Cirrus@Austlit

'The first period begins with Bernard O'Dowd's 'Australia'. Written in 1903, it's a portentous myth-infested sonnet pondering the future of the country. The First World War dominates the period and is reflected in the poems of Leon Gellert, Vance Palmer, and Frederick Manning. Populist verse is represented by Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' (written when she was nineteen) and an excerpt from C.J Dennis's The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, first published in 1915 with enormous success (it was reprinted five times in three months.) This vernacular romance is an early attempt to capture the Australian slang of the city larrikin for an Australian audience. A notable curiosity is 'Night Ride' by Zora Cross, a woman whose sexual freedom scandalized the Sydney of the 1920's.'

(Source: PoeticA website, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s281149.htm)

'The second period is characterised politically by the increasing urbanisation of Australia, the Depression and the Second World War, and in a literary sense by The Jindyworobak Movement, Modernism, Surrealism, and the Ern Malley hoax. In 1934 Frank Wilmot (who wrote under the name Furnley Maurice) published Melbourne Odes, the first Australian collection to specifically focus on the modern city. The Jindyworobak Movement was founded in Adelaide in 1938 and was dedicated to producing a literature derived exclusively from what was indigenously Australian. Jindyworobaks in this selection include Flexmore Hudson, Rex Ingamells, Ian Mudie and Rowland Robinson. In contrast, the influence of European Modernism is obvious in Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells (1939). The forties produced a great deal of cultural and literary agitation; consider the anarchist maverick Harry Hooton's 'Psalm' (1941) with its anti-bush stance, or Max Harris's attempts at Surrealism in 'R.S.V.P, To Paul Eluard' (1942). The Ern Malley hoax was perpetrated on Max Harris in 1944 by the two anti-Modernists James Mcauley and Harold Stewart.'

(Source: PoeticA website, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s281149.htm)

'The third period takes in post war European migration, feminism, the Generation of 68, drug poetry and the Vietnam war. Judith Wright's 'At Cooloolah' (1955) articulates two themes that were to be her abiding passions - the environment and Aboriginal dispossession. During this period Indigenous Australians writing poetry in English began to be heard. An example here is Oodgeroo's spirited rendition of 'We Are Going' (1964). Michael Dransfield's 'That Which We Call a Rose' (1969) is an example of his Romanticism, his rejection of materialist Australian society and his "escape" into heroin addiction. Bruce Dawe's 'Homecoming' (1968) protested against the Vietnam war.'

(Source: PoeticA website, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s281149.htm)

'The fourth period (1976 -2001) begins with 'Sound Poem' (circa 1977) by Jas H Duke. It was an era in which the forms of poetry and the number of collections published proliferated. Some of the major types were concrete poetry, performance poetry, the verse novel, and language poetry. Feminism, post modernism and environmentalism were important influences. John Forbes's deflation of literary seriousness in 'Afternoon Papers' (1988), is a poem that parodies Les Murray's 'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow' (1969) included in period three. Coral Hull has stated "I want to tell it like it is, then have something done about it." Her poem 'Koko the Monkey' (1994) shows her environmental and animal liberationist concerns. During this period the verse novel had an upsurge, the most popular being Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask (1994) . During this time we also began to hear the voices of poets from non-European backgrounds, such as Ouyang Yu's 'A Different Moon' (1995). John Kinsella's 'Figures in a Paddock' is an example of his interest in blending the pastoral tradition with linguistic innovation.'

(Source: PoeticA website, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s281149.htm)