Australian Poetry Research Articles

The Best Australian Poetry 2003

The Best Australian Poetry 2003

Marking the Unmarked: An Epitaphic Preoccupation in Nineteenth-Century Australian Poetry

JUST OVER HALF CENTURY AFTER VICTORIA'S ACCESSION TO THE THRONE, London publisher issued an anthology that announced itself as inspired by in the Greater Britain under the Southern Cross and dedicated to the English of three continents. Running to nearly 600 pages, Douglas Sladen's anthology Century of Australian provides generous--not to say indiscriminate--sample of nineteenth-century antipodean verse, and has continued to be reference point nor only for historians of early Australian literary production but for poets as well. (1) As he explains in an introductory essay, the editor drew much of his selection from material sent directly to him in response to an open invitation published in weekly Australian and New Zealand newspapers. To his choices from those submissions he added some solicited items, large helping of his own utterly banal compositions, and an assortment of poems by earlier writers. anthology's limitations obvious enough; as H. M. Green remarks, it include s everything that Sladen thought worth dragging in on any conceivable ground and the few accomplished poems are submerged in sea of what is at best mediocre even by the standards of the day and place. Nevertheless it is acknowledged to have a definite historical importance, if only because it drew attention to the fact that Australian colonists were prolific producers of verse. (2) Themes of loss and lamentation pervade the volume. As general feature this hardly makes it distinctive among Victorian collections of poetry. But in Sladen's book the melancholy motifs often take specifically elegiac form, and tend to focus on particular memorials: even cursory reader can hardly fail to notice that burial places recur obsessively as topos. Given the intention to feature depictions of colonial life and scenery (p. 3), it seems remarkable that the locative traces of death and mourning so salient in the poems gathered here. term traces, however, should be understood in broad sense; for while in some cases there is an evocation of specified commemorative spots, as in Barron Field's sonnet about the first European burial in Australia, other poems mark an absence in that they hover around the imagery of unmarked graves, as in Adam Lindsay Gordon's The Sick Stockrider. Century of Australian contains many images of the (pp. 43, 94), the far-away (p. 266), the forsaken home and burial ground (p. 78). Who remembered where his dust was laid? (p. 378) is question that hangs over several of the dead. Often the place of interment is so isolated and nameless that the person who lies there is unidentifiable (I stand by the grave of this unknown one [p. 327]; No human foot or paw of brute / Halts now where the stranger sleeps [p. 266]). (3) There is plangent insistence on the utter remoteness of these resting places, as in the poem by Henry Parkes called The Mountain Grave (pp. 370-371): A lonely spot we chose for him--/ Along the lonely path that led / Our footsteps to his lonely bed, / His corse we bore, with eyes all dim. Indeed lonely unmarked grave is what dying speakers themselves represented as earnestly desiring in some of these poems. In this there is of course general similarity to some British poems of the period, such as Tennyson's Come Not, I am Dead or Christina Rossetti's Song with its well-known opening lines: When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me; I Plant thou no roses at my head,! Nor shady cypress tree), but the setting here is markedly Australian. In Adam Lindsay Gordon's The Sick Stockrider the title figure's last request is this: Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave, I With never stone or rail to fence my bed (p. 180). Gordon's poem was once enormously popular with campfire reciters, as Brian Elliott remarks, and could be claimed as proto-typical Australian ballad. …

Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity

Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity

Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry

Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry

The social tradition in australian women's poetry

The social tradition in australian women's poetry

The social tradition in Australian women's poetry

Australian women poets have developed a tradition of social poetry, concerned in the main with public issues. In the early part of the nineteenth century, women such as Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Fidelia Hill showed an awareness that their poetry contributed to nation-building, in particular, offering a female sensibility and humane values to a pioneering society. By the later part of the century, nationalism was accompanied by a strong socialist impulse in the work of poets such as Marie Pitt and Mary Gilmore. In this century, Judith Wright has been pre-eminent as a poet who speaks on public issues, campaigning for conservation and for Aboriginal land rights. While second wave feminism has encouraged women to experiment with form, they continue to display an interest in the social and political world.

The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse

The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse is the first anthology to offer a full record of Australian women's poetry from European settlement to the present. Beginning with Fidelia Hill's recollections of her arrival in Adelaide and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's indictment of the Myall Creek massacre, it surveys the nineteenth-century landscape poetry of writers such as `Australie' and Catherine Martin, the radical nationalist verse of the 1890s, through to the abundant verse of the last three decades. The anthology offers popular works such as Caroline Carleton's `Song of Australia', Dorothea Mackellar's `My Country', and Robyn Archer's `Menstruation Blues'. It also includes generous selections from such key poets as Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood and Oodgeroo. Here, women poets express the most personal feelings, as in Zora Cross's sonnets of love and motherhood, and declare their outrage at public folly, as in Marie Pitt's `Australia's Tommy Atkins' and Gig Ryan's `Disinformation'. The poets celebrate the natural environment and regret aspects of its use. Their poems - rarely unengaged or sentimental - often have an ironic and satirical edge. The anthology collects the diverse voices of 88 women, including some newly arrived from Europe and representatives of the oldest traditions of the land. The result is a moving, passionate book that will broaden our conceptions of Australian poetry.

Slovenia as a locale in contemporary Australian verse

Despite the fact that the writer Patrick White had worked on his novels for a short while also at Lake Bled in Slovenia at Hotel "Toplice", just like Agatha Christie did at Lake Bohinj, Slovenia has only recently come to feature in mainstream Australian literature, more precisely in contemporary Australian poetry. It should be stressed that Slovenia is thus no longer present only in Slovene migrant poetry written in Australia as has so far been the case: it entered the major contemporary Australian anthologies. This testifies to the fact that Slovenia no longer belongs to the uncharted part of Central Europe on the geographical and consequently also on the Australian literary map. Rather than that Slovenia increasingly makes part of an average Australian 'Grand Tour' travel itinerary in Europe; it has thus become present in the Australian cultural consciousness. In this light two recent Australian poems with Slovenia as a literary locale are discussed, Andrew Taylor's "Morning in Ljubljana" I and Susan Hampton's poem "Yugoslav Story".

Slovenia as a locale in contemporary Australian verse

Despite the fact that the writer Patrick White had worked on his novels for a short while also at Lake Bled in Slovenia at Hotel "Toplice", just like Agatha Christie did at Lake Bohinj, Slovenia has only recently come to feature in mainstream Australian literature, more precisely in contemporary Australian poetry. It should be stressed that Slovenia is thus no longer present only in Slovene migrant poetry written in Australia as has so far been the case: it entered the major contemporary Australian anthologies. This testifies to the fact that Slovenia no longer belongs to the uncharted part of Central Europe on the geographical and consequently also on the Australian literary map. Rather than that Slovenia increasingly makes part of an average Australian 'Grand Tour' travel itinerary in Europe; it has thus become present in the Australian cultural consciousness. In this light two recent Australian poems with Slovenia as a literary locale are discussed, Andrew Taylor's "Morning in Ljubljana" I and Susan Hampton's poem "Yugoslav Story".

Between Anthologies: Feminism and genealogies of Australian women's poetry

(1997). Between Anthologies: Feminism and genealogies of Australian women's poetry. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 12, No. 26, pp. 265-273.

Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Paul Kane.

<i>Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity</i>. Paul Kane.

Paul Kane : Australian Poetry. Romanticism and Negativity. Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. VIII-256 S.

Paul Kane : Australian Poetry. Romanticism and Negativity. Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. VIII-256 S.

Review of *Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity* by Paul Kane, and *Bridging: Readings in Australian Women's Poetry* by Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden

Review of *Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity* by Paul Kane, and *Bridging: Readings in Australian Women's Poetry* by Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden

Australian poetry: romanticism and negativity

Australian poetry: romanticism and negativity

Paul Kane (1996): Australian Poetry. Romanticism and Negativity

Paul Kane (1996): Australian Poetry. Romanticism and Negativity

Journalism and Regional Identity

This discussion of George Loyau's prolific literary output will examine journalism in the wider context of literary production and raise questions about the role of journalists as entertainers as well as social and political commentators. Journalism remained Loyau's working profession for four decades (1860–1898). Yet it is easily overlooked because of his significant contribution to early Australian poetry and history. Loyau's verse and fiction were widely disseminated in the colonial press of the 1860s and 1870s, a time when he wrote for metropolitan and regional papers in all the mainland colonies except Western Australia. Regional Queensland, however, was the starting point and final location for a remarkable career which combined periods of public prominence with harrowing personal adversity. Indeed, the distinctive irony of Loyau's career is that adversity was never more acute than in those periods when his reputation as a poet and historian was being made. By contrast, regional journalism provided Loyau with the material means and social support he lacked in the large colonial centres. A recurring theme for the larger study of colonial journalists is the question of mobility. While metropolitan and political reporting were mostly highly prized by ambitious young journalists, Loyau's career confirms the role of regional networks in journalism and the existence of a class of readers who continued to crave popular fiction and entertainment as weekly staples. Although such journalism remained at odds with the political culture of the Fourth Estate, Loyau's literary persona proved both durable and complex, combining a deepseated sense of cultural inferiority with the celebration of the ephemeral through the practices of popular journalism.

Fivefathers: five Australian poets of the pre-academic era

Features five key figures of Australian poetry - Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley and Francis Webb. Les Murray's introductory essays to the poets evoke the writers' circumstances, the trajectories of their very different work and suggests why their accomplishment have been generally eclipsed.

Official Criticism? Critical Practices and Australian Poetry

Official Criticism? Critical Practices and Australian Poetry

Open, Mixed, and Moving: Recent Australian Poetry

Open, Mixed, and Moving: Recent Australian Poetry

Sue Murray: Bibliography of Australian Poetry, 1935-1955

Sue Murray: Bibliography of Australian Poetry, 1935-1955