This anthology of Western Australian poetry is historically oriented. Poets are arranged in chronological order according to birthdates or individual poems by original publication date, especially with the early ‘colonial poets’ and some Aboriginal singers, whose life dates are not possible to ascertain. Such a system is not perfect, since birthdates don’t give a sense of the history of an art, but this book’s purpose is to show the range of poetry across a period of time within a specific ‘area’, not only to be an historical document.
Given that poetry’s traditions and history in the region that we most frequently term ‘Western Australia’ go back well beyond the colonial marker of the Swan River Colony, and prior to that the outpost at Albany, and prior to that the contact made by Europeans with Indigenous peoples of the Western seaboard dating back to the sixteenth century, birth-dates seem a little arbitrary and purely a model of colonial convenience.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for contemporary anthologists to represent Aboriginal song-cycles, and the emphatic presence of the ‘poetic’ in the songs’ stories and the mimetic coordinates of oral memory. But still we have a sense of the intensity of song and poem-making in the songs and chants translated from traditional communities, and from elders who passed on the poetry of communities (and sometimes aspects of their own lives, especially individual songs, such as those collected in Taruru: Aboriginal Song Poetry from the Pilbara), in their contact with ‘European’ or ‘white society’, or indeed with any of the migrant communities that make up Western Australia. The centrality to country and belonging in these songs extends through to the present day and beyond, and might be viewed as outside any chronological markers ‘Western’ thought might introduce.
Indigenous songs and poetry are not the literal start to this book, because we have placed them where they have appeared in the process of collection and translation or, for Indigenous poets writing in English, according to their birthdates. Yet we have the eternal presence of Indigenous songs and poetry as a kind of ‘starting point’ to this anthology of Western Australia poetry, and then, in a different sense, we have the undeniable influence and presence of Indigenous country in the non-Indigenous poetry that comes with and follows ‘settlement’.
Having been made welcome by Noongar people, by various accounts, many ‘settlers’ exploited this goodwill, and applied the basic principles of greed and rights accorded by the distant British crown to their appropriation of land and removal of Noongar people. We believe that underneath the early poetry of Western Australia is this knowledge — either defensively or indifferently or in the sense of denial — of non-acknowledgement of prior presence and ‘ownership’. Whatever ‘rights’ might have been accorded Indigenous peoples by the Crown, the reality was that they had few or any rights under colonial administrations. The colonising urge is a self-serving one; cultural difference, and the inability to empathise pragmatically with the colonised people/s, meant that whatever individual attitudes or perceptions were regarding Indigenous tribes, Indigenous people were only going to lose and suffer in terms of that difference. There are many poems we could have included that show basic racism at work, that are rebarbative, reductive and plain old name-caller versifying dressed up as art, or as in-house humour, but we have chosen not to include them. If readers are interested in seeing the racist rhymes (‘serious’ and/or ‘humorous’) that colonial Western Australian poets could dish up, they may take a look at Western Australian Writing: An On-line Anthology (edited by John Kinsella for the UWA Library) that shows a wider historic range of material. Here, however, our raison d’être is to show the most interesting Western Australian poetry we can from over the last 180-odd years, as well as to include the odd poem here and there indicative of broader cultural conversations going on in Western Australian communities. There are quite a few masterpieces in this selection, but there are also poems chosen to illustrate their times within the constraints mentioned.
When it came to selecting a poet’s work, we didn’t necessarily go with their most recent, or even what they themselves might consider their best, but what we felt represented a period when they were becoming well known, or when their poetry had a decisive effect on what was being written by others. Every poem selected is a poem we respect, like or consider relevant to the historical overview of Western Australian poetry in some way. If we had selected every living poet’s most recent work (which is often the work poets feel most strongly about and close to), it would be a lopsided book — an anthology of recent poetry and little more. Many of the poets here are writing as well as they ever did, and maybe at their best, but their poems of the past are also relevant, important and often equally good and effective as anything they have written since.
So the selection process has been to look across time and select accordingly, rather than out of a poet’s life-work. However, in some cases, where a poet has had an ongoing influence and has produced a vast and diverse array of work, we have selected poems across the span of a writing life, sometimes numbering to four or even five poems. Jack Davis, Dorothy Hewett and Philip Salom are examples of such poets. In the case of the latter two, despite spending decades outside Western Australia, they remained and remain central to any notion of poetry from the West — in fact, we would argue that this notion led them to reinvent their presence on the east coast in interesting and vital ways.
Further to this, the idea that Western Australian poetry is ‘isolated’ and separate in any absolute sense is inaccurate and reductive (we will pick up on this ‘isolation’ later). Though clearly ‘British’ in its origins, the Swan River settlement soon had people from elsewhere as part of its literacy, and by the time of the goldrush of the late 1880s through to the 1920s, it had become a diverse ethnic mix, with some volatility and even conflict, to the point where the many poets publishing in goldfields newspapers used poetry as a jingoistic ‘dissing’ of cultures outside their own.
‘Afghan’ people, Chinese people, and others without access (linguistically or otherwise) to the print venues of the colony, who were perceived as a cultural threat or (more often) an economic rival on the goldfields, were racially abused, as were Indigenous Australians. There were better ‘goldfields poets’ (we might consider this, at least in part, a construct of the Bulletin magazine’s A.G. Stephens’s nationalist agenda, as much as a psychogeographical and demographic grouping of poets), and there were worse, in their abilities to hold a poem together beyond jingle-jangle rhyme schemes, but most were blighted by racism. But we should, nonetheless, never underestimate the power of poetry as a means of expression and aesthetic, cultural and artistic interest on the goldfields.
Eminent poets like ‘Dryblower’ Murphy often lifted their art to a social conversation that reflected a certain type of community attitude, using wit and irony to great effect, but more often the very local nature of the poems kept them trapped in local bigotries. But at their best, the goldfields poets spoke of fortune and loss, of ambition and death, of the human predicament beyond (locally) humorous anecdotes, Schadenfreude, and human foibles and folly. Doses of self-irony (even for the commonly ‘anonymous’ bard) helped!
The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century would seem to be a period of sparseness in Western Australian poetry, at least among the English language poetry that was appearing in print, though not of course among the Indigenous songs that cannot be collected here because they were not recorded and translated, but were an eternal part of life, of existence.
One poet not represented here because his works don’t ‘select’ as well as others is W.S. Siebenhaar. Beverley Smith notes, regarding his long poem ‘Dorothea’ (1911), that according to J.S. Battye, then librarian of the Public Library in Perth, ‘the appearance of Dorothea caused a considerable stir in the state’s literary circles. He [Battye] gives no details as to the exact cause of the “stir” but there was sharp difference of opinion among Perth critics as to the merit of the work. This seems to have arisen not so much over specific political content as its literary form.’ (Farmer, 223) Farmer touches on this literary debate but makes very little investigation of the poem itself. As is the case with almost all early Western Australian poetry, there are references, even tantalising references, to contexts and interrelations between poets and their work, but in reality little more. There’s space for serious consideration of poetry of this period in its context, looking at it within the circumstances of its writing and publication and the mores of its time, however problematic the poetry might seem today (politically or socially or ‘quality’-wise).
Despite being an historically based anthology, this book nonetheless concentrates on the post−Second World War period. From examples of early ‘colonial’ poetry, ‘goldfields poetry’, we take a journey through to the mid-twentieth-century pre-eminent poetries of Kenneth McKenzie, Dorothy Hewett, and Randolph Stow, and on to the intensity of Jack Davis and Fay Zwicky in the 1970s and 1980s, up to the present day with younger, internationalist poets such as J.P. Quinton, Caitlin Maling and Siobhan Hodge, who still have a strong sense of the local, but often also write about ‘elsewhere’.
Further, though many of the poets collected here wrote from Perth, the State of Western Australia is considered ‘regional’ in demographics, and many of the poets write from particular areas with particular regional inflections. This is clearly true of Indigenous poetry where identity and country are closely connected and interwoven; but also of non-Indigenous poets — Caroline Caddy writing out of the south-west, Elizabeth Deborah Brockman from the Avon Valley, the ‘goldfields poets’ during the goldrush but also those writing out of that region in more recent times (with often very different aesthetics and politics!), those writing from the mid-west, the Pilbara, and the Kimberley.
Identity is a complex, cross-hatched, three-dimensional portrait, and indigeneity often fuses with migrant heritage, altering the spatial dimensions of place. Jimmy Chi working out of Broome shows not only a vital interweaving of identities, but also of ways of seeing and transcribing cultural identity. Further, his mixture of song and poetry, music and words, is part of the broader activity we consider poetry. The brilliant songwriter and composer, David McComb of Perth band The Triffids, was such a poet-composer, and is also celebrated herein as one who crosses boundaries with ease. In the same way, we might look to the non-English language influences on so many English-language poets: behind these many English-language poems are often different languages, different artistic practices, and always different life experiences.
In this ‘painting’ of a very large place, there is no prescriptive formula for what constitutes a collective poetry or poetics. Many of us search for and identify many diverse ‘essential’ characteristics of place. Dennis Haskell has said, in private discussions with me (John), that humour is an essential part of the Western Australian poetic experience. If we find ourselves asking why, we will come up with many self-effacing and also self-ironising answers, but sometimes it amounts to an enjoyment of the absurd and/or a need to lift the spirits in the face of life’s various difficulties.
There have been few surveys of Western Australian poetry, but all of them have been consulted in compiling this work. We have drawn upon earlier anthologies from the early twentieth century such as the annual Jarrah Leaves, through to Bruce Bennett and William Grono’s Wide Domain: Western Australian Themes & Images (A&R, 1979) and Alec Choate and Barbara York Main’s Summerland: A Western Australian Sesquicentenary Anthology of Poetry and Prose (UWAP, 1979), and Brian Dibble, Don Grant and Glen Phillips’s Celebrations (UWAP, 1988), in terms of broader literary surveys connected to state or national celebrations of foundation (or invasion); or Western Australian Writing: An On-line Anthology through UWA, or the poetry-specific surveys of the contemporary from Fremantle Press (Quarry: A Selection of Contemporary Western Australian Poetry, edited by Fay Zwicky, 1981; Wordhord: Contemporary Western Australian Poetry, edited by Dennis Haskell and Hilary Fraser, 1989), and the ur-text of Western Australian poetry anthologising: William Grono’s Margins: A West Coast Selection 1829–1988 (FACP, 1988).
Large piles of individual collections have covered desks, shelves and floors in our house and workspaces for years. We have also considered newspaper, journal and newsletter publications, and poets in the light of their communal as well as personal contributions. In the end, needing to contain the brilliance of a poetry that geographically occupies almost a third of Australia, we decided that we would prioritise book publication, but that this would not be exclusive.
It is limiting and reductive to separate poetry from the environments in which it is read and heard. In the introduction to Taruru: Aboriginal Song Poetry from the Pilbara by C.G. von Brandenstein and A.P. Thomas (Rigby, 1973), Thomas discusses Dr Carl von Brandenstein recording songs of Indigenous stockmen by setting the environment: ‘an outcamp by a windmill, on the boundary of two sheep-runs’. We later read:
With his intimate knowledge of Jindjiparndi song, von Brandenstein listens fascinated, savouring the subtle variations, the fine sensibilities revealed in the poetry. To him, these songs are like the desert orchids, inconspicuous, faint-scented, but full of beauty for him who opens his heart and mind. Mirrga is singing a song from his youth, of his days of hunting, dancing and chasing the girls, when Cossack, now a ghost town, was the bustling port of Roebourne.
In the dark — make the torch shine!
Eyelids heavy.
In the dark — make the torch shine!
Oh Wandjuli!
Over five years, von Brandenstein sat at many campfires, joined many such nights of songs.
Issues of appropriation and inadvertent offence aside, there is a genuine effort here to relate the ‘poetry of a place’ that doesn’t require either linguist or anthologist, but is complete and entire in its own space. So what right do we have to bring it into a poetry anthology of a place that has compromised its very existence?
This is a key question of the present anthology and all such anthologies. We believe all the poetry gathered here is in the light of this fundamental relationship between place and circumstance. This is not to privilege one poet over another, one poem over another, but to show that poetry is its own necessity and is driven by knowledges no invader or state can suppress entirely. We admire and deeply value the Indigenous poetry, the songs, this land has nurtured and is nurtured by. And the performance aspect of these songs is at the very heart of all poetry, however and wherever it is made. How a poem is spoken or sung, performed or uttered, is part of a ‘reading’ process as much as following signs on a page.
We also considered the various ‘reading scenes’ that evolved in Perth during the 1960s to 1980s (and, of course, pre-dated this in public places, people’s homes, local halls, Mechanics Institutes etc.), which were often connected to or arose out of ‘music scenes’ (e.g. Lipservice and the Hayloft folk performances), and led to the anthologising of work that would otherwise have been lost to the occasion. Organisations such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers (WA), the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, Peter Cowan Writers Centre, Writing WA, Fremantle Arts Centre, Out of the Asylum Writers Group and many others, have fostered and anthologised writing, and most importantly, operated as points of dialogue and community.
Over the last couple of decades, slam poetry has altered the poetry landscape, reaching its peak maybe a decade ago. But the dynamism of performance has always been at the core of poetic identity, and whether it is ritualised performance, or spontaneous eruption in an environment designed for such moments, or culture-jamming in the face of the status quo, poetry is there, everywhere, in your face and whispering into your ear at once. Allan Boyd the Anti-poet is included here with a poem performed for his regular stint on ABC radio, a ‘to the people’ activist engagement that takes the street to people’s living rooms, cars, or wherever they can access radio. The on- and off- page performance activisms of anarchist poet Mar Bucknell are conveyed here through an extract from his performance-text piece (works well on the page!) The History of Glass, which we heard staged (music/sound and voice) in the Blue Room in the Perth cultural precinct some years ago. Bucknell has been a printer, an editor, an activist, an anarchist thinker, and a poet for many decades now, and his work is not as well known as it should be outside the poetry community because of his decision to remain low-fi and uncompromisingly community-based.
Publication happens in many ways. The various literary awards and competitions over the decades add another layer of discourse — from the Thomas Wardle Prize in the early 70s, to the Perth Poetry Prize, the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, the various university awards and others, and rich seams of work that remain untapped and bizarrely, relatively unknown. We encountered our first Western Australian poets outside home, in school publications. Lee Knowles surfaced in educational publications, and therein established her name and reached into the psyches of many schoolchildren. She spoke locally, but also universally. Her restitutions of women in colonial and more immediate contexts, her exquisite weavings of the sea and the quotidian, have become reference points in outward–inward fluctuations of Western Australian poetry.
The conscious declaration of a female and feminist poetics during the 1970s and 1980s in Western Australia is strongly tied to the poetry of writers like Lee Knowles, Fay Zwicky, Wendy Jenkins, Morgan Yasbincek and many others, whether or not they would themselves overtly espouse those poetics. Women of diverse poetries, their work helped drive generational change in publication and reception. In some ways WEB, the women’s poetry reading that began in the early 90s, was the crystallisation of a lot of activism and effort that went into sidestepping patriarchal (and national) means of disseminating women’s poetry, and might be seen as a turning point, along with Wendy Jenkins’s poetry editing at Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and the communal activism of a bookshop like Terri-ann White’s Arcane Bookshop in Northbridge, a place of literary, feminist, LBGQTI+, and ideological conversation and strength.
In Western Australia one must search widely to understand the nature of poetry-publishing when there were few opportunities within the state. Book and journal publication interstate and abroad were the norm for many Western Australian poets until the 1970s, but with the advent of UWAP publishing the odd poetry volume (though nowadays they are publishing many), and also the establishment of Fremantle Arts Centre Press (now Fremantle Press) in the mid-1970s, in addition to the work of Westerly and other local journals, publishing became two-phased for poets: home and away.
The argument over who was the first book-published poet in Western Australia is hard to resolve, as a certain Charles Walker seems to have had a book printed and distributed briefly in Perth (though possibly printed in Britain, but this is unlikely) before he and the book were ‘lost’. But the first confirmed local publication was by Henry Ebenezer Clay in 1873. Concurrently, the Fenian convict and escapee from the colony, John Boyle O’Reilly, published his collection of poetry, Songs From the Southern Seas, in Boston, USA, where he was to become a prominent editor and writer. This remarkable book includes a number of his dynamic poems of Western Australia such as ‘The Dukite Snake’. The dedication page and preface of this work mention his escape and time in Western Australia.
In doing research for this anthology, I have come across some unusual material. John Hay’s 1981 essay ‘Literature and Society’ from A New History of Western Australia (UWAP, 1981) draws on Beverley Smith’s UWA thesis written in the early 60s on early Western Australian writing, and makes a very brief point of reference worth following up in the context of the earliest publications. It interests me in particular because it complicates the claim made elsewhere about Henry Ebenezer Clay’s Two and Two: A Story of the Australian Forest by H.E.C., with Minor Poems of Colonial Interest, being the first volume of poetry by a single author published in the colony, as I mentioned above.
Hay notes, ‘In February [?] 1856, the convict Charles Walker seems to have published a small volume entitled Lyrical Poems, the first book of verse to be published in Perth. No copies are extant.’ (p. 607) One might guess that the claim (not Hay’s claim but asserted in various places) for Clay’s being the first book of its type published in Perth is due to the ‘No copies … extant’ regarding Walker’s volume. There is no evidence outside newspaper advertisements that Walker’s book existed at all. Naturally, this has got me intrigued, especially as, through drawing on colonial and later sources, I have made the same claim for Clay’s book myself.
Though he is not part of this anthology in terms of a poem included, Walker is part of the picture of what underlies this anthology. Poets and convicts easily forgotten. What do we know of Walker? Almost nothing. In the Western Australian newspaper The Inquirer and Commercial News (1855–1901), Walker published almost weekly advertisements from 19 December 1855 through to late March 1856, relating to a work entitled Lyrical Poems. The advertisements up until that of 6 February 1856 are worded ‘ “Lyrical and Other Poems”, By Charles Walker. Persons requiring a copy will please to forward their wishes to the author, at Mr G Marfleet’s, Perth; which will meet with due attention.’ Then they change to this: ‘Just Published lyrical poems by Charles Walker. Copies can be had at the Stores of Mr G. Marfleet, Perth. price — Half-a-crown.’
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 iconic 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.
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-induced 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