Australian Voices

A double anthology of Australian verse, covering the time from 1788 to the present day, must obviously present special problems for its editors, and most of all, a difficulty in the decision whether to give prominence to work on account of its place in the development of Australian language, myth and manners, or simply on account of its merit as writing. Inevitably the task of Professor Moore is the harder one. He has made a selection of verse from the time of settlement until 1930, dividing his book successively into – Folkpage 682 Songs and Ballads; the Colonial Age; Bush Ballads and Popular Verse; Poets of the Nineties; and, The Early Twentieth Century.

His preference for and appreciation of ballads saves the book from becoming a mere historical compendium of mediocre verse. It is good that he gives Ogilvie and Lindsay Gordon their due, especially the latter, whose few good poems are indestructible: on the other hand, following the present trend in criticism, he allows too little value to Henry Lawson’s work, which has the breadth and monotony of a groundswell after a storm, and for all its clumsinesses, does not date as the work of the cleverer Paterson does.

The descent from the balladeers, and those who philosophised on nationality and exile, to the poets of the Nineties to the Thirties, is like entering a stuffy sitting-room after a walk out-of-doors. Almost without exception, their poems are purely literary constructions, a narrow algebra ringing the changes on Fate and God and Time; and the worst of them, Hugh McCrae, has been given the most space. I cannot agree either with the editor’s inflated estimate of Mary Gilmore, undoubtedly an impressive personality, but a writer whose work is vitiated by generalities.

After this dimly-lit burrow, it is a relief to come to the second volume and Kenneth Slessor’s great poem, ‘Beach Burial’ –

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam . . .

There are still many generalities, but the dry watershed has been crossed: and the verses of Fitzgerald, Hope, Campbell, Manifold, McAuley, Buckley, and Douglas Stewart himself, express a mature, exact appraisal of the human condition. One notices that the emphasis on Australian nationality has slackened. Women writers – Wright, Dobson, Cato, Harwood, McDonald – are well represented. There are few poems that fail in quality and conciseness. The commentary can suitably end with a quotation from Gwen Harwood’s remarkable poem ‘Last Meeting’ –

. . . rocks and trees
dissolve in nightfall-eddying waters;
tumbling whorls of clouds disclose
the cold eyes of the sea-god’s daughters . . .

The world, said Ludwig Wittgenstein,
is everything that is the case
– the warmth of human lips and thighs;
the lifeless cold of outer space;

page 683

this windy darkness; Scorpio
above, a watercourse of light,
the piercing absence of one face
withdrawn for ever from my sight . . .

The personal occasion has been re-established as the central matter of poetry; and the poets who write in Australia no longer lack good models.

1964 (327)