Australian Writers: Men’s Week, Gens 1-3, Jan 12 to 19, 2025
This was meant to be an overview of Gen 2, but I have written at length in the past about the Bulletin years – their vociferous and often misogynist hyper-nationalism – so I thought I would head off on this tangent instead.
What do I know about poetry? The answer of course is bugger all. And yet, my most popular post over the years since my daughter, Psyche, wrote it, is Poetry Slam, Lawson v Paterson, an analysis of the debate in verse by the two writers in the pages of the Bulletin in 1892-3 over who was better qualified to write about bush life.
The debate typifies a lot of early Australian ‘poetry’ – it rhymed, it was topical, it was easy to read, breaking up the dense columns of prose that made up the bulk of newspapers and magazines where the only pictorial content was a few sketches and cartoons.
Luckily, I have on hand a 55 page essay by Judith Wright, ‘Australian Poetry to 1920’, included in The Literature of Australia, Geoffrey Dutton ed. (1964). She begins: “The history of Australian poetry from the First Settlement in 1788 to the end of the first world war is largely a study in the adaptation of the European (and specifically English) poetic consciousness and tradition to entirely new, and apparently hostile, conditions.” And goes on to discuss the culture shock “induced by the complete topsy-turvydom of everything to which the European mind was accustomed.”
There were at least a couple of convict poets whose work, based on English and Irish ballads, was transmitted orally, but later made it into print; and at the other end of the social spectrum, WC Wentworth was runner up for the Chancellor’s gold medal at Cambridge in 1823 for the epic ‘Australasia’. “Like most of the early attempts at official or serious verse in Australia, it lay under the heavy hand of the current fashion in eighteenth-century versification, which easily betrayed bad craftsmen into pomposity.”
The first poet Wright admires is Charles Harpur (1813-1868), the son of convict parents, who seems to have been largely self-taught. He published in mostly radical newspapers from his twenties on. A search on Trove from 1833-1845, Harpur’s early years, brings up ‘Petrarchian Musings, The Hundred Sonnets of Love’ (Literary Register, Sydney, 11 Nov 1843) and a couple of funny editorial comments – “ORIGINAL POETRY. WE have received a very angry and insulting letter. from Mr Charles Harpur, as to some alterations we made in his poetical lines on Robert Emmitt” (Morning Chronicle, Sydney, 25 May 1844); and “CHARLES HARPUR. Sea-shore, August, 1844. We insert the following lines, more with the view of encouraging the poetic feeling of our correspondent, rather than for any intrinsic merit of their own …” (The Star and Working Man’s Guardian, Paramatta, 24 Aug 1844).
Wright says The Hundred Sonnets are “competent, pleasantly turned, and sometimes moving in the expression of his loneliness and frustration.” Harpur, she says, espoused a “radical libertarianism” which pervaded “not only the satires and polemical verses he wrote for newspapers, but the whole trend of his thought as a poet.” He followed Wordsworth and Milton “who became unfashionable long before the end of his life, when Tennyson and Swinburne were the acclaimed influences.”
Wright writes of Harpur’s success in capturing the very un-European Australian landscape.
… huge dry-mouldered gums
Stood ‘mid their living kin as banked throughout
With eating fire, expelling arrowy jets
Of blue-tipped, intermitting, gaseous flame.
from ‘Bushfire’ (1853)
Harpur passed the Australian poetry baton to Henry Kendall (1839-1882), probably our best known early poet but of whom Wright is not a fan. “His work lacks the backbone, the hard underlying structure, of that of the older poet, and his style, though he gradually outgrew his early loose and flowery manner, was in general lacking in strength and plainness.”
Kendall’s poetry contrasts an imagined coastal paradise with the “hell of the inland”. Wright says, “So far from being, as claimed, the first poet to deal descriptively with the Australian landscape, Kendall internalized it; his landscape poems are symbolic of his own yearnings and distresses.” His best work is in his third and last volume, Songs from the Mountains when the poet had “regained his serenity and began to live a normal life.”
By popular demand (see Comments below) I have updated my post to include :
Often I sit, looking back to a childhood
Mixt with the sights and the sounds of the wildwood,
Longing for power and the sweetness to fashion
Lyrics with beats like the heart-beats of passion –
Songs interwoven of lights and of laughters;
Borrowed from bell-birds in far forest rafters
from ‘Bell-birds‘
She writes at length on Kendall’s faults, his “versification is seldom good”. But, “[f]or various reasons, his poetry was becoming popular, and he achieved, for an Australian poet, a considerable reputation, which has lingered round his name and to some extent prevented a proper assessment of his achievement.”
Australia was heading for nationhood and, beginning “to feel the need of a poet”, “seized on Kendall to fit the bill, as well as Gordon.”
Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870) came out/was sent out by his family from England in 1853 and was variously a mounted trooper, a horsebreaker, and, briefly, a South Australian MP. His financial problems were too much for him and he suicided. Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, which came out almost simultaneously with his death, was a popular success, “for the first time making bush workers interesting in the eyes of the respectable.”
We led the hunt throughout, Ned, on the chestnut and the grey,
And the troopers were three hundred yards behind,
While we emptied our six-shooters on the bushrangers at bay,
In the creek with stunted box-tree for a blind.
from ‘The Sick Stockrider‘
Gordon’s popularity created a flood of imitators, ‘bush balladists’. “Without this influence, not only Australian writing but much else in Australian attitudes and opinion would scarcely have taken their present shape … the present-day revolt against ‘Australianism’ and ‘The Australian Legend’ is largely directed against the attitudes that stem from the wide acceptance of the values of the Bulletin school.”
That’s enough for one day. I’ll write part II of this post, starting with Barcroft Boake, when next I get a day off. (Maybe even tomorrow, Tues, though I know I have a few hours work in the morning.)
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Judith Wright, ‘Australian Poetry to 1920’, in Geoffrey Dutton, ed., The Literature of Australia, Pelican, Melbourne, 1964