So I have decided to repost some. They never pale… And I have added some bits as well. Enjoy,
Australian poem 2008 series #15 — John Shaw Neilson “The Orange Tree”
30 MAY
Perhaps recent events have brought this poem to mind…
John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942) is one of the most delightful figures in Australian poetry.
The Orange Tree
The young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
– A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.
– Is it, I said, of east or west?
The heartbeat of a luminous boy
Who with his faltering flute confessed
Only the edges of his joy?
Was he, I said, borne to the blue
In a mad escapade of Spring
Ere he could make a fond adieu
To his love in the blossoming?
– Listen! the young girl said. There calls
No voice, no music beats on me;
But it is almost sound: it falls
This evening on the Orange Tree.
– Does he, I said, so fear the Spring
Ere the white sap too far can climb?
See in the full gold evening
All happenings of the olden time?
Is he so goaded by the green?
Does the compulsion of the dew
Make him unknowable but keen
Asking with beauty of the blue?
– Listen! the young girl said. For all
Your hapless talk you fail to see
There is a light, a step, a call
This evening on the Orange Tree.
– Is it, I said, a waste of love
Imperishably old in pain,
Moving as an affrighted dove
Under the sunlight or the rain?
Is it a fluttering heart that gave
Too willingly and was reviled?
Is it the stammering at a grave,
The last word of a little child?
– Silence! the young girl said. Oh, why,
Why will you talk to weary me?
Plague me no longer now, for I
Am listening like the Orange Tree.
Another poem — set to music
Australian poem 2008 series #14 — Rosemary Dobson (1920 – 2012 )
16 MAY
I note Rosemary Dobson’s work is set from 2009 in the HSC, so more may appear later on at English/ESL. My immediate inspiration, however, was Poetry special: The Continuance of Poetry by Rosemary Dobson on Radio National’s “The Book Show” this week.
Rosemary Dobson was born in Sydney in 1920—the daughter of English immigrants and the grandaughter of poet, critic, biographer and essayist Henry Austin Dobson. And she is the only one of five featured poets who is still living. Her first collection, In a Convex Mirror, was published in 1944, and all up, she’s written 13 collections of her own work and edited several anthologies. Her work has attracted many awards over the years, and in 2000 Rosemary was given an honorary Celebration by the National Library of Australia.
The work we’re focusing on today, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is both an elegy and a celebration. It’s a meditation on the nature of friendship and loss, which Rosemary Dobson wrote in memory of her friend and fellow poet David Campbell. This series of 12 poems were composed on the occasion of his death. They were written more as a private memorial than a public statement of grief. The series is in fact an intimate reflection on what happens when two minds meet and share together the richness of their mutual poetic heritage. And in this case that heritage has as much to do with Chinese literature as it does with Australian poetics.
An example of her work:
A Fine Thing
To be a scarecrow
To lean all day in a bright field
With a hat full
Of bird’s song
And a heart of gold straw;
With a sly wink for the farmer’s daughter,
When no one sees, and small excursions;
Returning after
To a guiltless pose of indolence.
A fine thing
to be a figurehead
with a noble brow
On a ship’s prow
And a look to the end of the world;
With the sad sounds of wind and water
And only a stir of air for thinking;
The timber cutting
The green waves, and the foam flashing.
To be a snowman
Lost all day in deep thought
With a head full
Of snowflakes
And no troubles at all,
With an old pipe and six buttons,
And sometimes children in woollen gaiters;
But mostly lonely,
A simple fellow, with no troubles at all.
Australian poem 2008 series #13 — Roland Robinson (1912-1992)
09 MAY
There is the following brief but fascinating account of this poet in an unexpected place — well, unexpected by me because I had not realised the connection:
Born in County Clare, Ireland, writer and poet Roland Robinson came to Australia in 1921. His formal education was brief and he worked in various jobs, mainly in the bush as a rouseabout, boundary-rider, railway fettler, fencer, dam-builder and gardener.
In the 1940s he took classes with Helene Kirsova and appeared in a number of productions by the Kirsova Ballet. He wrote about his dance experiences in the first part of his autobiography, The drift of things: an autobiography, 1914-1952, published in 1973. During the 1950s and 1960s Robinson was dance critic for The Sydney Morning Herald.
Robinson’s first published poetry appeared in Beyond the Grass-Tree Spears published in 1944. His love of the Australian landscape and everyday scenes were inspiration for his poetry and he was committed to the Jindyworobak Movement. He also wrote extensively about Aboriginal myths and legends.
— on the Australia Dancing site.
I first encountered Robinson’s poems in the 1960s through anthologies; Beyond the Grass-Tree Spears was one of the first “slim volumes” of Australian verse that I ever bought, attracted because there were some rather good poems in there about places I knew in the Royal National Park south of Sutherland. He did not figure in the small pantheon studied at Sydney University in the nascent Australian Literature course taught by Gerry Wilkes, but I liked his work nonetheless. The Jindyworobaks too were looked on as eccentrics at best, and there was something a bit too fervent about them at times, not to mention that most of them were fairly minor poets. Mind you, they had something worth saying; I suspect they will be seen as forward-looking in our current climate on Indigenous Australia.’
This example of Robinson’s work is the only one I could currently find on the net; later I may add another.
The Drovers
Over the plains of the whitening grass
and the stunted mulga the drovers pass,
and in the red dust cloud, each side
of the cattle, the native stockmen ride.
And day after day lays bare the same
endless plains as the way they came,
and ever the cloven ranges lie
at the end of the land and the opal sky.
With creak of pack and saddle leather,
and chink of chain and bit together,
with moan of the herd with hobble and bell
they come to the tanks at the tea-tree well.
And through corroding blood-red hills
by sanded rivers the Gulf-rain fills,
far, where the morning star has shone
and paled above, their tracks are gone.
On the Jindies, see the Wikipedia article linked in the biographical note above. The last few paragraphs raise some of the issues people have had with them:
Ivor Indyk has suggested that the Jindyworobaks were looking for a kind of pastoral poetry, harking back to an Arcadian idyll which was removed from the early pioneer period, back to the pre-colonisation era. He claims that “they overlooked the fact that Australian novelists have been there before them”, but that unlike the Greek original this Australian “Arcadia” is not full of dryads. fauns and happy shepherds but is “haunted and usually overwhelmed by the spectres of death and dispossession”, i.e the atrocities, betrayal and misunderstandings of white contact with the natives. He also says of Judith Wright that she is “oppressed by feelings of ‘arrogant guilt’. Guilt, as a burden of white history, is felt again in the division between the settlers and the land itself, despoiled by greed and incomprehension”, in spite of her trying to inaugurate a “white dreaming“, while the landscapes of Ingamells are:“aflame with energy, but they are also uninhabited, save for the ghostly remnants of Aboriginal tribes, and more frequently, the cockatoos and parakeets whose bright colours and raucous cries express both the power and the alien character of the land. There is little that is really social or cultural about this use of an Aboriginal perspective, and no real sense of history.”
It is thus arguable in certain cases whether the poetry is aiming at an indigenous consciousness in whites or possession of the land, which the indigenous Australians are seen as being in close contact with.
The great native influence on the Jindyworobaks was literature which had been taken down by white folklorists and anthropologists. Written, as opposed to transcribed, indigenous literature did not appear in print until the 1920s when David Unaipon, a Christian from Point McLeay mission, South Australia, published a large body of work. Unaipon was publishing into the 1950s, by which time the Jindyworobaks were in decline. Unaipon was the sole published indigenous Australian writer during their heyday, and indeed it was not until the 1960s that a second was published – Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker). This is because until the 50s and 60s, classroom education was mostly vocational, or directed towards Christian missionary work. Unaipon, despite coming from South Australia, is not mentioned in the works of the Jindyworobaks, so it is hard to say how much of an influence, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines was.
The Jindyworobaks have been accused of appropriating native culture, but such a criticism comes with an uncomfortable response – i.e.that if indigenous Australian write/paint in European-derived forms, such as the novel or Impressionism are they themselves appropriating? This criticism is based on the notion that people should only indulge in cultural forms developed by their own ethnic group, and that anything else, including cross-fertilisation, is appropriation. However, by exchanging one culture, for another, as A.D. Hope pointed out “the poet who tries to write like a second hand abo [sic] is no more likely to produce sincere work than the poet who writes like a second-hand Englishman” (Note, Hope uses the term “Abo”, which is usually pejorative.) *
Other criticisms of the Jindyworobaks have been on a different racist basis, i.e. of the supposed inferiority of indigenous culture, and thereby the Jindys. Such a mindset is less acceptable in the modern day, but was commonplace in mid-20th century Australia.
* I doubt that A D Hope was in any serious sense racist; but he certainly was dismissive of the naive nationalism he would have seen in the Jindies, and was a European-oriented anti-modernist classicist himself — and a very fine poet. He also famously dismissed the work of Patrick White, of course, as “verbal sludge.” The word “Abo” is of course no longer desirable, but until the current generation was very widely used. There is no doubt Hope is using the word dismissively in what he said, but weigh that against “second-hand Englishman”, also dismissive. He was saying, in the language of the mid 20th century, that the Jindies could not aspire to authentic Aboriginality, and that is an issue.
Neil's Commonplace Book 