The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry

by John Kinsella

  So we might assume the book was printed and published, and might we conjecture that it was done through Marfleet’s ‘booksellers’ (actually a general-goods store)? In itself, it’s thin evidence, though it would be strange to pay so consistently for advertising if there was nothing intended and ultimately nothing to show.

  And it gets stranger. Searching the newspapers of the period, there is no evidence of Walker consistently publishing poems in them — the usual method of dissemination of the time.

  But there is one poem in The Inquirer and Commercial News, 30 April 1856, the paper in which he promoted his book. It’s a poem with a twist — a threat poem, an investigative poem, a sleuthing poem. With it he places an ad offering a reward for the return of his supposedly stolen manuscript, and then includes a poem damning the culprit. But Walker, a ‘reconvicted man’, sadly took his own life not long after. We read: ‘He was a somewhat conspicuous character in consequence of his rage for verse making, which found vent in the advertising columns of this journal, and in a small volume entitled “Lyrical Poems”, published some six months since.’ And so all ‘trace’ of this first book of poetry vanishes.

  Being a colonial poet prior to the boom of ‘manly poetry’ (as A.G. Stephens, editor of the Bulletin, would call the outburst of goldfields versifying that began in the 1890s, starring poets such as ‘Crosscut’, ‘Bluebush’, and ‘Dryblower’) was no easy thing outside whimsical verse-making, either praising or mocking (complaining of) colonial and ‘regional’ life and administration. As Hay quotes Henry Ebenezer Clay writing in his introduction to Immortelles, The Goal of Life and Other Poems (which, according to Hays, was serialised in the Church of England Magazine in 1872, and then published in book form in Perth in 1890), ‘The pioneers of local literature in a small community should prepare to encounter special difficulties and a probable harvest of loss. Without assumption, they should have sufficient self-reliance to hold their ground against the saucy badinage of amused spectators and the practical indifference of friends.’ (p. 608)

  Just under thirty years after these poems of Clay’s were written, and less than a decade after Clay’s words of introduction to his volume, we read ‘Willy-Willy’, ‘The Boulder Bard’, in his ‘Ode to West Australia’, noting of Western Australia (pre Federation):

  Land of Forrests, fleas and flies,

  Blighted hopes and blighted eyes,

  Art thou hell in earth’s disguise,

  Westralia?

  The sense of Western Australia (massive as it is), being the ‘end of the earth’, and in this something perversely to be celebrated, was a dominant tone in verse written out of the colony.

  In the context of brutalities that settlers committed on the Indigenous peoples of the region, as I noted when discussing ‘goldfields poets’, most of the newspaper verse found in early colonial papers was overtly racist, often hate-filled. Moral defence as attack? But one did find a register of guilt even if it was rendered in the ‘noble savage’ sense with touches of ‘local colour’ (this is an American term, not an Australian one regarding context and period, but the irony serves the bereftness of the situation). The poet ‘Acaster’ in ‘O’er a Native’s Grave’ (1871) writes, contesting the given bigotries of the colonial press and community:

  Poor child of earth — The rising sun,

  That tips the hills with mellow ray,

  No more shal’t rouse thee from thy sleep,

  Or cheer thee on thy lonely way.

  No more with spear, and weapons rude,

  Shal’t thou roam thro’ the woodland dell,

  No more midst festive scenes shall sing

  The wildsome songs you loved so well.

  So considering a poem we have chosen by the early ‘settler’ poet of Western Australia, Elizabeth Deborah Brockman, ‘On Receiving From England a Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers’, written in the 1860s (journal-published in 1868), we might think of precisely where it came from. It may not be as overtly original as much other European poetry of the period, but it was extremely unusual to come out of the ‘bush’ of Western Australia at the time. Written at ‘Seabrook’, the property on which Brockman lived with her husband and children near the colony’s earliest inland town of York, it encapsulates the sense of loss and disconnection ‘settlers’ often felt in their ‘strange’ new place.

  Brockman migrated at age seven with her parents to the Swan River Colony from Edinburgh where she had been born in 1833. Living on a property known as ‘Glen Avon’ (which I often pass, travelling from ‘Jam Tree Gully’ to the town of Northam), by the Avon River, she led a bookish life and became one of the earliest and certainly most accomplished settler poets, publishing as ‘E.’ in the local church magazine. We might consider many colonial subtexts in her writing (there is only a small book of poems, published after her death in 1915): women’s rights in the colony, religious obsession and security, depression, and most importantly, I think, the fact that Brockman lived on land that had been stolen from the Noongar people, the traditional owners and custodians of country.

  These subtexts are obscured in the poems, but through reading letters, journal entries (by other parties), prose commentaries in the Church of England Magazine, and other snippets discovered in historical archives, one gets the typical picture of both a predictable exploitation of Indigenous people and religious patronising. Yet I (John) also argue there is something more than a sense of superiority and possibly guilt eating away at the edges of the sense of belonging and alienation in her poetry; that in those local flowers that have ‘no dear familiar names’, there is an acknowledgement that access is something that must be granted, that it can’t just be taken.

  The flowers from ‘home’, the Old Country, she receives in the mail, sent by ship and taking six months to reach her, are the dried residue of an old life, a life of her childhood, of a country that is no longer hers. They act as symbols of absence, triggers of memory, signatures of her own history (and that of her colonial family) and of those left behind in the Old Country. They are dead but look (fragilely) alive, they are almost living memorials, or maybe simulacra of themselves, and her ‘othered’ self. They are signs of what she might have been.

  But the poet is also an alien in this stolen land, and for all her effort to become one with the place she now lives in, she can’t entirely. She is isolated by distance and by unbelonging. She is permanently temporary, and when she loses family to death, or through their returning to England (or Scotland), the loss is doubled in spiritual and conceptual ways. The cost to her is immense, and of course to those who have been dispossessed. Though discovering this poem as a young person was an epiphany to me, especially having spent so much of my life in the region from which she wrote, it also represents the crisis of writing poetry as a non-Indigenous person in the place I know as ‘home’. Brockman says:

  I look around and see

  A thousand gayer tints; the wilderness

  Is bright with gorgeous rainbow colouring …

  This ‘wilderness’ is her angst and her security. In the alienation is her poetry, but also her desire for conformity. She is both recognising her non-belonging and trying to counter it. Those ‘gayer tints’ include wildflowers and trees, from donkey orchids to the blossom of York gums and wandoos, which I know so well.

  Many years ago I wrote as background to the life of Brockman:

  In the colony, poetry — much of it doggerel, though with the occasional gem — featured in the various newspapers that came with the ‘settlement’ of what is now known as Western Australia. Papers such as the Swan River Guardian (1836–1838), Inquirer (Perth, 1840–1901) Herald (Fremantle, 1867–1889), and Sun (Kalgoorlie, 1898–1929) were vehicles for the development of a State and regional literary consciousness.

  It’s this connection, in what is formulaic in her verse (the ‘dew’), and the oddness of its circumstances of production, that interests me still. In the last stanza of the poem, Brockman talks of the delicate dried flowers as being
‘frail memorials’, an echo of the markers of death of the colonists in their often-isolated graves, and the memory of markers in the Old Country. What is built is tenuous. More: the markers of memorialising are not visible to the casual observer, as they involve the deaths of those whose land is stolen, and the lost graves of those who died in ‘exploring’ and colonising. No word in this poem can be read merely within the conventions of English-language verse; every word, as ‘pat’ as it seems, comes with a contextual kick. Those who are in the Old Country are as the dead, as she is dead to them. The stolen land is haunted by misdeeds, and her loss of connection is a haunting, too. She doesn’t overtly say this, but all colonial poetry, especially that written in such profound social and cultural isolation, tends towards such complexity. The electric link is more Frankenstein than the polite shudder of a genteel religious lady. Her religion is a buffer and buffers can dissolve so easily. The last few lines of affirmation and well-wishing are reassurance, not a polite homily.

  This might not be one of the greatest poems in the language, and it does fit a template of similar poems written in the colonies by others with a longing for the absent family and the markers of the Old World, but it is different because of where it specifically comes from and when it was written in that place. Context is everything, sure, but it’s even more than everything here. It’s a counter to the rules she lived by, the patterns of behaviour she chose to observe and uphold. No glittering poet’s-fame for her: just a connection with her own alienation reconfigured into an expression of the loss she certainly felt but also helped create.

  In some ways, this is a tragic poem of chronic depression (or maybe ‘melancholy’), the crisis of the colonial subject and the subjectivity of being a ‘poetess’, and of searching for consolation where no consolation was or could be morally available. It is a poem, to my mind, of what we might call temporariness and schism in belonging. What is ‘lost’ is permanently lost. Old memorials are the false memorials over the killing fields of the colonised land.

  We as the editors of this anthology have a very flexible definition of what constitutes ‘belonging’. Our respect for Indigenous land rights and belonging is primary, but beyond that, all other Western Australians are migrants or refugees, or have a migrant or refugee heritage, and also many Indigenous Western Australians have some non-Indigenous heritage. A lot of poetry has been written by migrants and refugees that we can’t locate, but we wish to acknowledge the breadth of practice. Western Australia’s boundaries are arbitrary — they are recent impositions on a massive area that was home to many different peoples, whose languages overlapped and whose understanding of borders and boundaries were complex and ‘dictated’ by factors beyond the greed and expediency of the modern ‘sovereign’ state. As stated, it is not the purpose of this introduction to trace the history of colonial Western Australia — but in order to understand why poetry is such an important part of the region’s many identities, of its pre-invasion history, of its colonial and ‘post’-colonial history, one has to come to grips with the betrayal of, say, Noongar welcoming and willingness to share land and all it contained with ‘settlers’; the consequences of both ‘occasion-specific’ and systematic murder and dispossession of Indigenous peoples by colonial authorities and settlers; and the exchanges in newspapers both bigoted and ‘humanistic’ regarding this colonisation.

  Further, the pastoral and later mining histories of Western Australia are inextricably linked to the evolution of a tangential, disturbed pastoral poetry, found in writers such as Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett, and in the more long-term embracing of the wheatbelt in the work of a poet such as Glen Phillips. Phillips’s poetry may be seen as moving from a more straightforward ‘celebration’ of his wheatbelt past and connections, to a more critical ‘surveying’ of where he came from and what he most values engaging with. His poetry is quite paradoxical in this celebration mixed with temperance and caution, with an academic awareness of the wrongs meted out by colonialists/farmers, and yet working within his (largely) positive childhood experiences of growing up at Southern Cross and later teaching high school at Northam before moving to Perth for most of his adult life. Phillips also looks at the wheatbelt through his extensive travels and times in Italy and China, creating a triangulation of experience, which sometimes cross-fertilises, but also produces quite geographically separate bodies of work.

  The impact of distance — the isolation of Perth as a city, historically, from empire, and from the rest of Australia — is a vital part of understanding why Western Australian verse has particular tangents worth considering in themselves. Western Australia did not have convicts till very late (it became a penal colony in 1849), and then for nowhere near as long as other states (transportations ran from 1850 to 1868). But it did have convicts, and convict labour built much of the state’s early infrastructure, and also created distinct strands of its literature. John Boyle O’Reilly, the Fenian already mentioned, who would escape the state on the Catalpa, wrote important poems of place — his ‘The Dukite Snake’ is a classic poem of colonial guilt corrosion.

  The goldrush and its creation of a school of witty, often sarcastic, and too often racist poets; the drive in the 1890s towards Federation; Federation itself; the massive impact the (distant) First World War had on the relatively small population of Western Australia, through deaths that touched every country town as well as Perth and all points in between; the Great Depression; the Second World War and the post-war migrations; all changed the social, ethnographic, cultural and demographic make-up of Western Australia in generative and absolute ways, and its poetry must be read inside these ‘shared’/collective experiences.

  Poetry accompanied these shifts and changes, and the distant world had an impact on it in often unpredictable and complex ways. Western Australia is geographically and culturally close to South-East Asia and its Indian Ocean neighbours. For decades now, there’s been movement between Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia for many Western Australian poets, and increasingly regular movement between Chinese and Western Australian poets. Westerly magazine, that great facilitator of Western Australian literature in countrywide, regional, and international contexts, has published poets from these countries and encouraged exchange and dialogue.

  A poet such as Dennis Haskell has been pivotal in these interactions, as has John Mateer with his movements between South Africa and Australia; as was Ee Tiang Hong, who was part of Perth poetry but still very much connected to Malaysia and Singapore. Sunil Govinnage, a migrant from Sri Lanka, has written across cultural spaces. Shane McCauley has long been interested in Chinese and other Asian poetries and has, in recent work, enlivened his own practice through sharp and sometimes playful interactions with language and myth in this context. Andrew Lansdown noted in his launch speech for Shane McCauley’s recent collection of poetry, Trickster, that it ‘contains poems that explore oriental themes — mostly Japanese, with a smattering of Chinese and Korean … and myth-related poems, with Native American myths predominating, but including Greek, Hindu and Egyptian myths.’

  Randolph Stow was, along with Hewett and Davis, part of a poetry and poetics that through the 50s to the 90s totally changed the way that Western Australian poetry and literature in general were seen and interpreted by those from ‘outside’. Stow’s rural associations with pastoral country just outside Geraldton, his immediate family life in Geraldton itself, his attending school and university in Perth, his reaching to the rest of the world as a cultural and personal shift, were part of the psyche of the teaching of Western Australian literature. A brilliant poet and novelist, his poems of rural edges and points of contact and alienation with other parts of the world from the Trobriand Islands/Papua New Guinea to America and Europe, and especially his ‘ancestral’ home in Suffolk, make a body of work in which poetry and fiction might be seen as inseparable. Much has been written about Stow and his work, so this introduction will simply point the reader to the wide selection of his poems, including his pieces of i
conic and paradoxically iconoclastic poetry of alienation in the weirdly ‘familiar’ landscape, in The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems. There are many links to be made across poems in this anthology, but this might provide a focal point for the discomfort of colonial intrusive self-knowledge, denial, dispossession and alienation.

  Most of the poets collected here have English as a first language, but others don’t. And a vast body of work in Greek, Italian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Hungarian and many other languages is lost to the English-language-oriented anthologist. Even where we have had access to poetry in original languages, we have gone with English versions, though we would like to have included texts across many languages. The fine Sudanese-Australian poet, Afeif Ismail, who has had such a presence in Perth poetry, is represented here in a version by his collaborator, Vivienne Glance, who, in a sense, is also represented as the poet she herself is. In Contrary Rhetoric (FACP, 2008), I (John) wrote (of Western Australian literature in general):

  One of the main considerations in forming a regional oeuvre, or suggesting a canon, no matter how diverse and fluid, is what belongs and what doesn’t. [The novelist] Xavier Herbert’s (1901–1984) great works come from the far North, outside Western Australia, and yet his early Perth–Fremantle stories in some way define his voice. His writings from outside belong, as far as I’m concerned. A writer like John Mateer who comes from, and writes about, South Africa, has been resident in Western Australia for many years, and concerned himself with issues relative to place in this context. His voice moves in and through the local, but always takes language into a wider field of play. He also questions issues of belonging. Questions of what constitutes community are vital.