Naming the Nation: A Poetic Retrospect

Abstract

The work of conjuring settler nationhood for literary space was a self-conscious, colonial, and then nationalist task for both and New Zealand, and as literary space becomes increasingly global or, as Wai-Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell would put it, planetary, that conjuring must be repeated for broader (and usually more powerful) reading formations and in ways that can guarantee no singular literary tradition for either nation. This conjuring project is powerfully present in poems bearing the name of the country in which they were written, apostrophizing that national/colonial entity and bringing it into a literary reading space. The Australian colonial poets, from the first half of the nineteenth century onward, sought to trope the in global and imperial terms: in 1859, just before John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, for instance, Caroline Carlton's Song of Australia took pains to declare that No shackled slave can breathe the air / Fairest of Britain's daughters' fair-Australia! Repeated in the national anthem Advance Fair, which was penned by Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878 but did not replace God Save the Queen until 1984, the fairness of settler mained at for poetry, as it did for the non-white and Indigenous populations through Federation in 1900 and beyond. Bernard O'Dowd's poem from the year of Federation conjures Australia as the Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space-imperial cartography and European temporalities write Australian literary space as already belated even as it is inaugurated.A 1932 poem titled Australia from the long-lived feminist and socialist Mary Gilmore begins by lamenting the censured, absented Aboriginal names for country replaced by Australia. It is sensitive and typically elegiac in pondering the differing gaps between the land and its perceivers' apprehension of it: between landscape and language, place and speech.There was great beauty in the names her people called her,Shaping to patterns of sounds the form of their words;They wove to measure of speech the cry of the bird,And the voices that rose from the reeds of the cowal.All these Australia poems address the classically postcolonial question of how to leverage a sense of cultural difference that would speak back to British colonial sway, yet find credibility within the Anglophile canon that, as Leigh Dale has has pointed out in The English Men, came along with Anglo-Celtic settlement. ( AngloCeltic was often used both to acknowledge the Irish element in the nineteenth-century diaspora and to recognize that migrants from other European countries had a different status within Australia.) Cultural nationalism is the logical response. Settler Australians sought their own sense of identity, to repudiate the stigma of inferior belatedness that Anglocentric discourse can propagate. But the search for identity not only effaced the tear in the national fabric represented by excluding Indigenous people from that identity, it also had the potential to lead to the facile, rousing optimism appropriate only to national songs.This optimism is precisely the target of A. D. Hope's satiric, yet deeply felt, 1939 poem Australia.They call her a young country, but they lie:She is the last of lands, the emptiest,A woman beyond her change of life, a breastStill tender but within the womb is dry.Hope undoes the Austral trope, exposing its gendered elements, too; the virtues that an optimistic brand of settler nationalism would claim for Australia-that it is fresh, virginal, and untainted by or tragedy-are not there. Geologically the continent is old, and culturally it is barren: Without songs, architecture, and history echoes the charges of antipodean cultural failure familiar from European first encounters. Yet it is precisely the state of Australia's cultural desiccation that lends it some promise for Hope-hoping, if still from the desert the prophets come // Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare / Springs in that waste [. …