Tasmanian poetry is perhaps the most subtle and allusive in its embodiment of ambivalence but it is still a distinctive characteristic of many poets’ work. There is Michael Dransfield’s lyrical evocation in 'Minstrel' of a Tasmania that is ‘not lonely’:
The road unravels as I go,
Walking into the sun, the anaemic
Sun that lights Van Diemen’s land.
This week I have sung for my supper in seven towns.
I sleep in haysheds and corners
Out of the wind, wrapped in a wagga rug.
In the mornings pools of mist fragment the country,
Bits of field are visible higher up on rides,
Treetops appear, the mist hangs about for hours.
A drink at a valley river coming down
Out of Mount Ossa; climb back to the road,
Start walking, a song to warm these lips
White-bitten with cold.
In the hedges live tiny birds
Who sing in bright colours you would not hear
In your fast vehicles. They sing for minstrels
And the sheep. […]
As against James McAuley’s ‘St John’s Park’ at the other end of the Tasmanian day:
The afternoon wears out in a gold daze.
On ragged wings, uttering its carking cry
A raven scavenges; a flock of gulls
Flies from the tip. The last teams leave the park.
The old have crept inside to meet the dark.
Loss is what nothing alters or annuls.
James McAuley (1917-1976) was one of the most influential figures in Tasmanian literary life in the second half of the twentieth century. He went to the University of Tasmania as a Reader in Poetry in 1960, already an established figure in Australian poetry, founding editor in 1956 of the Congress for Cultural Freedom-associated Quadrant and one half of the globally notorious ‘Ern Malley’ hoax duo from 1944 (see Mead, ‘Poetry and the Police’). Before his move to Tasmania he was an activist in the Catholic Social Studies Movement and in the foundation of the Democratic Labor Party. But as Peter Pierce writes in his brief memoir, ‘Writers’ Careers – and James McAuley’ he was a benign and inspiring figure, as Professor of English, for a group of cross-generational writers who emerged in Tasmania in the late 60s/early 70s: Amanda Howard (Lohrey), Peter Conrad, Gwen Harwood, Margaret Scott, Vivian Smith, Peter Pierce himself, although the version of McAuley in Lohrey’s novel, The Reading Group, the ‘Aging Poet of the Right’ is a tyrannical figure who understands how to use culture for political ends. McAuley wrote his still-born, long voyager poem Captain Quiros in Tasmania (published 1964) – ‘his dirty big epic’ Gwen Harwood called it (Idle Talk 163) – and in 1975 he published A Map of Australian Verseand a book of critical essays, The Grammar of the Real. This scholarly and critical work is under-recognised for its interest in the relations of Australian writing to canonical English traditions. His redress of an earlier anti-Modernist stance in his late translations of Trakl is also of significance in Australian poetics for the psychic drama of the poems’ context and given that Tasmanian poetry has been generally conservative and inward-looking.
The poetry and correspondence of Gwen Harwood, still Tasmania’s highest profile poet, have received major critical, biographical and editorial attention (see Alison Hoddinott, Gwen Harwood : The Real and the Imagined World, 1991; Jennifer Strauss, Boundary Conditions : The Poetry of Gwen Harwood, 1996; Stephanie Trigg, Gwen Harwood, 1994; Gregory Kratzmann, ed. Gwen Harwood : Collected Poems 1943-1995, 2001, Gregory Kratzmann, ed. A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943-1995 , 2001 where Kratzmann argues that Harwood should be considered Australia’s greatest letter writer). Kratzmann and Alison Hoddinot edited Harwood’s Collected Poems for UQP in 2003.
Harwood is frequently read as a poet of complex and defiant female experience, perhaps fuelled by habitual press references to her as a ‘Tasmanian housewife,’ but she is a poet who also emerges out of a kind of Fernando Pessoa-like heteronymic imagination. Harwood’s early poetry writing and publication is dispersed across at least three more than merely pseudonymous signatures, as well as her own: she published poems under her own name as well as under the noms-de-plum of imagined poets ‘Walter Lehmann’, ‘Francis Geyer’ and ‘Miriam Stone.’ There is an element of Malleyesque hoax mixed in here, directed at male literary editors in particular, as with the notorious Bulletin ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ acrostic sonnets hoax of 5 August, 1961 – ‘I should have thought the acrostics a guarantee against the idea that I thought the poems had any intrinsic worth; my only motive was to show up the incompetence of anyone who published them,’ in this case Donald Horne (Idle Talk 52). But more significantly this dispersed and heteronymic poetic practice seems to be a way of negotiating, while sometimes ridiculing, male-dominated and masculinist academic and intellectual culture which she had a deep interest in, often from the perspective of European cultural and intellectual traditions. It’s no coincidence for example, that her heteronymic poets have European names – she refers to Miriam Stone as Miriam Stein, as if she had Anglicised her name. Harwood’s attitude to Tasmania is characteristically ambivalent, often complaining in letters about how she hates Tasmania, ‘this ugly charm flung in seas of slate’ – ‘Don’t let them bury my bones here’ (Idle Talk 57, 139) yet often responding deeply to its natural beauties.
Margaret Scott’s Collected Poems were published in 2000 with a ‘Foreword’ by Philip Mead, which draws attention to the way in which her poems register the shock of emigration from the northern hemisphere, and the role of memory in her poetry. George Mackay Brown’s assertion, about Orcadian poetry, seems also to apply to Scott’s island perspectives, haunted as they are by time. Scott also feels powerfully the ambivalence of Tasmania, for her ‘a place of weird contrasts and fierce polarities.’ Her ‘Walking to Cape Raoul,’ for example, from her 1988 collection The Black Swans is a powerful instance of the Gothic theme in Tasmanian landscape writing, in sharp contrast to poems like James McAuley’s ‘Spider on the Snow’ or Vivian Smith’s ‘watercolour country’ (from ‘Tasmania,’ Tide Country 1982):
Then the track falters in reeds and pocked mud,
And the forest steps close.
Darkness peeps through the legs
Of its towering guard as we flounder and point.
There’s a faded plastic pennant nailed to a tree:
‘To Cape Raoul.’ It has the malicious look
of a bad joke, pointing away from the cleared land
and familiar beasts.
In their landmark anthology, Effects of Light : The Poetry of Tasmania (1985) Vivian Smith and Margaret Scott consciously defined the phylogenetics of the island’s poetry for the first time. If islands are worlds, they are ambivalent worlds because they’re also home to endemic species. Smith and Scott identified what they called a ‘quintessential’ quality to Tasmania, noting also its ambivalence at the same time:
Movements and events which in Australia at large have been broad, diffuse or partial have become in Tasmania extreme, concentrated or bizarre. The impact of white invaders upon the indigenous people has been more devastating here than in other states. The southernmost peninsula of this southernmost state became not simply a convict settlement but the gaol of an empire. The feuding over wilderness areas, has taken on an extra edge in the clear light of this place of paradox and contrast which Maxwell Miller [?-1867] celebrated as ‘the blooming Eden of the Southern Sea’ and Hal Porter damned as ‘an ugly trinket hanging at the world’s discredited rump. (i-ii)
‘Similarly,’ they write, ‘Tasmanian poetry can be seen as a kind of simplified replica, a sharper more highly-coloured version, of mainland complexity’ (ii). This is the identical point to Peter Conrad’s: ‘here was Australia in little: a society gobbled up by an allocation of earth too large for it, clinging in trepidation to the shore’ (Down Home 34). By contrast, in a poem like Les Murray’s ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’ (from The People's Otherworld, 1983), included by Smith and Scott in their anthology, Tasmania seems rather to have provided the occasion and setting for island complexity of linguistic representation:
Flashy wrists out of buttoned grass cuffs, feral whisky burning gravels,
Jazzy knuckles ajitter on soakages, peaty cupfulls, soft pots overflowing,
Setting out along the great curve, migrating mouse-quivering water,
Mountain-driven winter water, in the high tweed, stripping off its mountains
To run faster in its skin, it swallows the above, it feeds where it is fed on …
Effects of Light includes selections from earliest settler times, including convict and colonial poets, like Louisa Anne Meredith, Edward Kemp, Caroline W. Leakey, and James Hebblethwaite. Their selection of 20th-century poetry from Marie E. J. Pitt, A. D. Hope, Hal Porter, James McAuley, Gwen Harwood, Vivian Smith, Margaret Scott, Vicki Raymond, Andrew Sant, Stephen Edgar, Sarah Day and others is framed in terms of the ‘mark’ that Tasmania, as a place, has left on their writing: ‘the isolation of the place has compelled the island’s poets to turn inwards to explore their own identities and at the same time to search after an understanding of their place as human beings in nature and in time’ (iii). Nothing unusual here, in terms of artistic pursuit, rather it’s the intensity of aesthetic expression that is endemic to the island: ‘a peculiar concentration to the fashioning of images which can reconcile their own humanity with the paradoxical qualities of an enduring yet changeful landscape and a remote yet ever-present past’ (iii). The ‘tone’ of Tasmanian poetry, Smith and Scott argue, is customarily ‘muted, pensive, or intimate; its forms are often elegiac, meditative or lyrical, above all, its concern in many instances is with an outer world that is emblematic of an inner one, with the private colloquy and what Gwen Harwood has called “parables of fate”’ (iii). In other words Tasmanian poetry, like Gwen Harwood’s work, has no radical, anti-pastoral or formally innovative traditions, its ambivalences are all internal and intellectual.
After Effects of Light, poets like Gwen Harwood, Andrew Sant, Vicki Raymond, Sarah Day and Stephen Edgar (who has edited poetry for Island magazine and whose work has received multiple prizes), in particular, went on to establish national and international reputations as poets where their formal and thematic concerns no longer seem bounded by the critical matrix established in Smith and Scott’s anthology. And Smith and Scott’s framing of Tasmanian poetry tends to discount the work and themes of one of the most interesting figures in Australian poetry, Marie E. J. Pitt (1869-1948). Born near Bairnsdale, Pitt went to live in Queenstown with her miner husband in 1893, shortly after their marriage. A socialist and a feminist Pitt wrote about her twelve-year experience of living in West coast mining towns like Mount Read, Mount Bischoff and Mathinna. As Roslynn Haynes notes Pitt’s labor journalism and poetry ‘written from the perspective of a young wife and mother, daily fearing for the safety of her husband […] evoke a Gothic landscape, remote, harsh and dramatic but full of haunting power and energy’ (142). There are deep ambivalences everywhere in Pitt’s poetry, about land clearance and mineral extraction. ‘West Coast Silhouette’ juxtaposes nature in the form of the sea and a songbird with land-clearing and mining:
Once more I stand –
Stand and look west from an open door,
With the world beneath me stretching away
Far and far as the eye can see
To Heemskirk out on the dim sea marge:
And hear, now muffled, now rising clear,
The jangling note of a single bell
And the beat of hoofs, on the corded track,
Of the pack-team toiling up from “the Lead”;
Yea, hear again
Through the hollow hush of the afternoon
The brown thrush fluting her madrigal,
The axe-strokes ringing o’er ridge and spur,
And the clang of “steel”
At the change of shifts on the “number four”. (Burke 110-11)
Pitt’s poetry can read alongside such contemporary capturing of workplaces and working people’s voices as Pete Hay and Tony Thorne’s Last Days of the Mill(2012) about the closing down of ‘The Pulp’ (Associated Pulp & Paper Mills Limited). Another writer whose work doesn’t easily fit Smith and Scott’s frame is Tim Thorne, a poet who has engaged with broader social and political issues since his Generation of ’68 days. His A Letter to Egon Kisch (2007 – addressed to the Jewish Communist writer who made a dramatic visit to Australia in 1934) is a neo-Byronic swipe at contemporary Australian society and politics:
Dear Egon, since you leapt aboard our land
A life’s time allocation has slipped by
And every grain of all that trickling sand
Has held a world, as most of us well knew
From Billy Blake, who also showed us why
The lamb is purer than the jackeroo.
(As well he told of tygers, I believe,
but ours chose your arrival time to leave.
Since Smith and Scott’s anthology there have been other collections of Tasmanian poetry, like Helen Gee’s River of Verse : A Tasmanian Journey (2004), a collection with a conservationist focus, the web-based showcase of Tasmanian poets ‘The Write Stuff,’ and C.A. Cranston’s anthology of Tasmanian writing Along These Lines : From Trowenna to Tasmania : At Least Two Centuries of Peripatetic Perspectives in Poetry and Prose (Launceston: Cornford, 2000).
Read on to next section: Re-purposing the Archive.
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