Australian Elegy: Landscape and Identity
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Australian Elegy: Landscape and Identity by Janine Gibson BA (Hons) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of (Doctor of Philosophy) Deakin University December, 2016 Acknowledgments I am indebted to the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University (Geelong), especially to my principal supervisor Professor David McCooey whose enthusiasm, constructive criticism and encouragement has given me immeasurable support. I would like to gratefully acknowledge my associate supervisors Dr. Maria Takolander and Dr. Ann Vickery for their interest and invaluable input in the early stages of my thesis. The unfailing help of the Library staff in searching out texts, however obscure, as well as the support from Matt Freeman and his helpful staff in the IT Resources Department is very much appreciated. Sincere thanks to the Senior HDR Advisor Robyn Ficnerski for always being there when I needed support and reassurance; and to Ruth Leigh, Kate Hall, Jo Langdon, Janine Little, Murray Noonan and Liam Monagle for their help, kindness and for being so interested in my project. This thesis is possible due to my family, to my sons Luke and Ben for knowing that I could do this, and telling me often, and for Jane and Aleisha for caring so much. Finally, to my partner Jeff, the ‘thesis watcher’, who gave me support every day in more ways than I can count. Abstract With a long, illustrious history from the early Greek pastoral poetry of Theocritus, the elegy remains a prestigious, flexible Western poetic genre: a key space for negotiating individual, communal and national anxieties through memorialization of the dead. An analysis of Australian elegy from the 1820s until the present reveals that settler elegy is of particular importance in view of Australia’s former status as a British colony and as a post-colonial nation. Characterised by the presence of a symbolic association between landscape and the elegized poet, a substantial body of settler elegy is shown to be involved in legitimizing tenure of the land, establishing national agendas, and creating settler Australian identity. An important subset of Australian poetry, elegy lacks any full-length study, a considerable, oft-noted omission in the critical literature. A priority of the research has been to establish the parameters of the field, seeking out elegy throughout all periods of Australian literary history, and all forms of publication, from newspapers and magazines to single-author collections and anthologies. The primary sources, upon which this thesis is based, number over 1000 poems. The methodology for this study involves the critical analysis of a range of elegies using postcolonial and feminist theories. Other than a vein of contemporary anti- elegy, a postcolonial perspective identifies a substantial number of colonial and contemporary settler elegies that show a crucial association between elegy and landscape, making clear how discursive regimes of power were and still are often associated with neo-colonialism. This study examines the pervasiveness of discourses associated with land ownership and identity in elegy through the representation of the putative extinction of Aboriginal peoples in the proleptic elegy; the symbolic connection between burial, land ownership and identity in the bushman elegy; an association between poetic tradition and nationalism in the colonial tombeau; and in the spectral presence of the contemporary elegized poet on the landscape. Moreover, in its elision of the effects of colonization and its aftermath on Aboriginal peoples, the Australian settler colonial and contemporary elegy presents a landscape in which Aboriginal peoples, their histories and cultures are absent or misrepresented. Indigenous poetry published from the 1960s onwards, discussed in the final chapter of the thesis, responds to this absence in settler landscape elegy through claiming traditional lands, histories and cultures. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Colonial Dying-Race Elegy 38 Chapter Two: The Bushman Elegy: Claiming the Colonial Landscape 86 Chapter Three: The Colonial Tombeau and Nation 140 Chapter Four: The Contemporary Tombeau: Landscape and Identity 193 Chapter Five: Loss and Renewal in Aboriginal Elegy 252 Conclusion 312 Notes 322 Bibliography 330 Newspapers 355 Introduction The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the settler elegy is of importance in view of Australia’s former position as a British colony and as a post-colonial nation. It is proposed that the presence of a physical and symbolic association between landscape and the elegized poet in a considerable body of settler elegy is involved in legitimizing ownership of the land, establishing national agendas, and generating representations of settler Australian identity. In the larger historical perspective, the elegy has most often been a poem of meditation, usually on love or death, while in the more modern sense of the term the elegy is a short poem, often formal in tone and occasioned by the death of a person. The notion of elegy as providing a public/private space for poets to speak about experiences of absence and loss, both as a lament for the dead and as meditative verse, is central to the genre. Of relevance for this study, the western genre of elegy is a key means by which individuals, communities and nations remember and speak of their dead. Employing both a postcolonial and a feminist perspective, this thesis examines a number of ways that Australian settler poets have used the genre of elegy since the nineteenth century. The central focus of the thesis is a large group of Australian elegies written between 1820 and the present – termed in this study as ‘landscape elegy’. The legal doctrine of Terra Nullius is intricately bound with the landscape elegy in terms of representation of land ownership evoked within landscape elegy. The white, settler elegies discussed in the first four chapters of the thesis not only express concerns associated with Introduction legitimization of land tenure in a settler nation, but with an Australian national identity represented by poets as forged through an association between the elegized dead and the land. This identity with the land not only creates a sense of belonging for the settler, but also importantly underlies discourses concerning experiences on the land, that in turn support a claim to the land. An imperative of the thesis is to tease out an interaction between the genre of elegy and landscape in order to mark a partnership between death, burial and memorialization, and the Australian landscape as an imagined geographic space involved in the symbolic process of imperial land colonization and land tenure. Through a close analysis of Australian landscape elegy, this thesis describes the ways in which these two influential western forms – the genre of elegy, and ‘landscape’ as a discourse – combine to generate an influential political and discursive field that attempts to establish a symbolic ownership of the land through death and burial: one that is represented in the settler elegy as taking place in the bedrock of the landscape itself – the soil. That the settler landscape elegy is most often represented as enacted by the elegist at the grave, creates a particular white settler narrative that symbolically asserts a right to the land through life, death and burial within the Australian landscape. The elegy acts as a marker in a textual geography that underwrites landscape possession, as well as what Patricia Uppal describes in relation to the elegy of place – in the Canadian context – as a poem that ‘provides a necessary site for the apprehension of local, regional, or national inheritance’ (2009: 185). Uppal’s comment marks the importance of place in terms of not only inheritance, described above in terms of land tenure, but also in relation to nationalism which is particularly 2 Introduction apparent in the colonial settler elegy in nineteenth-century Australia. In A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani argues that ‘the political use of mourning in the service of the nation-state are everywhere to be seen’ (2009: 73). Ramazani states, too, that the modern nation uses public figures and heroes in ‘state-sanctioned elegies’, suggesting that ‘when poetic uses of language are made to serve public mourning, we have the imagined- community in mourning’ (73; 74). The ‘imagined-community’, that Ramazani suggests is served by public mourning, is integral to Benedict Anderson’s early postcolonial text Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). Anderson’s seminal text, and particularly his concept of ‘imagined communities’, is discussed in this thesis as relevant to nineteenth-century Australian settler nationalism. The lauding of the dead heroes that Anderson locates as an important part of nationalism, play a key role in the Australian context in relation to the way their role is said to contribute to the colony, and later the nation (10). Furthermore, the verse of the colonial poet is shown as a driving force in the project of nationalism in expressing the new nation, its beliefs, and national ethos. Thus, the focus of this study is landscape, identity, and nation, which will be revealed as key concerns of settler poets writing elegy in Australia. A postcolonial perspective of settler landscape elegies identifies this group of poems as omitting the presence of Aboriginal Australians on the landscape; as well as eliding the impact and repercussions of colonialism on Aboriginal