel but, he says, the novel deals with the town itself rather than with the problem of race. The background for the story was provided by a trip he did on behalf of the Courier-Mail, and the idea for the story came from his experiences in journalism, as was true for the earlier novel The Man in the Jungle. He extensively revised Mingga because, as he says, "The first version was over-written. Much had to be taken out. I tried to write the novel too quickly after the experience. However, the final draft is now ready." Poetry nevertheless remains his chief concern, and it is his poetry which he is most interested in discussing. "I have felt the need in recent years to wonder and write about the relevance of "the craft". I have sought a sort of reaffirmation of my belief in poetry. After all, if one is compelled to write poetry, one likes to think that compulsion is an act of faith more than a disease. There were hints of this new enquiry of mine in some of the poems in Bungalow and Hurricane, and I now have a group of unpublished poems dealing expressly with this subject." Such an enquiry can be highly personal and introspective and he has been concerned in the compiling of his latest volume to objectify his experience as much as possible. "I think that, lately, I have come upon ways of handling 59 the subject more publicly; I have written poems about other poets and

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute poetry — there is, ostensibly, less of the me.'' An example of this is an un­ published poem entitled "Prisoners of the Crown", a poem that deals with the impact of Australia on the poet Charles Harpur.

PRISONERS OF THE CROWN

Joseph and Sarah, prisoners of the crown Between the precipice and sea, felt The island as deep as all the injury done When England convicted them and gave them guilt, And gained with good behaviour pardon, the rub. The freedom to rebuild transported straws of love Into the clays of exile, slab by slab. Their son, native born in the gaoled Windsor grove Of bluegums, put on with English at his lips Their burden as the faith that bent his back. The gorges that travelled in the transport ships, The cargo, the continent below the deck. Where the word, released, shall free the burdening stone Slaved Harpur, the son of prisoners of the crown.

This is one of the poems on nineteenth century poets that David Rowbotham intends to include in his new collection. He has been much less certain about including a group of more personal poems. This is part of his desire to make the new volume a more outward-looking book than Bungalow and Hurricane. "I think I might cut out any poems that are too obviously exercises in mental therapy. At the same time, it's a jx)or show if a poet has to feel afraid of stating all feelings. If he feels he has to objectify every deep emotion, he can too often make that emotion insincere. In doing so, he makes the practice of poetry insincere too. For example — the poet, like any man, loves and hates. Why, in expressing these things, should he create a 'middle man' system that stands between feeling and the reader? Personal or subjective poetry can have a public and objective effect if the poet is good at his craft. For, no matter how subjective he is in his theme, he remains quite objective in regard to language. The ob­ jectivity lies in his tussle with language. Language is the hard fact that can save the involvements in himself from seeming just sloppy sentiment or fiction." One of the most successful of the more personal poems is one in which he manages to universalize the individual experience. It becomes a poem about man's condition, dealing with the themes of fear, courage and endurance. 60

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute LION'S-GA TE I shall go in, go in at the lion's-gate That locks the wildest garden. The man then Who follows me in must be the beaten man. Fellow-animal dragging in his wound. Parting the bushes to his breathing-ground. Thus driven, all who enter meet apart. Hearing in the tunnels they make separate The tawny suffering of the secret heart. But in the hidings of the sheltering den Sounds the sympathy that can save men; There in the respite of leaf and dark they begin On the long agony of curing wounds. Ready to run again where the hunt resounds On the open rocks of the world. The beasts go in.2* The interest in history, the interest in the relation of present to past which characterized Bungalow and Hurricane, is continued in the poetry David Rowbotham has written since. The concern with the larger dilem­ mas facing contemporary man that first came to the fore in some of the poems in All the Room is represented among his more recent verse by "First Man Lost in Space", as epigrammatic in style as anything he has written.

FIRST MAN LOST IN SPACE I took in death With your goodbye. Then what have I To fear of death ? I live with death As with a star. It is not far To go with death When death, the fear That floats the earth. Stars empty forth. The earth dies here. The seas, not I, 61 I mourn the earth.

24. Bulletin (Sydney), 10 December 1966.

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute And I mourn death Its birth goodbye. You buried me With one red roar. Do not grieve more The given. See, As I see now. The atom's urn, In which you turn The seaborne prow And craft of earth About, for fear, In seas of death. So empty here . .. What is it bears My craft to birth. My ark of earth Away from yours? — The thing I seem, The time I have. The light you gave. The launch of dream. And a great star Is standing by. I have gone through The kingdom's eye. I go before. Before gods grew, To where none knew Creation, nor. Trailing the plume Of ice and fire, The rose desire. Another bloom Shall summon me. Shall save us all. And the past be 62 Perpetual ... 25

25. Australian Poetry 1968 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1968).

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute David Rowbotham intends at present to call his new coUection of verse The Makers of the Ark. The projected title is derived from the subject- matter of one of his new poems. "My poem about 'the makers of the ark' sums up, I trust, all that seems to be in my new work. Is this work a departure from, or advance upon, Bungalow and Hurricane? I don't know. All that I know is that, since writing the poems in that volume, I have written another hundred poems, and have prepared another book of between fifty and sixty of these. I'm just glad that I've gone on writing to this extent. Now — only for a while, I hope — - I have come to a stop. If I've come to a permanent stop (every poet's fear!), so be it! If I have any mission at all, it is to go on writing, and to me it will not matter what I write about so long as I have written well on whatever comes to mind."

ALL We, the makers of the ark. We, the manifold Hammering men at ceaseless work, Sharing the confusion spelled In the lands Noah found When he touched mountain-ground, Build in the babels towering the tongue, Or with unthinking sense, Old new vessels that still, among Moments of the immense Green summit of the world, Sail upon all they hold, The same wonder within, the blood We violate but praise. The same first olive of the wood And resurrection of days, And the one mountain we were In the ships we make and are.

63

Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ploughman and Poet. Sydney: Edwards & Shaw for Lyre-Bird Writers, 1954. Town and City. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1956. Inland. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1958. All the Room. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964. {All the Room was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for 1964.) The Man in the Jungle. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1964. "Brisbane", Current Affairs Bulletin (University of Sydney), XXXIV, No. 6. Bungalow and Hurricane. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967.

This bibliography does not include all David Rowbotham's contributions to newspapers and periodicals. From 1946 onwards he contributed articles and reviews to the Toowoomba Chronicle and Darling Downs Gazette, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Bulletin. From 1952 to 1955 he was on the staff of the Toowoomba Chronicle, and from 1955 to 1964 on that of the Brisbane Courier-Mail. In 1967 and 1968 he was chief book reviewer for the Courier- Mail.

-LA NO

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