If Francis Webb (1925–73) is not Australia’s greatest poet, he is certainly one of Australia’s great poets, featured in virtually every anthology since ‘Idyll’ and ‘Images in Winter’ appeared in Kenneth Slessor’s Australian Poetry 1945. Successive generations of Australian poets have acknowledged Webb’s significance or influence, Judith Wright, David Campbell, Rosemary Dobson, Vincent Buckley, A.D. Hope, Gwen Harwood, Les Murray, Bruce Beaver, Robert Adamson, Kevin Hart, Phillip Salom and Dorothy Porter among them. Astonishing, then, that such a poet should have ever been out of print, and, worse still, improperly rendered in the first place.
Angus and Robertson’s 1969 Collected Poems, expanded in the 1977 paperback to include ‘Disaster Bay’ and ‘Lament for St Maria Goretti’, offered the widest range prior to this edition, but as Webb’s sister and brother-in-law, Leonie and Peter Meere, have exhaustively detailed in Francis Webb Poet and Brother (2001), it contained textual and paragraphing mistakes, plus only a fraction of early and late works. Michael Griffith and James A. McGlade’s selection Caps and Bells: The Poetry of Francis Webb (1991) included most of these works and a valuable notes section, but as Patricia Excell points out in her 1993 review of Cap and Bells, Webb’s largely unheeded changes to the 1969 edition, held in correspondence at the New South Wales State Library, were not consulted and the old errors remained.
The aim of this edition is to restore the Webb corpus to its correct sequential order, with each poem in its final form. Well-known works including ‘Morgan’s Country’, ‘The Canticle’, ‘Light’, ‘The Brain-washers’, ‘Around Costessey: Scherzo and Adagio of Bruckner’s Ninth’ and ‘Nessun Dorma’ are now as the author intended them in his 1968–69 correspondence with Angus & Robertson editor and former mentor Douglas Stewart (1913–85), who Webb at the time dubbed Australia’s greatest poet (17/11/68, Mitchell Library MSS 3269). Despite good intentions, Stewart ignored some of Webb’s changes and did not have access to the greater share of unpublished works. The two poems ‘collected’ for the 1977 edition were in fact selected from eleven works published in Poetry Australia 56: Francis Webb Commemorative Edition (1975).
With the advantages of hindsight and scholarship, a definitive Webb corpus can now be established through a series of long-overdue renovations. Three unfinished poems plus a suite of four completed works composed after the greater share of Leichhardt in Theatre are included from Francis Webb Poet and Brother. Webb’s own notes now introduce the longer sequences and his Author’s Notes are expanded from the Stewart correspondence. The exception to this is ‘Leichhardt in Theatre’ (so not to disrupt the theatre motif), but this is countered by information in ‘from Leichhardt Pantomime’ and an extensive entry in the Author’s Notes from Stewart’s anthology Voyager Poems (1960). ‘from Leichhardt Pantomime’ (1947) now appears before Webb’s debut book A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), not as the opening to ‘Leichhardt in Theatre’ as in Cap and Bells; for although it serves as a clear progenitor of the Leichhardt sequence, much as ‘At Twofold Bay’ prefigures A Drum for Ben Boyd, Webb himself cut it as a prelude and epilogue. A technical exception of sorts has been made for the latter portion of Webb’s first epic ‘Disaster Bay’ (1945–46), later revised for Leichhardt in Theatre. Strictly speaking, this should be omitted in favour of the 1952 Leichhardt version, but to do so would disrupt the unity of this important early piece, while transplanting the later version would corrupt Leichhardt in Theatre. Thus, I have retained the last portion of ‘Disaster Bay’ in its original form, after which ‘from Disaster Bay’ serves as a tangible example of Webb’s editing and revising. I have chosen not to implement minor, possibly accidental, verbal changes to ‘Morgan’s Country’, ‘Bells of St Peter Mancroft’ and ‘St Therese and the Child’ in Webb’s Poets on Record recording released in 1975, leaving these, with their tiny authorial commentaries, for my Notes on the Poems section. Webb was a fastidious editor of his poetry, and on the handful of occasions I have intervened it has been in consultation with evidence-based scholarship and for reasons given in the Notes on the Poems. Titles and subtitles of poems in quotation marks, such as those in A Drum for Ben Boyd, aim to further assist the reader in keeping with the style of previous collected editions, although the first entry for Ben Boyd, ‘From Our Roving Reporter’, belongs to Webb.
Finally, I have left ‘aboriginal’ with a small ‘a’ for textual veracity, though Webb’s deep respect for Indigenous Australians informs his challenges to colonial delusions in ‘Ball’s Head Again’, ‘End of the Picnic’ and ‘Eyre All Alone’ and he would have no doubt endorsed such a change out of both this respect and his late penchant for capitalisation. Episodes of antiquated intolerance, such as that of the whaler in A Drum for Ben Boyd, expose a character’s objectionable nature rather than any view of the author, and the whaler chapter in the original 1948 edition was accompanied by an especially atavistic Norman Lindsay cartoon. Webb’s life-long empathy for the vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed is continually reaffirmed from ‘The Hulks at Noumea’ to ‘Ward Two’ and it is indistinguishable from his Catholicism. Time and again he warns of the perils of a disconnected humanity which indulges the catastrophic entitlement of the ‘Mask’ in ‘Birthday’, while advocating the humility, compassion and transcendence of ‘The Canticle’ in all their cosmic immediacy.
Francis Webb was an ambitious, energetic and structurally sound poet from a young age. His earliest surviving poem ‘The Hero of the Plain’ is dated here as 1940 when its appearance in a local children’s page Sunrise marked Webb’s emergence as a public poet; however, Leonie and Peter Meere estimate its earliest composition date as 1932, at age seven. This goes some way towards explaining Douglas Stewart’s reaction to A Drum for Ben Boyd sixteen years later:
Wherever Webb went his poetry accompanied him, from the Sydney Harbour and New South Wales coast of his youth to air-force training in Canada (1944), then Australia, Canada again, England, Italy, further work and travel throughout Southern Australia (1950–53), Canada, Calcutta and Ireland in brief, then England (notably Birmingham, Norwich, Norfolk, 1953–60), and back to Australia, mostly Sydney and Orange, but also Melbourne where his last, finished, poems were forged. In this sense Webb’s poetry is highly located, literal and realistic. Some of his more esoteric wordplay, occasionally denounced as modernist obscurantism, is more often the result of his absorptive practice, most glaringly in the nautical terms in ‘First Watch, Spencer’s Gulf’, the anatomical Latin of ‘Electric: Song of the Brain’ or the musical terms in ‘Rondo Burleske: Mahler’s Ninth’. This is not to suggest that modernist influences, particularly those of Eliot, Yeats, Slessor and Brennan, are not apparent, but rather that Webb’s influences do not supersede his locales. Equally, usually simultaneously, this is a poetry of the anti-heroic, religious, mythico-symbolic and allegorical that asks more than a single reading in exchange for its riches. To facilitate this, I have reserved all background information for the Author’s Notes and Notes on the Poems sections so new readers can simply turn to ‘The Hero of the Plain’ and begin, returning or delving where they feel called upon to do so – for these poems respond to and generate many calls, and Webb felt his works were self-explanatory.
Of course the labour – and pleasure – is hardly mine alone. This book owes its life to the generosity and custodianship of the Francis Webb’s family, particularly Mrs Claudia Snell and Mrs Leonie Meere, to whom Australian literature is deeply indebted. Patricia Excell has been doubly supportive in her 1986 Australian Literary Studies article which first uncovered Webb’s unheeded changes, and more recently in her painstaking line-by-line analysis which confirms this edition’s definitive status. My grateful thanks to Terriann White, Kate McLeod, Emma Smith, Anne Ryden and Melanie Ostell from UWA Publishing, Daniel Brown, David McCooey, Lyn McCredden, Frances Devlin-Glass, Bernadette Brennan, Peter Steele, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Petra White, Craig Powell, Michael Griffith, Philip Salom, Mal McKimmie, Desmonda Kearney, Sandie Rogitsch, Deakin and Macquarie Universities, Cambria Press (New York), Westerly, Blast, CBHS Lewisham and The New South Wales State Library for variously assisting my research and commentary. To my wife Amanda for her understanding and patience, thank you. This volume is dedicated to ‘Frank’ and to those who supported him, in the hope that they find solace in this extraordinary life’s work together at last in its deserving entirety.