BRISBANE RIVER POETRY AFTER QUEENSLAND’S DISASTROUS SUMMER FLOODS, RUTH BLAIR Above: WA Clarson, DISCOVERS A RICH TRADITION OF BRISBANE RIVER POETRY. Brisbane, original lithograph printed as he river is getting its shine back’, a remotely aware of; how this sinuous, impressive a supplement to The friend remarked some little while after Illustrated Sydney ‘T as Peter Porter calls it, anchors whatever sense News, 30 August 1888. across the Eleanor Schonell Bridge (the ‘green’ of belonging we might have to this place, and for Digitally enhanced by pedestrian and bus bridge slung across the visitors anchors impressions and experience. A Francisco Roelas. river between Dutton Park and The University of Howe, in ‘Evening on the Brisbane River’ (1912), Below: Curving roads Queensland) reading poetry by Samuel Wagan has a sense of the way in which the river enters and pathways mimic Watson and Luke Beesley embedded in the the souls of those who live beside it: the sinuous bends of footpath and embossed on the railing. Because The beauty of the River is like a benediction the Brisbane River. the bridge is so high you have almost a bird’s eye To the workers passing homeward by the winding, Photo by Mila Zincone. view of this reach of the river. And on this day, shaded Road: with the stretch of water smooth down to the … thick’, Dimitris Tsaloumas calls it–was almost teaching As its beauty o’er them casts its dreamy spell; know more about how, from the time of European windings, settlement, the river has been celebrated and I’ve It speaks of far off fair things, and an endless story gone hunting, especially for poems. What follows tells. Across the poems I’ve been reading a story today.1 The river’s shine is a recurring theme. unfolds, both of learning to see the river and of learning to live with it and alongside it. Early poets In his Foreword to the collection Rivers (the work clearly stand apart from it, admiring, and weaving of three poets: John Kinsella, Peter Porter and the river into a paean to European colonisation Sean O’Brien), Kinsella writes, ‘Creation myths, and to ‘progress’, as in ‘The River of Queensland’ the “world river”, sources of life and death, diverse (Anon., 1859): ecologies, connectors and “edges” of habitats, Hail to thee life stream of our now infant nation. rivers bind life together across continents’.2 Poets Thy glory shall be ours where the Bay extended, can help us understand how the river that we Bidding us to mould this birthright of our children Till poets rise to tell the wonders of Queensland. on fast ferries does things to us we may be only
FRYER FOLIOS | JUNE 2011 3 I acknowledge the Peter Porter’s poem, ‘The role of the Brisbane On this transom, the river’s dawning Aboriginal peoples River in the fortunes of my family’ (2002) skin … Stand here … give your breath to gives, more than a century later, a sense of who have lived shadow of Cootha’s the disturbing realities and costs of European dusk … Stand here … and whisper upon and live along the Brisbane River nineteenth century, sees: lines of Kurilpa’s ghost … from its source to a river altering the lives Others too have sung the river. In Mabel Forrest’s of men and beasts, for all the world as if its mouth and who a feud as old as that of sun and rain have always known were set off by these migrant magistrates hoping to make careers twelve thousand miles the bridge, / The ripple kisses on her mouth’; but how to respect a from home. industry is never far away, and there is death in this Arcady: great river. The end of this poem, mimicking the stately iambic pentameter and locutions of many of its Sometimes within her reedy curves, predecessors, is a parody of early celebrations of Sometimes across her sandy bars, A drowned face, tired of every day, colonisation: Awaits the judgment of the stars. Her similarly titled 1927 poem, expresses sheer a State’s proud capital, its comely banks joy at the beauty of this city with its winding river, its smooth and smiling surface now outranks ‘so full of godhead do we feel today’: the plush riparian pleasures of the Yarra’s saunter through Victoria’s savannahs, and Queensland, once Louisiana, turns Found in warm seas beneath pale, tropic skies, Super Texas, primus inter pares. Glimpses of a developing city are common in The river in this poem is blue, not the brown we the poems. A Howe observed (1912): ‘From tall chimneys in the city smoke wreaths are lightly Essex Evans, in ‘Adrift: a Brisbane River reverie’ drifting, / shrouding shining waters with a veil of whirling grey.’ Mabel Forrest, in ‘Brisbane River’ glint’. For Emily Bulcock, in 1924, the ‘delphinium (1916), begins with industry at the mouth of her blue’ of the sky, at the time of Oxley’s coming, was mirrored in the river ‘clearer than today’. A She shudders by the shambles where The dawning brought an oily calm poems is to see what they can tell us about the And iron roofs are bleak and bare river. Observation, though not the major driving Above the works at Eagle Farm. force, is nevertheless the seed from which the Samuel Wagan Watson, who is our great poet poems grow. I have already mentioned the river’s of the city and its river today, relates progress, shine–perhaps the most commonly observed politics and communication in a richly dense feature. The river breeze and the tidal nature of the poem, ‘smoke signals’ (2004): I remember construction cranes like herds of frozen plateau above For Mabel Forrest, the bay is a lover waiting to meet the river (1916). Manfred Jurgensen writes: the age of 4, ‘shadows lengthen. absence carries, / hours sail that I learnt to read the columns of Brisbane city. into the shining tide’. (1999). Associated with the Watson’s poems on the Eleanor Schonell Bridge, tidal nature of the river are mangroves, with sinister ‘Dreaming river triptych’ and ‘On the transom of connotations in early poems: is both encomium and elegy, drawing on ancient The fretful river rolls past mead and scar European and Aboriginal heritage: To the dark mangrove, fringing on the deep, Abreast the bar. (Evans, 1891) Never the same this river–Archaic vein, [the mud] snaking through the land’s dreaming Vomiting forth its slime and clay cortex–Submerging provinces; the Where the mangrove areas point the way. (Lucas, 1906) triptych cultural on every tide…
4 UQ LIBRARY But a century later, Laurie Duggan calls a Above: Vessels collection of his poetry Mangroves, as if inspired, in themselves. They are represented by Thomas stranded in Brisbane’s Shapcott’s ‘The river at Brisbane’ which is Botanic Gardens reproduced on page 10 of this issue. in 1893. From an dragging ‘against the current’.3 Album of Queensland I would like to be able to say that I see a clear Flood Views, 1893, The trees and plants that grow alongside the river evolution of ideas across the poems. I had Philp family papers, appear in the poems; the forests and gardens expected to see a development from observation UQFL28, Album 3, and the iconic Botanical Gardens; the bats (‘Ah, to a sense of the intertwining of human lives with Image 25a. just as well / I fell in love with Jacarandas, and the life of the river. But a sense of belonging with Below and previous page: A cyclist crosses the birds: pelicans for Silvana Gardner (1987), this essay from A Howe’s 1912 poem, ‘Evening the Eleanor Schonell who describes their return after disturbances by on the Brisbane River’, where the poet is sensitive Bridge. Photo by Mila Zincone. for Alexander Muir, in the ‘lofty scrubs’ on the river workers. Mabel Forrest in her poem ‘In the banks, ‘birds in strange rich plumage’ (1899). A gardens, Brisbane’ (1901) entwines the river and century later, for the visitor Dimitris Tsaloumas, its nearby gardens with thoughts of a past love. It the birds are an unknown, even for a Victorian: is clear, even in SG Mee’s humorous poem, that ‘strange birds / land speechless at my feet / and the river is inseparable from the fabric of the city’s look at me like children’ (2000). life. Thomas Shapcott says: One of the notable features of the Brisbane River You are surrounded. Loops and reaches, steep is its sinuosity. ‘The river winds, the river winds’, banks and the breeze that comes off water weave begins one of Mabel Forrest’s poems (1916). everywhere Samuel Wagan Watson describes it as a ‘brown snake’, a ‘tortuous river’. Its winding nature going on, a deeper sense of involvement with the makes a mockery of ‘north side’ and ‘south side’; river. For Laurie Duggan, who lived in Brisbane nevertheless, there is a strong sense of the river on the river at Teneriffe at the turn of the new as a dividing line. Crossings are a common topic. century, the meaning of the river becomes the very process of writing: is the occasion for a humorous statement of the Marks on paper, gradations on screen as ephemeral as the factory light oscillating between the two Brisbanes’ (1866). The timber upside down in the river: it’s there every night cut by the wake of ferries, resuming its shape, though bridge was replaced by the iron Victoria Bridge in this itself is illusion… 1893. JH Bardwell has a vision, in 1924, of a river … ‘by stately bridges spanned’ but the next bridge, – even in print meaning shifts, the Grey Street Bridge (later William Jolly Bridge) we are caught by different angles every time. was not completed until 1932 and the Story (‘Louvres’, p. 49) Bridge not till 1940. Meanwhile, there were, and In ‘The river at Brisbane’ Thomas Shapcott’s memories of childhood are involved in the a ferry, The Pearl, sank, the tragedy recorded in moods and the twists and turns of the river. an anonymous poem in The Worker. Lawrence Bourke’s lovely poem, ‘Night crossing the Brisbane River’ (1985) describes a ferry crossing statement. In Samuel Wagan Watson’s collection under the moon: smoke encrypted whispers, the river is seamlessly The ferryman indolently uncoils his arm part of the story or stories, the experiences, the slipping the hawser from its cleat he leans feelings. Luke Beesley’s poems on the pavement out and pushes the jetty gently into the dark. of the Eleanor Schonell bridge build on stories collected as oral history in association with its relationship in the ferry crossings: construction. The more we can see such stories as connected with place, the more aware we are you and I are crossing ferries to seek, to know, to feel, to praise of belonging and of responsibility. ‘The river is a strong brown god,’ wrote TS Eliot in Four quartets, remembering the Mississippi of his
FRYER FOLIOS | JUNE 2011 5 homeland. But the Brisbane, impressive river that REFERENCES: it is, does not appear in this light. Mabel Forrest is 1. This essay would not have Evans, George Essex, ‘Adrift: Tsaloumas, Dimitris, ‘Note with been possible without a Brisbane River reverie’, interlude from the banks of the Queenslander, 19 December, Brisbane in September’ in New a common interest of artists of her generation, to the help of AustLit–the Australian Literature 1891, Christmas Supplement, and selected poems, University Resource. It would have p. 1. of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Wagan Watson’s river ‘snaking through the taken half a lifetime to Forrest, Mabel, ‘Brisbane Qld, 2000. land’s dreaming cortex’ is closer to the mythic River’, Lone Hand, vol. 19, Watson, Samuel Wagan, this resource. Most of the no. 113 (n.s. vol. 6, no. 4), 1 ‘Dreaming river triptych’ and mark than Forrest’s Olympians. There are, too, material I discuss was September 1916, p. 195. ‘On the transom of ghosts’, located in the Fryer Library. across the poems, few in the way of conventional ‘Brisbane River’, Bulletin, vol. Poetry on the pavement, Thanks to librarians there 28, no. 2479, 18 August, 1927, Eleanor Schonell Bridge, metaphorical invocations, associating rivers, for and at the John Oxley p. 6. Brisbane City Council, viewed example, with the process of life. George Essex Library. I acknowledge 20 May, 2011, 6 UQ LIBRARY