Two Essays on Australian Poetry by Dr. Ian Irvine (copyright 2005-2008 all rights reserved) [Mercurius Press (Bendigo, Australia), Formally Asphodel M&ES] Copyright Notice: Extracts from theorists and Australian poets discussed in this work are included under ‘fair usage’ provisions related to review and academic critique. Author Bio Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: ‘Australian Edition’, 2005. He is the author of three books – Dream-Dust Parasites a novel (written as Ian Hobson); The Angel of Luxury and Sadness a non-fiction book concerned with post-traditional forms of alienation/chronic ennui; and Facing the Demon of Noontide, a collection of poetry. Dr. Irvine currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing and Community Services programs at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia). He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui. In his recent theoretical work he has attempted to develop an anti-oppressive approach to creative writing based upon the integration of Cultural-Relational theories concerning ‘self in relation’ with Jungian and Groffian models of the ‘collective’ or ‘transpersonal’ unconscious. Essay One Reassessing the Jindyworobak ‘imagery’ revolution on the way to a literature of the ‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’ Copyright Dr. Ian Irvine, 2006, all rights reserved. Word count: 3,770 (including quotes) [This essay is based upon the draft of a talk delivered as part of a panel on Australian poetry delivered at the ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) conference held in Perth, Western Australia, June- July 2006.] Essay Two Tracing the Political in Contemporary Australian Poetry Copyright Dr. Ian Irvine, 2005-2006, all rights reserved. Word count: 4,446 (including quotes) [This essay is based upon the draft of a talk delivered as part of a panel on literature and politics at the AAWP (Australian Association of Writing Programs) conference held in Perth, Western Australia, November 2005.] Reassessing the Jindyworobak ‘imagery’ revolution on the way to a literature of the ‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’1? 1. Who were the Jindyworobaks? It is a ghost that walks before birth. As a faithful promise it comes. To have known it is to yearn with heart and eyes for the long hush for the long, long hush under starlight in the desert with the winds, waiting the sun’s rise.2 The ‘Jindyworobaks’ were a loose ‘club’ of Australian poets who wanted to forge a new relationship between language and landscape, indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Their project eventually involved (invoked?) encounters with the spectres and ghosts of Australia’s colonialist history—i.e. ‘entities’ that spoke of the repression of alternative histories, especially indigenous, and of non-indigenous ‘shadow stuff’ (in the Jungian sense). It is arguable that these encounters, recorded in poetry and prose, helped construct a cultural space conducive to white acknowledgement—however limited, initially—of indigenous loss and grief linked to dispossession and forced assimilation. These same encounters also paved the way for later indigenous and non-indigenous poetic representations of the suffering of the land itself, its many extinctions, its devastated forests and grasslands. The group originated in Adelaide and their anthologies span the years 1938 to 1953. The best work of the group’s leading poets—Rex Ingamells, W. Flexmore Hudson, Ian Mudie, William Hart-Smith and Roland Robinson—clearly introduced a fresh hybrid poetic to the national psyche—one cannot say ‘new’ given the antiquity of the Aboriginal elements they openly acknowledged. It is arguable that the Jindyworobak project has also had an important, often under-unacknowledged, impact on Australian literary and cultural life. Poets as diverse as, Mary Gilmore, Judith Wright, Colin Thiele, Dorothy Hewett, James McCauley, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Margaret Irvin and Geoffrey Dutton contributed to the various Jindyworobak anthologies Les Murray has also acknowledged Jindy influences on his work.3 This article will reassess the Jindyworobak contribution to 20th century Australian literary developments. It will also attempt to highlight the role of ‘spectres’ and ‘ghosts’ in their poetics. In particular, it will emphasise the group’s local contribution to what is now recognized as an international environmental/ecological poetics (epitomized by the work of Gary Snyder in the US and Judith Wright, and more recently John Kinsella, in Australia). In the case of the Jindies this poetics emerged in the form of a uniquely Australian ‘landscape poetics’ (Ingamells’: ‘environmental values’). The movement’s 1 Judith Wright, from ‘Landscape and Dreaming’ 2 From ‘Desert Dawn’, Rex Ingamells, 1940 3 Brian Elliott in his 1979 book The Jindyworobaks, goes as far as to equate Murray’s idea of the ‘vernacular’ with Ingamell’s definition of the term ‘environment.’ Murray’s The Vernacular Republic of 1975 certainly reworked and extended on select Jindyworobak themes. uniquely Australian ‘anti-colonial’ poetics—part of what became an international anti- colonial/ethnopoetic movement—will also be looked at.4 2. Critiques of Jindyworobak Critiques of Australian Culture and Society Brian Elliott in his introduction to The Jindyworobaks (1979) described the motivations of the Jindyworobak poets of the late thirties as follows: ‘The older world suffered from disastrous forms of heart disease. The [Jindyworobaks] wished, if they could, to assert their youth and difference, to relish the natural freedom of the human spirit, and they wished to look for it, since other resources had clearly failed, only in their own country. There was a sense that poetry … in particular had failed, and it had failed because it no longer represented fundamental experiences of living. It had become a decorative frill. The impulse of the [Jindyworobaks] was to say, “We must find it again; and we must find it here.”’ This quote perhaps summarises the origins of both the empathy and ambivalence modern progressives feel toward the Jindyworobak poets. On the one hand, their youthful idealism,5 their respect for Aboriginal culture and their implicit critique of colonial dependency are to be celebrated and have had a not insignificant humanizing effect on the development of post-WWII Australian culture. On the other hand there is ambivalence about their tendency to appropriate Aboriginal culture, especially when some critics argue that they did little to directly nurture Aboriginal efforts toward self- determination. Another concern was their tendency to simplify the ‘rural/urban divide in Australian society—city people were routinely stereotyped as fallen, alienated and out of touch with ‘the land’ and its spiritual treasures. They are also open to critique with regard to their ‘insularity’ (leading at times to an exclusionist form of ‘nationalism’) and what we can describe as their ‘anti-intellectualism’ (a tendency perhaps derived from their unconscious Romantic assumptions). We note that their anti-intellectualism and tendency to idealise the ‘rural’ reappeared in Les Murray’s poetics.6 In terms of poetic form, many critics have argued that due to the movement’s ‘insularity’ its leading practitioners were also ‘anti-experimental’ (apart from their attempts to adapt Aboriginal literary forms into English) and that as a consequence little worthwhile poetry emerged from the main practitioners of the movement. On this score the ideological tendency toward the ‘traditional’ in terms of poetic form and the anti- European element (meaning anti-modernist at that time) undoubtedly hampered the 4 Epitomized internationally by the poetics of Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Diane di Prima and many others. 5 Brian Elliott, in his introduction to The Jindyworobaks (p.xviii) wrote: ‘They were inexperienced and earnest; in a word, novices. They may be thought of as the class of ’38, because it was in that year that they graduated … and produced their first magazine and manifesto, the 1938 Jindyworobak anthology; also Ingamells’ declaration of war against the provincial philistines, the pamphlet Conditional Culture.’ 6 His idea of a ‘Vernacular Republic’ with its underlying idea that there exists an alliance between Aboriginal Australians and the non-indigenous rural poor (described as the Boetians) against urban Australians (the Athenians) is vaguely reminiscent of some Jindyworobak ideas. ability of some of the poets to respond with formal and even thematic flexibility to the changing world around them.7 However, as the anthologies demonstrate, the major poets all experimented with free-verse forms and some of their work reveals distinctly modernist modes of representation, though their aesthetic should more properly be described as ‘symbolist’ rather than ‘imagist’, with appropriated, often grossly decontextualised, representations of the Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’ taking the place of the metaphysical ephemera that typified 19th century French Symbolist poetry. It is important to note, however, that