Australian Moods

The time when Australian poetry was notable for the heavy journalistic phrase and the strained surrealist image (all pointing to dubious myths of blood-and-soil nationalism) now seems to be well behind us. The new poetry is essentially quiet, a trifle prosaic, holding up a lens through which one sees a solitary abraded landscape. One had noticed McAuley demanding a return to classical logic and the well-made stanza; A.D. Hope, equally formal, producing exact and militant social satire; Craig and Buckley exhibiting page 302 slides of the Hydrogen Age. I think Charles Higham has the advantage that he moves well out of the drawing-room and the lecture-room.

There is no impression that he ever writes just to keep his hand in. His social, erotic and pastoral preoccupations are closely knit together, so that he is further than most of his contemporaries from the curse of journalism. One of the strongest poems, ‘O’Leary’, gives shape to the inward soliloquy of an old boxer going back into the ring to be slaughtered; it is, very properly, a poem of youth and age, not a shallow impressionist fight commentary. I think those that affected me most deeply were poems derived from direct or indirect experience of Japan –

A frozen samisen;
The rain’s fingers thrum
Upon the iron roof.
Hands stroke a drum
And a face pale as sleet
Stamped with a quiet pain;
The mind still aloof
In that cage of heat
Where the wind dies again . . .
The plectrum brushed along
The hidden nerves all night,
Her body is in my arms
In the pale rushlight;
The words that separate
Stilled now where we are strong
Against the old alarms;
Against the city’s hate
Wound in a single song . . .

This one, ‘Osaka House’, is a remarkably fine love poem. Moreover, it shows what new life can illuminate the words when Australian (or New Zealand) poets move for a little out of the well-marked, arid social territories to which they are habituated. We cannot become Asians; but it is not impossible to be affected by Asian life, even at the cost of shattering the simple pieties of the football field, scones on Sunday, and the railway station cup of tea. No Aussie or Kiwi can make the move without opening wounds of moral uncertainty – yet it may be worse, for a writer at least, to die without having grown up. Mr Higham has plainly avoided our common fate. His poems, at times untidy, are still the best I have seen to come recently out of Australia.

1967 (431)