We live in a multi-ethnic society that expresses itself on the surface in English, yet is really made up of numerous languages. Some years ago I heard an exciting reading at Tom Collins House by Vietnamese poets writing in Vietnamese. This is a poetry available in Perth, if those outside the particular communities are willing to listen.
This issue has long concerned me (John), though this is not meant as a disclaimer. It is a desire to qualify the importance of reading English-language Western Australian poetry with an awareness that it is an English informed by many other languages and with many cultural inflections. Mateer’s work is a fine example of an expansive approach to locality in which there is a constantly active Venn diagram of cultural overlaps and sharings, of complex and multifaceted social, political, and quotidian interactions that are seen and unseen, that often register in a poem as a marker of their existence, as a point about their relevance and importance.
Mateer’s poetry invites us to look again, to reconsider our own cultural certainties. It shows a scintillating flexibility in its interactions with different temporal and spatial configurations of encounter and sharing — from Western Australia back to South Africa and to Western Australia again, to Singapore and many other Asian countries and points of contact with the Indian Ocean, with Egypt or European countries and the world at large. But each point of encounter is deeply invested with the self and condition of the individual being played out through culturality. Cultural difference isn’t a backdrop for Mateer; it’s interactive being.
And, most relevantly, and most vitally, the spoken (and body-written) poetries of Indigenous peoples have been interrupted by colonisation. The reclaiming of language is an ongoing process, and a brilliant one, but poetry reclaims the space of the language it is written in, and the many Indigenous poets herein, from the renderings of early twentieth-century Pilbara-region songs, to the work of poets such as Jack Davis and Charmaine Papertalk-Green, decolonise the English they use, and reclaim stolen Indigenous space. Sally Morgan’s Sister Heart excerpted here reconfigures young-adult and verse-novel modes to encourage empathy for the Stolen Generations.
Western Australia was also profoundly affected by the psychology and actuality of the Vietnam War, and the fear of Communism wrestled with late 60s and early 70s libertarianism. A group of wonderful and individuated poets heavily influenced by the values of American counterculture not only from the 60s but the jazz movements of the 50s came into play, blending irreverence with their own selves being implicated in capitalist-consumer society. Andrew Burke is a standout. Notably, as with many ‘local’ poets, Burke has been a great facilitator of other poets’ work. Philip Salom founded the significant Disk readings in the 1980s; more recently, Jackson has been a positive force for change and an energy for creativity, and many others can claim the same. Perth poets, if not Western Australian poets, tend to gather at one time or another.
In the cultural slippages of Perth from the 60s to the present day, an internationalist poet such as the great Fay Zwicky brought myths of Europe and Judaism, of America and elsewhere into an analysis of the poet’s role in society and the obligations to integrity in the poetic self. Zwicky is one of the world’s finest poets; her sophistications of form and theme remind one of Akhmatova, Szymborska, Adrienne Rich and William Blake. With poise and control, she tracks the personal encounter with the weight of history and the obligation to declare a position. Her long poem ‘Kaddish’ might well be one of Australia’s greatest literary works. Elegy and reflection on identity, culture and ‘faith’, it transcends locale and yet is deeply imbued with ‘place’. As a teacher at the University of Western Australia, like her former colleague Dorothy Hewett, Zwicky strongly influenced a generation of poets and critics (though this is yet to be fully examined). Zwicky is a critic of great acuity, and her learning effortlessly imbues her poetry.
Dorothy Hewett’s body of work is like no other. The conversations between her dramatic theatre work and her poetry are unending. The two may be separated, but as with Jack Davis’s poetry and plays, they belong to the same breath and intention. They speak personally and mythically at once; they play the confessional off against the social, and realism and imagination are in constant struggle. Hewett’s is one of the great poetic oeuvres of the twentieth century and has been much written about, so we will say little here other than that every time we pass through Midland on the way back to the wheatbelt from the city, we quote from her poem ‘In Midland Where the Trains Go By’.
At any time, a quote from her work comes to our lips: she is omnipresent, and though she spent much of her adult life in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, she is always very much part of Western Australian poetry. And we are delighted to represent work by her husband and partner, Merv Lilley, a wonderful poet in his own right who crossed the Nullarbor with Dorothy and was part of this place as well. An anecdote from John’s family archive: John’s mother was taught by Hewett (and Zwicky) at university, and one day Hewett said to the class she was in, ‘That’s my husband out there …’ One student looked out and said, ‘I can only see a gardener’, to which a proud Dorothy replied, ‘My husband is the gardener.’ And we are equally proud that he was, because that’s where knowledge resides.
The Hewett-Lilley family are, for us, the embodiment of what poetry can be at its best. Kate Lilley, Dorothy’s and Merv’s daughter, writes a remarkable neo-metaphysical poetry of female identity reclamation and contestation that is witty, super smart, and incisive. Her cousin, Lucy Dougan, writes a poetry that reaches to the core of human joy and suffering, as well as a large range of other subjects; a poetry of great technical skill, close observation and subtlety, finding unexpected resonances in many aspects of daily life.
As public argument in Australia has been considering the question ‘Is Australia Moving West?’, this is a crucial time for Western Australian writing and a good time to reexamine its roots. The mining boom swelled the population of Western Australia, but as with all ‘rushes’, it brought some who would be temporary (a valid presence in itself) and some who would bond with place, or for economic or social reasons stay on regardless and thus inflect culturality.
The journey from the east (t’other siders, as the colonial Western Australian poets might say!) is a common one, and many of Western Australia’s finest poets come not only from overseas, but from ‘the east’. Dennis Haskell has been in Western Australia for over thirty years — he raised a family here with his late wife, Rhonda, and has not only been one of the major poets of his time but has deeply affected local poetry culture. He is Western Australian through and through, and even if he feels he has other identities as well, he self-identifies as a Western Australian. His poetry wonderfully engages with the ‘domestic’, the literary along with the matter-of-fact and, with striking compassion, he writes of the suffering (and loss) of another with resolute compassion and empathy. All of this is refracted through his life in Perth, but with the world at large moving in and out of poems, lines, and his imagery. The point is that to be of ‘this’ place does not preclude being part of other places. Zwicky shows us that.
Andrew Taylor, another eminent ‘Australian poet’, came from a coastal town in Victoria, was for many years in Adelaide, and then lived in Western Australia where he was the foundation professor of English at Edith Cowan University for decades. He is husband to Beate Josephi, a poet from Germany who writes in German and English, working for many years in Adelaide, and then for decades in Perth. She and her poetry are internationalist.
The intense relationship between the local and the national and international is one of the defining characteristics of any colonised space, and it’s especially true in Western Australia. We could also add that many Western Australian poets move east for work, personal reasons, or to be heard in different contexts. The great poet Philip Salom, a model for so many who followed, was always a restless creative artist who took his work on a wild trajectory from the early rural and ‘locality’-inflected poems of The Silent
Piano into the conceptual interior psychological spaces of The Projectionist to the game-changing word and conceptual plays of Sky Poems, where internationalism in style and content exploded into a material/spiritual dialectic. Salom continued to experiment, stayed at the Rome studio provided by the Australia Council, and went down ever more experimental and innovative paths, to move to Melbourne, teach writing at Melbourne University, and begin his Pessoa-like play with different poetic voices, with twists on the twists. His restless exuberance links with something sharp, even bitter at times, which makes for a poetry unlike any other, anywhere. We would argue his trajectory from the dairy farm in Brunswick Junction, to agricultural college, to the universities of the world, is one fully in keeping with the Western Australian dynamic of bursting out of ‘isolation’ into the wider world while always looking back.
The power and influence of Indigenous poetry within communities, and in Western Australia as a whole, would be central, exploring broader national debates on issues of country, belonging, language, appropriation and identity. Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson), a vital and important if controversial poet, who has been inside and outside community, is a case to be considered. An understanding of collection and translation is crucial, and of the relationship to English-language poetics in the work of Jack Davis, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Alf Taylor, and many others. But in the context of belonging and exclusion of original ownership or custodianship of not only land but knowledges of land, it is essential to put their poetry at the core of what we understand as a regional work. Further, Kim Scott’s commission to write a poem of welcome and reconciliation for the new Perth football stadium is an outstanding example of the revivification of a ‘disrupted’ language as a tool for community, empathy, strength, illumination and healing.
Charmaine Papertalk-Green is constantly challenging the mining industry’s ongoing colonial aggressions, and illustrating the natural bridge that exists between art and poetry, and community. She is a ‘no-bullshit’ poet who speaks with her people and converses with other individuals and communities. Her poetry is deeply informed not only politically and culturally, but in terms of human weakness and strength. Her poems are often politically pointed and rest on some very human failing to allow a way out of the conditions we create for ourselves.
Jack Davis wrote a political poetry that was powerful and direct, but also richly figurative. And poetry for the suffering environment. His identification of colonial aggression and the link with mining companies is embodied in ‘Mining Company’s Hymn’, one of the most vital poems gathered here. The aggression is also traced in his poem ‘Rottnest’, for Aboriginal people who were murdered by or died while in the custody of colonial authorities on Rottnest Island. Davis’s ‘John Pat’ poems were an activist intervention sung out of rage and desperation at (continuing) deaths in custody, and the very specific loss of the young John Pat, who died in Roebourne lock-up after alleged police violence. They are among Australia’s finest poems, and tragically and sadly, are part of an ongoing sequence of poems written by Indigenous poets about ongoing abuse and death inflicted by the State. Robert Walker’s poem ‘Solitary Confinement’ preludes his own death — in Fremantle Prison at the age of twenty-five in 1984. His killing was attributed to ‘a misguided use of force’ by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. We ask readers to look up the details of this case and let them be known to others, and to spread word of this fine poet.
So much Western Australian poetry is about ‘place’, about differentiating ‘here’ from ‘there’, or about the quiddity and essence of the observed and experienced in the land. The coast, inland, the desert, the Kimberley, ‘down south’, the Great Western Woodlands, the Hamersley Range, the goldfields, the jarrah and karri forests, the Perth Hills, wetlands and swamplands, the rivers and ocean — these are markers of differentiating geographies but also ecologies and sociologies and complexities of history around those places. Where we come from, and who we are and why we are as we are, underpin poem after poem. In early colonial poetry the defining of ‘new place’ with a subtextual (at the least) guilt (that is sometimes angry refusal to accept) of overlay and occupation, is enacted in language of ‘home countries’ (and counties!), of Europe in Australia. This is unsurprising. However, ironically, one could argue that because Western Australia was so far from the cultural discussion of belonging and exile that went on in Sydney and later Melbourne, the struggles were less trope-like and more internalised in the actual dynamics of colonial activities.
The convict-‘bushranger’, Moondyne Joe, the great escaper, became hugely significant because he cocked a snook at the crown, the government, the law, but also because he occupied that liminal space between the already liminal bush and town, where bush could never reach other ‘civilisations’ in the distant east. Western Australian poetry was written with a doubly inflected sense of distance. And when Elizabeth Deborah Brockman writes about that electric spark of significance in receiving a pressed British wildflower in her new ‘home’, it is with colonial distance regarding ‘home’ as well as colonial distance regarding the rest of colonisation. It’s an important difference to understand.
We feel this book’s reach is not just Western Australian but extends to all poetry readers and educationalists interested in how the poetry of a region mirrors poetry of the world; and indeed, how it doesn’t. The idea is not to present this as of local interest only, but of world interest. Be they city poems, religious poems, rural poems, environmental poems, cultural poems, war poems, peace poems, personal poems, public poems, they are part of the local, and part of the greater world. The active poets of today’s Western Australia cross a vast range of ages and attitudes and interests, and reach into spaces in a way that is unique because they come out of a unique and internationally unusual place. A big place that is small as well. Poets such as Shane McCauley (especially with the strong influence of Asian poetry and motifs), Lucy Dougan and Marcella Polain change the way we think about where we are and who we might be, as do radical textually liberating poets such as Gabrielle Everall and Scott-Patrick Mitchell, who both question the very nature of how we label and identify, and the deep problems in doing so.
Both Everall and Mitchell have been influential in challenging gender and sexual-identity stereotypes that have underpinned so much of our poetry, whether declared or not. Everall’s poem-book, Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys, shifts certainties in deeply literary and confronting ways, and pre-dated current discourse on how we identify (or don’t) as gendered or non-gendered people, and how self-generating love and passion are. Mitchell is an avant-garde experimentalist who has challenged the declarations of certainty in the construct of a ‘mainstream’, not only through his remarkable poetry but through his literary commentaries in the gay press. The act of ‘dressing up’ and ‘performing’ for an audience is what the writer does in some form or another, and Mitchell plays so many variations on this theme that he has created a unique polyvalent ‘self’ speaking out of his poetry with wit, social insight, deadly satire, and passionate celebration of love and the body.
Though environmental activism and ecologically motivated poetry are the essence of what we believe and do (especially in John’s case), we see few overtly ecological poetry books per se in Western Australia, outside some recent works of that kind. Books by Annamaria Weldon and Nandi Chinna have engaged with place in profoundly ecological ways, as has work by J.P. Quinton, who has a background in landscape architecture, and there are a few others, but overt ecological activism has not been a big focus of the state’s poetry. Having said this, the relationship between nature and the human has featured strongly, particularly in the work of Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Philip Salom, Andrew Taylor, Alec Choate, Caroline Caddy, Alan Alexander and too many others to single out.
Of course many ecologically oriented poems or sequences have been written or are being written; one would expect so, given the horrific damage being done to the natural world and the fact of human-indu
ced climate change. But we hope more and more works will take environmental degradation into focus as a subject in itself (as vital as ‘love’, ‘death’, ‘relationships’, ‘place’ etc. — in fact, ecological poetry connects with all these identifications!), not in just the many single-poem instances of this, but in book-length works.
Further, as global warming takes its obvious toll, poets have — to our minds — an obligation to speak out about the destruction, or the pressure to destroy, areas so essential (to the entire biosphere) as the Great Western Woodlands and the remaining Beeliar Wetlands.
So let us declare ourselves, and not let others tell us who or what we are. Poetry speaks out and outwards. This is a community of poetry extending across time and place, yet with many things in common.
John Kinsella (with Tracy Ryan), September 2016
George Fletcher Moore (b.1798 d.1886)
Western Australia For Me
Air — ‘Ballinamona oro.’
From the old Western world, we have come to explore
The wilds of this Western Australian shore;
In search of a country, we’ve ventured to roam,
And now that we’ve found it, let’s make it our home.
And what though the colony’s new, Sirs,
And inhabitants yet may be few, Sirs,
We see them encreasing here too, Sirs,
So Western Australia for me.
With care and experience, I’m sure ’twill be found
Two crops in the year we may get from the ground;
There’s good wood and good water, good flesh and good fish,
Good soil and good clime, and what more could you wish.
Then let every one earnestly strive, Sirs,
Do his best, be alert and alive, Sirs,
We’ll soon see our colony thrive, Sirs,
So Western Australia for me.
The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry Page 4
