John Shaw Neilson, ‘Love’s Coming’ (1896)
When our children were little, we lived about a kilometre from the place where John Shaw Neilson (1872–1942) is buried, in Melbourne’s Footscray cemetery. As places of pilgrimage go, it is hardly Arlington. The cemetery is wedged between two main roads, one of which is the major arterial between the Port of Melbourne and all points west. Thousands of trucks grind their way past every day, loaded with containers full of imported goods. It’s just as well that the dead don’t speak plain words because you wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance of hearing what they were saying.
In the period after my mother died in 2011, I used sometimes to visit Neilson’s grave. Mum is buried nine hundred kilometres away and Neilson has always been a poet to whom I have turned in times of trouble. It’s strange how often a tough day at work will end with a few minutes in his company. This is because Neilson’s poetry can soften the hardest place. He is an alchemist who turns stone into air. His life was one of unremitting physical hardship; his poetry is as ethereal as a gentle breeze on a hot day. Where there is grief, he sows hope.
One time, I was standing in the cemetery and happened to look across to the other main road. It too is a montage of businesses that don’t make the tourist brochures, a place so loud with colour that it has become colourless. There are car yards, building suppliers and plumbing warehouses. There was also a funeral parlour two doors from a well-known brothel. It was not well known to me, I hasten to add. In between was a takeaway shop with tables out the front. I observed a gentleman emerge from the brothel, put on his tie as he stopped to talk to a couple of truckies who were eating burgers and chips at the tables outside the greasy spoon, then skip merrily into the funeral parlour. Of course, there is an ageless connection between sex and death but this scenario left me confused.
John Shaw Neilson wrote of experiences that were both more simple and subtle. He will never count for much in a world where both sex and death are matters of commerce.
There is little in Melbourne’s inner west to mark the time Neilson spent here in the declining years of his life, from 1928 to 1942, performing the light duties of which he was capable for the Country Roads Board. He was a stranger to the city and didn’t much like it, having lived mostly in the western parts of Victoria, but his health had been so devastated by years of back-breaking manual labour that some friends wanted to ease his burden and raised money to help him. He had been unemployed and was in desperate circumstances, as he had been for most of his life. But he didn’t write much verse in the city. The house he shared with his sister, Annie, in Gordon Street has been demolished to make way for a hospital car park. There is a bust of him in the Footscray Library, looking out over the hundreds of students from all over the world who study there, taking advantage of educational opportunities that eluded Neilson. He would have been delighted to see young people building new lives in this way; he himself had less than two years of formal schooling. Other than the bust, there isn’t much. Yet, whenever I walked past his grave, it appeared that someone had left flowers or a card or a note in an envelope. I am not the only person whom Neilson still touches.
Neilson was born in in 1872 in Penola, a small town in South Australia with an enormous place in the spiritual history of Australia. Mary MacKillop started a school there in a stable. Adam Lindsay Gordon (see Chapter 23) had been a policeman there and one of Neilson’s early publications, ‘Sheedy Was Dying’, is reminiscent of Gordon’s ‘The Sick Stockrider’. After Adam Lindsay Gordon took his own life, Marcus Clarke wrote a celebrated preface to his poetry. He said:
In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth.
There is a great deal about this that could apply to Neilson, a poet of both loneliness and desolation, one profoundly affected by the heritage of his landscape. The difference is that Neilson takes us to much quieter and more tender places than the galloping tempo of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Gordon was always on horseback. He sought escape in speed, bravado, daring, machismo. Neilson was usually on foot. He trudged from job to job, often distances of 120 kilometres, often short of water. His poetry celebrates ‘Nature learning how to write’.
It also struggles. Neilson’s mother, Margaret, was a God-fearing woman of whom God himself might have been afraid. Her religion was as hard as the baked earth; she was as controlling as the drought. Neilson was to deal with her legacy in many poems, not least the exquisite ‘The Gentle Water Bird’, dedicated to Mary Gilmore (see Chapter 20). It begins:
In the far days, when every day was long,
Fear was upon me and the fear was strong
Ere I had learned the recompense of song.
In the dim days I trembled for I knew
God was above me, always frowning through,
And God was terrible and thunder-blue.
His father, John, was rather different, but equally problematic. He was an infernal optimist, dragging young Jock, as Neilson was known, from one hopeless job to the next. John was impulsive, a dreadful planner and a dreamer; but he loved poetry and that was a lifeline for his son. The Australian Dictionary of Biography observes that John Shaw Neilson had more than two hundred different jobs in thirty years. When she finally met him, Mary Gilmore, no stranger to the lives of working men, was appalled: ‘When I saw his work-swollen hands, with the finger nails worn to the quick by the abrading stone, I felt a stone in my heart.’
All of this is part of the mystery of Neilson’s poetry, much of which is pure angel dust. Take these lines from ‘Love’s Coming’, written in 1896 and finally published in May 1911:
Quietly as rosebuds
Talk to thin air,
Love came so lightly
I knew not he was there.
Reading this poem in the Sydney Sun prompted Mary Gilmore to contact Neilson, and thus began a correspondence in which he found support. He replied to Gilmore: ‘I really did not think that anyone should be so affected by my verse…I daresay you can feel things that I cannot feel at all.’
The poem is beautiful for several reasons beyond initiating this important relationship. First of all, Jock’s father remarried in March 1911. Margaret had died of ‘typhoid and exhaustion’ at Christmas, 1897. For all her asperity, she had held the family together. His father’s remarriage at the age of sixty-seven was to a woman, Elizabeth, who was forty years his junior. His eldest son, Jock, was never to marry and one biographer speculates that part of the reason was a sense of responsibility to his father’s second family in the likely event that his father should die before they reached maturity. Certainly, Jock could never afford to marry. So the masterpiece he published at that time suggests an absence, a longing for love, even an oversight. It is one of the most tender love poems, written by someone who had missed out on romance. Love, in this case, is a ‘he’.
The poem is blind. Love is felt and heard, but not seen. It was published in a time when Neilson’s eyesight was going from bad to worse. The fine-blown Mallee dust of Victoria’s Western Districts had played havoc with his vision, problems that began before he turned twenty. They appear on the third page of his autobiography, finally published almost four decades after his death. By 1911, when his father got married, Neilson took advantage of being in Melbourne to consult oculists, as he called them. He went to three different doctors but none could do very much. The last one did give him glasses, which helped to some extent. ‘I could read a little by going out into the open, but writing always seemed to bother me.’
So John Shaw Neilson joined the company of Homer, Milton and Borges, writers whose vision was larger than sight.
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In 2016, we took a family holiday to Adelaide, driving across the wide open places in western Victoria through which Neilson had trudged. We stopped briefly at Dow Well, a scratch on the map west of Nhill, where there is a memorial to John Shaw Neilson. It remembers the ill-fated farm his family had in the area when his father took up a selection of land, and his younger siblings were able to get some education in a nearby one-room schoolhouse which also employed his sister as a sewing instructor. It was here, in the early 1890s, when Jock was scraping a living from the scornful landscape, that his first poems appeared in the local paper.
After many miles in the car I was glad to step outside, away from the metal shell that had insulated us from the drama of the landscape. It was winter. Within minutes, the wind was toying with me. The space unfolded in every direction. It was immense. I stared, thinking of the backbreaking labour that John Shaw Neilson and his father had needlessly invested in clearing the area of trees. The poet suffered an accident to his thumb that detracted from his already precarious income because he could no longer swing an axe. Part of me wanted to cheer for the trees that may have been saved. But that misunderstands the choices of those who have no choice. I said a few words of thanks that this rugged place had come to find rest in such gossamer poetry.
I turned back to the car, where my three children were glued to their screens. ‘How long till we get there?’ they asked. ‘Perhaps we are there,’ I replied.