Although the traditional view of published poetry is that it appears in "slim volumes of verse", the private presses and publishers of de-luxe editions often choose poetry for their texts. The verse is usually accompanied by illustrations, making these productions attractive to the collector as well as the student of poetry.

Among the works on display we find examples of the Fanfrolico Press. This was the creation of Jack Lindsay, and John Kirtley, two young Australians who went to England with the idea of starting the press. Many of these works have illustrations by Norman Lindsay, Jack Lindsay’s father.

As in Britain and the United States, the mainstream publishers were influenced to some extent by the private presses. Kenneth "Seaforth" Mackenzie’s Our earth is a beautiful production with Norman Lindsay plates, published by Angus & Robertson.

After Kirtley returned to Australia he set up his own private printing establishment, Mountainside Press, in Ferntree Gully, and produced perhaps the most spectacular of the Australian private press books, R. D. Fitzgerald’s Heemskerck Shoals.

1. Lindsay, Jack, 1900-

The passionate neatherd / by Jack Lindsay ; [decorations by Norman Lindsay] ([London] : Fanfrolico Press, [1926])

2. Slessor, Kenneth, 1901-1971.

Earth-visitors : poems / by Kenneth Slessor. (London : Fanfrolico Press, 1926)

"Decorated with three collotype reproductions of woodcuts by Norman Lindsay, and two copperplate engravings made from designs by the same artist"

3. McCrae, Hugh, 1876-1958.

Satyrs and sunlight / being the collected poetry of Hugh McCrae ; illustrated and decorated by Norman Lindsay with an introduction by Thomas Earp. (London : The Fanfrolico Press, 1928)

4. Mackenzie, Kenneth, 1913-1955.

Our earth / by Kenneth Mackenzie; with an original etching and 13 illustrations by Norman Lindsay. (Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1937)

Norman Lindsay was the common factor in many of the literary works published in Australia, particularly in Sydney. He undertook illustrations for writers published by the New South Wales Bookstall at the bottom end of the market, and his son’s Fanfrolico Press at the top end.

The poets on display here were working in the fantasy world of nymphs and satyrs made familiar through Norman Lindsay’s art. It was essentially a dead-end for Australian poetry, but Slessor was able to progress from here and produce some fine work describing contemporary Sydney.

Kenneth "Seaforth" Mackenzie is now best-known as a novelist. His first novel, The Young Desire It, was published in 1937, the same year as Our earth. The poem is a rhapsody on another of Lindsay’s preoccupations, the pagan celebration of sensuality. It is a long work in blank verse celebrating the fertility of earth and the natural emotions of mankind.

5. FitzGerald, Robert D. (Robert David), 1902-1987.

Heemskerck Shoals / written by Robert D. FitzGerald; and decorated by a map and fifteen designs after drawings done by Geoffrey C. Ingleton. (Fern Tree Gully Lower, Vic. : Mountainside Press, 1949)

This book was hand-printed by John T. Kirtley at his Mountainside Press at Ferntree Gully near Melbourne. R. D. Fitzgerald was already an established poet; Heemskerck Shoals was his fourth book. The title poem is in the genre of works in the epic-style on figures of early Australian discovery and exploration. In this case, Abel Tasman is the subject. Other examples in this line include Slessor’s poem on Captain Cook, and McAuley’s on De Quiros.

The Wayzgoose Press is the most ambitious of the fine presses currently working in Australia. Their presswork and design are truly admirable, and in recent years they have been producing spectacular editions of modern Australian poets.

The books by Jas Duke and Ken Bolton are produced on long sheets joined concertina-style. The text is printed in different colours with, especially in the Bolton book, the addition of many strikingly coloured decorations.

6. Brunsdon, Jyoti, 1941-

The cure / Jyoti Brunsdon. (Katoomba [N.S.W] : Wayzgoose Press, 1992)

This was the first major book of verse printed by the Wayzgoose Press. It is a very personal work detailing responses to a drug cure.

7. Duke, Jas H. 1939-1992.

Dada kampfen um leben und tod [Dada fight for life and death] : a prose poem / by Jas H. Duke. (Katoomba, N.S.W. : Wayzgoose Press, 1996)

Description: 1 vol. of folded leaves : ill. ; 34 x 50 cm.+ 2 folded sheets in pocket.

Jas. Duke was a Melbourne performance poet. This book comes with a biographical introduction by fellow poet, Pi O, "Jas H. Duke, an appreciation of Australia’s first Dadaist". In the late 1960s, Duke went to London and America and sought out the remaining Dadaists. He was mainly influenced by sound poetry, and the scat vocals of Jazz. He wrote about this part of his life in Destiny Wood, a novel published in Melbourne in 1974. Pi O first met him at a poetry reading organised by Chris Mann at La Mama in 1973.

In a touching paragraph Pi O describes Duke’s death,

On the 19^th of June 1992, aged 52, Jas H. Duke died in St. Vincent’s Hospital from complications resulting from a broken leg. As he was being wheeled into surgery, Thalia (a Melbourne poet) who went to visit him, told the nurses to take care of him cos he was one of Australia’s greatest poets. They laughed, and asked him to recite a poem. Tho in a lot of pain, as sat up and recited "Solidarity Explained":

          When the axe first came into the forest
                    The trees said to each other
                              The handle is one of us.

8. Bolton, Ken. 1949-

The terrific days of summer / Ken Bolton ; [conceived & designed by Mike Hudson ; handset by Jadwiga Jarvis]: (Katoomba, NSW : Wayzgooze Press, 1998)

Description: 1 portfolio covered in printed cloth : col. ill. ; 37 x 49 cm. + 1 folded sheet in a pocket in the front cover. Contains 22 leaves of illustrated text printed on one folded sheet (12,090 x 33 cm., folded to 47 x 33 cm.), folded in concertina style. Accompanied by a separate introductory essay by George Alexander.

Ken Bolton is a Sydney poet. He edited the poetry magazine, Magic Sam and currently edits Otis Rush, another poetry magazine. As well as publishing over a dozen volumes of poetry from 1977 to the present, he has also published, with his fellow-poet, John Jenkins, a verse-novel, The Ferrara Poems (1989).

It is impossible to do justice to The terrific days of summer with a quote, mainly because it is a visual poem, with its typography modelled on Mallarme’s "Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard", and Christopher Brennan’s "Musicopoematographo-scope" and, "Pocket musicopoematographoscope". Bolton’s work differs from these earlier publications in that it is printed in different types and colours and at varied angles, interspersed with Miro-style graphics. It is this which makes the achievement of the Wayzgoose Press so remarkable. The poem reads in part,

The terrific days of summer are here again
Already the sun is making the pool room of the British Lion too hot in the afternoon
…
"hermetic" days
New Photo-realist days
The sort of thing
That for some people.
          Presumably, is conjured by a lawnmower ad
                    on television

(-from the air
we see a man move
from one side of the lawn to the other
                    the man wears shorts
                    & we wear jeans
the lawn looks "lovely" & we think summer is
                              is it really effortless?
          is it
                              really so smooth
                    & green?
                    or more dionysian
          a sprinkler ad

This series was published by Geoffrey Dutton, as a supplement to his magazine, Australian Letters. There were thirteen separately published booklets from 1961 to 1963. Most of the major poets and artists of the time were represented.

Brindabella Press was run by Alec Bolton in Canberra. It was an Australian private press in the Golden Cockerel tradition. The Brindabella books combine high quality poetry with fine wood-engravings. Alec Bolton was Rosemary Dobson’s husband, and he published some of her works, as well as works by other major Australian poets such as Kenneth Slessor, David Campbell, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. We have a full set of Brindabella Press works, donated to us by Professor Jean Whyte. They are the most consistently handsome of the Australian private press books.

10. Campbell, David, 1915-1979.

Starting from Central Station : a sequence of poems/ by David Campbell. (Canberra : Brindabella Press, 1973)

David Campbell was born in the Monaro district of New South Wales. He was educated at Cambridge and served in the RAAF in World War II. When he returned to Australia he went back to the land on properties in the Canberra district. His first volume of verse was Speak with the Sun in 1949. Campbell was an Australian nature poet writing in a style similar to that of Judith Wright and others of his contemporaries. Starting from Central Station is a sequence describing the poet’s youth and in particular his memories of his father.

In the 1970s he unexpectedly changed to a more contemporary, allusive style. This can be seen for example in Words with a Black Orpington (1978).

11. McAuley, James, 1917-1976.

Time given : poems 1970-1976 / by James McAuley. (Canberra : Brindabella Press, 1976)

James McAuley was one of the poets involved in the Ern Malley hoax. This is dealt with more fully below in the section on the 1940s. The poems he wrote under that mythical poet’s name were meant to sabotage the tendency towards modern, quasi-surrealist poetry as embraced by the writers around Max Harris’s Angry Penguins magazine.

McAuley’s own poetry was characteristically classical in its verse forms and in its meditative content. He was editor of Quadrant, and from 1961 was an academic in the English Department of the University of Tasmania. The poems in this book were written when McAuley was aware of his approaching death, and reflect the deep religious faith of the author, as well as his keen eye for the details of nature and life and his deft poetic technique. Here is "Winter Morning",

Spring stars glitter in the freezing sky,
Trees on watch are armoured with frost.
In the dark tarn of a mirror a face appears.
Time is moving through displacements.
Hungrily the blind earthworm burrows
Deeper into its night. Surely
Heaven must ache with all its vacancies.
A dog’s howl is thrown up like a rope-trick.
It is an hour for prayer without words. (p. 32)

12. Hope, A. D. (Alec Derwent), 1907-

The drifting continent and other poems / by A.D. Hope; illustrated by Arthur Boyd. (Canberra : Brindabella Press, 1979)

A. D. Hope’s poetry is characterised as satirical and intellectual, but in this, one of his later volumes of poems, there is much that is contemplative. In "Tasmanian magpies" he recalls the clarity of perception he had as a child, using as an image the different call of the southern magpie as compared to the northern.

Ethiopia! They used to say,
Fluting at dawn through pure, clear rills of sound,
The magpies of that earlier day,
Ethiopia! Ethiopia! From all around.
Dulcimer of no Abyssinian maid
Was ever so plangent or so doucely played.
Ethiopia, Ethiopia!
Echoes went through me of Mount Abora.

Another country, another age! I still
Hear them at early morning in the trees;
The same pure grace notes, the same exquisite trill,
The lilt, the liquid ease,
But not the enchantment of that warbled name;
The magpie dialect here is not the same;
The magic syllables have gone
That brought me full awake and roused the sun.

Lost Ethiopia. Is that loss in me?
Monaro magpies bursting into song
Soar through new cadences, fresh jubilee;
But in an unknown tongue
Rejoice. Can it perhaps be true
That I have lost those languages I knew
In boyhood, when each bird,
Stone, cloud and every tree that grew
Spoke and I had by heart all that I heard? (p. 31)

13. Wright, Judith, 1915-

Rainforest (Canberra :¦Printed by A.T. Bolton at the Officina Brindabella, 1987) 1 sheet broadside 42 x 26 cm. Wood engraving by Rosalind Atkins.

Judith Wright is without doubt Australia’s best-known poet, but after the mid-1970s she stopped writing the poems by which she had become famous and concentrated her energies on ecological maters. However, she has continued to publish. She lived for a long time in Canberra where she became friends with Rosemary Dobson and Alec Bolton. This single sheet broadside with an engraving by Rosalind Atkins features a poem equal to her earlier nature poetry. It appeared originally in Phantom Dwelling (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1985)

14. Murray, Les A. (Les Allan), 1938-

The idyll wheel : cycle of a year at Bunyah, New South Wales, April 1986-April 1987 / Les A. Murray ; wood engravings by Rosalind Atkins. (Canberra : Officina Brindabella, 1989)

Murray, Les A. (Les Allan), 1938-

The sleepout [art reproduction] / by Les Murray; wood engraving by Rosalind Atkins. (Deakin, A.C.T. : Brindabella Press , 1994)

Description: 1 sheet : b&w ; 36 x 48 cm. Text of poem with illustration (14 x 16 cm.).

Les Murray was brought up on a dairy farm at Bunyah, on the north coast of New South Wales. After living in London, Canberra, and Sydney, he has returned to live on a portion of the family farm which he has managed to buy back. He was editor of Poetry Australia from 1973 to 1979, poetry editor for Angus & Robertson from 1976 to 1991, and became literary editor of Quadrant in 1990. Murray has been writer-in residence at numerous universities. Since the 1980s he has become the dominant personality among Australian poets, styling himself ‘the last of the Jindyworobaks’. Les is currently in the news because he has been asked by the Prime Minister, John Howard, to assist in drafting the preamble to the new Australian Constitution.

The idyll wheel consists of poems written to describe the seasons on his farm. Murray outlines his intentions in a verse "Preface",

An east-running valley where two hooded creeks make junction
And two snoring roads make a rainguttered cross of function:

There, each hamlet of house-and-sheds stands connected and alone
And the chimneys of old houses are square bottles cut from iron.

Gum forest is a solid blue cloud on the hills to the south
And bladygrass and chain rust round its every wheeltracked mouth.

Being back home there, where I am all ages,

I wanted to trace a year through all its stages.

15. Slessor, Kenneth, 1901-1971.

The sea poems of Kenneth Slessor / wood-engravings by Mike Hudson, introduction by Dennis Haskell. (Canberra : Officina Brindabella, 1990)

This is a selection of Slessor’s poems. It includes what are perhaps his two best works, "Five Bells" and "Beach Burial".

"Beach burial" is the best-known Australian war poem. It first appeared in Southerly vol. 5, no. 3, 1944 (p. 13), but was not collected until his Poems (1957), a re-issue of One Hundred Poems (1944) with two additional works.

The poem was written during Slessor’s time in the Middle East during World War II as a war correspondent.

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.

Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin –

"Unknown seaman" – the ghostly pencil drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men’s lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
El Alamein. (p. 41)

16. Dobson, Rosemary, 1920-

Untold lives : a sequence of poems / [by] Rosemary Dobson; with a wood engraving. "Breakaway", by Mike Hudson. (Canberra : Officina Brindabella, 1992)

Untold lives is one of Rosemary Dobson’s most recent books of poetry. Each poem consists of a brief description of someone the poet knows or has known. Most of the poetry is tinged with sadness, telling of people with the high hopes of childhood and what eventually happened to them. It is not to detract from Rosemary Dobson’s achievement to say that Robert Browning is an influence on these works.

Her Story

"It’s time to shed. I’ve given so much away,
Furniture, clothes: dresses so wonderful
Maybe I’ve tossed Fortunys out – my grandmother
Had elegance and wealth.
                    But still I keep
This little muff of leopard-skin.

"One year we went to England. Father stayed
In India I think.
Mother went skating on the open ponds
Near the Big House we lived in.
She pushed a wooden cart that ran on wheels
And I sat there bright-eyed with eagerness
Small hands kept warm inside this little muff.

Mother was happy then.
I saw her talking to a bearded man,
He took her hands in his, pulled back her gloves
And kissed both palms. Yes, I remember that.
Many years on she said, "He begged me so
To run away with him, at once, for good.
But no, I could not, seeing you sitting there
Hands in your little muff…"

"So there was Mother’s chance.
You knew her later. Doesn’t that surprise?
Yes, we went back to Father very soon
To India, Europe and Australia.
First Father died then Mother.
I’ve lived enough for several volumes since
None of it written down.
                    I’ll leave

Nor chick, nor child, sibling, possessions, wealth.
There’s just this little muff – it touches me.
Oh, yes, I’ll go, you know, when it is time
Not looking back.
                     It’s getting rather late." (p. 29-30)

The Ancora Press is operated by Brian McMullin, formerly of the Graduate School of Librarianship at Monash University, now a Research Fellow in the Monash University Centre for the Book.

17. Monro, D. H. (David Hector)

The sonneteer's history of philosophy / Hector Monro. ([Clayton, Vic.] : Ancora Press, Monash University, 1981)

Hector Monro is an Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy Department at Monash. His poems are written in a witty, scholarly style. There is a tradition of this type of writing in Australia, for example in the works of R. G. Howarth, and John Medley.

18. Lindsay, Jack, 1900-

Eight poems of youth / Jack Lindsay. ([Melbourne] : Monash University, Ancora Press, 1996)

This volume of Jack Lindsay’s poems was edited with an introduction by John Arnold of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash. It contains poems by Jack Lindsay from the University of Queensland magazine, Galmahra, here presented in book form for the first time.

19. Dutton, Geoffrey

New York Nowhere (Melbourne, Lytelwode Press, 1998)

This work was Geoffrey Dutton’s final poem, published shortly after he died. It deals with his feelings after a stroke in America when he was nursed back to health by his wife. The publication was surrounded by controversy because of the web of relationships involving Dutton, his wife, and others with whom they were involved. The book is accompanied by a CD of the poet reading this poem, and two other recent, unpublished poems.

20. Traversare. 1.

(Melbourne, Vic. : Centre for the Development of Artist's Books and Limited Editions, 1992) Monash University studio series ; no. 2/1992. Contains texts by Henri Michaux, Wang Wei and Christopher Brennan with commentaries by Daniel Leuwers, Mae Anna Pang and Kevin Hart, and an introduction by Jenny Zimmer. Original images are by Jennifer Hawkins, Alan Mitelman, Gary Poulton, Xiang Yi and Petr Herel. Designed and produced by Petr Herel.

21. Wallace-Crabbe, Chris

Drawing, text by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, designed and illustrated by Bruno Leti. (Melbourne, Centre for the Development of Artist’s Books, Monash University, 1994.)

Chris Wallace-Crabbe was born in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne in 1934, and was educated at the University of Melbourne. He was an academic in the English Department at Melbourne from 1961 until 1989, when he became director of the Melbourne University Australian Centre, retiring from that position at the end of 1998. He established and ran the Centre with Dinny O’Hearn.

Wallace-Crabbe first rose to notice among the poets such as Vincent Buckley at Melbourne University during the late 1950s and early 1960s. His first book, The Music of Division appeared in 1959. He has now published over thirty books of poetry, and essays, as well as a novel.

During the 1990s he has been collaborating with Melbourne artist Bruno Leti in a series of beautiful artist’s books. Bruno’s etchings, monotypes and aquatints are married with a text, which, rather than being letter-set, is screenprinted by Larry Rawling.

22. Ryrie, John.

Trees, ladders / [woodcuts by John Ryrie ; poems by Alex Selenitsch ; box by Hamish Hill] (Melbourne : Hybrid Production, 1995)

Description: 6 pieces : ill. ; in timber slip-case 50 x 27 x 4 cm. + 1 sheet. Limited ed. of 20 numbered and signed copies. "Printed by John Ryrie using garamond, imprint & rondo hand-set monotype, on Arches 200 GSM, the cover on Khadi 320 GSM, the box made from various suburban forest timbers"--T.p. verso.

John Ryrie is a Melbourne poet and artist. This is his major publication. Each copy is presented in its own slip-case made from different Australian timbers.

Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne architect and poet who lives in Clifton Hill. He has been involved in several artist’s books, including Ruth Cowen’s Real estates of the heart.

23. Cowen, Ruth.

Real estates of the heart [kit] / Ruth Cowen ; compiled by Alex Selenitsch and Stephen Coppel. (Canberra : Graphic Investigation Workshop, 1991)

Description: 8 folded sheets, 1 mirror, 3 mirror fragments : chiefly col. ; 18 x 18 cm. in box 23 x 21 x 7 cm. Series: Uncollected works (Graphic Investigation Workshop (Canberra School of Art)) ; "An edition of 20 copies has been printed on letterpress... signed by the poet. 8 additional copies are reserved for the collaborators" -- T.p. "Book design for ‘Uncollected works’ series by Petr Herel. Intaglio prints by Frances Rhodes and Dianne Fogwell. Silkscreen prints by Robert Mendham. Handset by Peter Finlay and Les Petersen" -- T.p.
Contains 9 concrete poems in letter press and mixed media, 2 relief prints, cotton wool and mirror, all contained in a transparent plastic box. Includes introduction by Alex Selenitsch.

24. Hopkins, Ted.

[Teledex] / Ted Hopkins. ([Prahran, Vic. : Champion Books, 1980])

Description: 40 cards ; 23 cm. Consists of cards filed alphabetically in metal teledex container.

Ted Hopkins, from Moe in Gippsland, was an VFL footballer, famous for kicking four goals for Carlton in the last half of the 1970 Grand Final. He ran the Champion Press and the Brunswick Hills Press in Prahran, and was part of the "Fringe Network". His Teledex consists of a metal Teledex which includes a series of poems arranged according to the first letter of their titles.

He has also written The Yallourn stories (1982).

25. Sime, Ian

Eyes From Ust Maya: poems in celebration of love, reason, freedom and anarchy ([Melbourne], the author, 1982)

Ian Sime was a Melbourne artist and poet. An inspirational, charismatic figure, he moved in the Melbourne literary and artistic circles around John and Sunday Reed, Mirka Mora and Adrian Rawlins. Sime lectured in art, and was the founder of the Psycho-Aesthetic Society. He has been described as one the Melbourne, "Beat cognoscenti".

The book on display is self-produced, presented in a leather satchel. It includes colour xeroxes of some of his art work.

26. Mann, Chris.

Da-dum [realia] / Chris Mann. ([Australia] : The author, [1985?])

Description: 1 drinking glass, 1 paper table napkin, 1 matchbook, 1 playmoney note ; in cardboard box, 9 x 9 x 13 cm. The text of the poem is printed on the cardboard box, drinking glass, table napkin and matchbook.

Chris Mann is a performance poet who has published a number of artist’s books, in various styles. He moved to New York in the mid-1990s where he has established himself as part of the international avant-garde poetry/art scene.

27. The Birth of peace. (Brunswick, Vic. : NMA Publications, 1990)

Description: [20] p. ; 14 x 21 cm. + 1 sound cassette + 1 cellophane goldfish.

The booklet consists of computer source code in the C language of the programs IDALR.C and IDALT.C. Superimposed on this code are texts by C. Mann, R. Descartes, H. Heine, and music (piano staves) by F. Nietzsche.

Author: Larry Polansky [backslash] The Birth of Peace [backslash] collaboration with Chris Mann, Alistair Riddell, Warren Burt, et al [backslash] Utilities for Chris Mann Goldfish piece (software)... " -- 3rd p. of booklet.

Title on cassette: The birth of peace : a verse ballet by R. Descartes (text), H. Heine (text), C. Mann (text), F. Nietzsche (music) with C. Levi-Strauss (violin), L. Wittgenstein (clarinet), conducted by Willy the goldfish.

28. Tipping, Richard, 1949-

The Sydney morning / by Richard Kelly Tipping. (Newcastle [N.S.W.] : Thorny Devil Press, 1989)

"Screenprinted by Richard Tipping and Shaw Hendry".

Contents-Note: v. 1. Word works & ideographics 1967-1988 -- v. 2.
Word works, 1967-1991 -- v. 3.
Word works, 1979-1992 --v. 4.
Word works, 1993-94.

Richard Tipping is an academic at the University of Newcastle. In the 1968-69 Richard was the editor of the Adelaide poetry magazine, Mok. His first book of poetry, Soft Riots, was published as part of the University of Queensland Press Paperback Poets series in 1972. Since then he has developed his output in the direction of concrete poetry and "artist’s books". Richard has had various exhibitions of his works in England and America. Thorny Devil Press is his own imprint.

The volumes on display have their titles, The Sydney morning, printed in the same type-face as The Sydney morning herald. This is part of Richard’s predilection for visual puns.

29. Lyssiotis, Peter.

The Harmed circle / Peter Lyssiotis. ([Melbourne] : Masterthief Enterprises, [1992])

30. Lyssiotis, Peter.

The Look of Love/ Peter Lyssiotis, and Scott McQuire. ([Melbourne] : Masterthief Enterprises, [1998])

Peter Lyssiotis is a Melbourne writer and artist. He is best-known for his "artist’s books". These contain dreamlike, surrealist photographs and a sparse, accompanying text. The photographs are integral to the poems they illustrate.

1920s

31. Cross, Zora, 1890-1964.

Elegy on an Australian schoolboy / by Zora Cross.( Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1921) (Adelaide : Hassell Press)

The 1920s saw the continuation of war poetry, both celebrating the exploits of our fighting men and lamenting the realities of war. Zora Cross’s Elegy on an Australian schoolboy, a poem about her young brother who was killed in the war, is an example of the latter. She is best-known for her 1917 book, Songs of love and life, a collection of love poetry thought at the time to be rather too frank, but which proved popular enough to appear is several editions.

32. Harford, Lesbia, 1891-1927.

The poems of Lesbia Harford. (Melbourne : Melbourne University Press in association with Oxford University Press, 1941)

Lesbia Harford died in her twenties, of pneumonia. She graduated in Arts and Law from Melbourne University and published poems in periodicals such as Birth. Her poems were collected and published by Melbourne University Press on the advice of Nettie Palmer, who wrote an introduction to the book. Nettie Palmer was a family friend and she writes warmly of the bright and talented young poet. The poems are interesting partly because Lesbia writes of her experiences working in a clothing factory,

          Machinists Talking

I sit at my machine,
Hour long beside me Vera aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.

Her boy, she hopes, will prove
Unlike his father in the act of love,
Twelve children are too many for her taste.

She looks sidelong, blue-eyed
And tells a girlish story of a bride
With the sweet licence of Arabian queens.

Her child, she says, saw light
Minute for minute, nine months from the night
The mother first lay in her lover’s arms.

She says a friend of hers
Is a man’s mistress who gives jewels and furs
But will not have her soft limbs cased in stays. (poem no. XXXIII)

33. Birtles, Bert.

Black poppies / by Bert Birtles ; with a pencil portrait of the author by B.E. Minns. (Sydney : B. Birtles, 1924)

This book has an introductory "Note",

Last year, 1923, the author was expelled from the University of Sydney on a charge of "committing misconduct in writing a poem," which was printed in the June issue of "Hermes" the University magazine, under the title "Beauty." This poem is herein reprinted on page 15 with three alterations, viz.: the word "to" replaces the word "past" in the second line; "contentedly" replaces "contented" in the seventh line and "o’er" replaces "past" in the fifteenth line.

"Beauty" was written for his girlfriend, Dora, later to become his wife. It is a love poem which was felt to be too explicit in some of its passages. Reading it now, one is struck by the emotion and the beauty of expression.

Two lone glad doves are sighing on the roof,
Sending in mournful notes to the stars
A faint tremble of wailing joy; the wind
Is carolling too, - on his lute low – crying
An infinite gladness, echoing round
The walls …. Lie still, dear, and rest awhile,
Contentedly, our longing now appeased,
Till we fall, like dreaming snowflakes, far
Into the void of delightful sleep….
Like a gentle wind, I feel you breathing,
And a still joy murmuring, dovelike, through your blood
In satisfied desire….
                    Oh, two hot stars
Leapt up in your mad clasp and kissed
The moon, now glowing o’er the window ledge,
And blotted out my mind….And now, you warm
Still thing are beautiful as any flower,
Huddled snug to me….How sweet you are!
A satisfying relaxation sleeps
Upon your limbs, all beautifully white
As ivory, warm as its touch is cold,
Beneath me, and the fragrant roses spill
Their perfume from the jar. Your moonlight hair
Is on the pillow….Oh, move not, dearest.
Unfold not your warm limbs about me; let
Me kiss your mouth, your eyes, your forehead,
And kiss your breasts….oh, hold you ever in my arms,
And passionately love your beauty not aloof….
Dearest, you are so glad, glad as those
Two birds, aloft, still sighing on the roof. (p. 15)

34. FitzGerald, Robert D. (Robert David), 1902-1987.

The greater Apollo : seven metaphysical songs / by Robert D. FitzGerald.([Australia] : R.D. FitzGerald, [1927])

This was FitzGerald’s first volume of verse; published "For private distribution by gift among the author's friends only." The poems were originally written in 1926, and appeared in The Spinner and The Bulletin.

35. Neilson, John Shaw, 1872-1942.

New poems / by Shaw Neilson. ([Sydney] : The Bookfellow in Australia, c1927)

John Shaw Neilson was established as one of Australia’s leading nature poets by the 1920s. New poems was his fourth book. He was an agricultural labourer who lived a difficult life. His poetry was in the Australian tradition of the untutored minstrel, in the style of such poets as Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall.

This book was published by A. G. Stephens, editor of The Bookfellow. It contains one of Neilson’s much-anthologised pieces, "Stony Town".

36. Gilmore, Mary, Dame, 1865-1962.

Under the Wilgas : poems / by Mary Gilmore. (Melbourne : Robertson & Mullins, 1932)

Mary Gilmore was a well-established poet as early as 1918. She was a radical idealist and had gone to Paraguay with William Lane’s Cosme settlement in 1896. She returned to Australia in 1902, and always retained a deep feeling for the oppressed. Under the Wilgas contains many poems lamenting the plight of the aborigines. The Monash copy has a manuscript note on the fly-leaf, signed by Mary Gilmore and dated, "Sydney 27.2.35",

In regard to the blacks the white man said they had no intellect but only instinct. But of what level was the intellect that saw no further than this?

37. Adamson, Bartlett, 1884-1951.

These beautiful women / by Bartlett Adamson ; decorations by Roy Hodgkinson. (Sydney : Sydneysider Co., [1932])

Bartlett Adamson was a journalist on Smith’s Weekly. He wrote romantic poetry with a strong sexual flavour. This volume includes a manuscript poem, "Low doings in high life" signed by Adamson, which would probably not be acceptable for publication even today. These beautiful women with its art deco cover and text illustrations of nudes in a fin-de-siecle style is unusual for an Australian book.

38. Dennis, C. J. (Clarence James), 1876-1938.

"I dips me lid" to the Sydney Harbor Bridge. (Rhodes, N.S.W. : Lewis Berger & Sons (Australia), [1932])

C. J. Dennis, Australia’s larrikin poet is best-known for his "Sentimental Bloke". He was a versifier of great facility, and for many years contributed topical poems to the Melbourne Herald. "I dips me lid" commemorates the 60,000 gallons of Berger's paint used on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

39. Slessor, Kenneth, 1901-1971.

Darlinghurst nights and morning glories : being 47 strange sights observed from eleventh storeys, in a land of cream puffs and crime, by a flat-roof professor: and here set forth in sketch and rhyme / by "Virgil" and Kenneth Slessor,( [N.S.W.] : Frank C. Johnson, [1933])

Slessor’s light verse must be counted among the most impressive achievements in Australian poetry from the 1930s. He contributed a series of these slight, but perfectly-formed, poems to Smith's weekly where, accompanied by Virgil Reilly’s highly evocative and realistic illustrations, they opened a window onto inner-city Sydney during the early 1930s.

Cocaine was the drug of choice then. Slessor writes about it in "Snowdrops",

The Snowdrop Girl in fields of snowdrops walks,
Whiter than foam, deeper than waters flowing,
Flakes of wild milk gone blowing,
Snowing on cloudy stalks.
The Snowdrop Girl goes picking flowers of snow,
Blossoms of darkness bubbling into dreams,
In a strange country, by the shadowy streams
Where the cruel petals of the Coke-tree grow.

From the smoke and the fume of the backyard room,
Where poverty sits and gloats,
On runaway feet from a dirty street
To a field of snow she floats;
And tickets to Hell have a curious smell
And a dangerous crystal whiff,
Where men hawk Death in a snowdrops’s breath
At a couple of shillings a sniff. (p. 37)

40. Slessor, Kenneth, 1901-1971.

Five bells : XX poems / by Kenneth Slessor : with six decorations by Norman Lindsay. (Sydney : F.C. Johnson, 1939)

The title poem of this small booklet is Slessor’s major work. It is a long meditative poem on the death of his friend, Joe Lynch, who drowned in Sydney Harbour. The poem is written in a much more contemporary style than Slessor had employed in his early works. Although it shows the influence of T. S. Eliot, Slessor writes in a distinctive voice and is able to evoke the atmosphere of the harbour and of the bohemian pub culture of the time. Lynch had spent some time in Melbourne; this too is described,

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leached away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you’d written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living, who now was dead:
"At Labassa. Room 6 X 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room – 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over the sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photoes of many different things
And different curioes that I obtained …" (p. 17-18)

Norman Lindsay’s illustrations are not really appropriate but he was a well-established part of the Sydney publishing scene, and doubtless added to the book’s appeal.

"Five Bells" was voted Australia’s favourite poem in 1998 in an ABC poll for National Poetry Day.

41. Higgins, Bertram.

"Mordecaius" overture, a poem / by Bertram Higgins. (Glen Iris [Vic.] : Bright Printing Service, [195-?])

Higgins was the editor of Stream, a short-lived Melbourne magazine (three issues, July-September 1931) devoted to avant-garde art and poetry.

"Mordecaius" overture, a poem was first published in 1933. It is an example of a young poet very much under the influence of Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Go where the lightning points? Or where the penumbra glows?
Madness to tempt new lands by a forked and fitful path
While the old House, split to its hearth, still stands.
Down the long slope I go …
There where the calm clouds pile, how softly unrolls
The Past in a white fume of waving scrolls!

42. White, Patrick, 1912-1990.

The ploughman : and other poems / by Patrick White; illustrations by L. Roy Davies. (Sydney : Beacon Press, 1935)

Before he published his first novel, Happy Valley, in 1939, Patrick White published two volumes of verse. The first, Thirteen poems, published in 1929 or 1930 survives in only two copies, one in the Mitchell Library, and one in the Fisher Library. The second, The ploughman is more common, but still a very rare book. As with Happy Valley, his first novel, White would never allow any of these early works to be reprinted. He is rumoured to have bought copies and destroyed them.

Most of the poems are in a delicate, wistful strain. Here, for example, is the ending of "If you would see",

Yet, let it be so, and not find agony hid in bliss.
I will kiss your mouth, that is red and trembling warm;
I will rest my head on your heart
And follow its whispering melody, clear and soft,
Chasing the present like violins
That pursue the souls of a symphony.

Our copy of The ploughman is a signed presentation copy from White to "Jennie Deans", dated 1935.

43. Dobson, Rosemary, 1920-

Poems / Rosemary Dobson. ([Mittagong, N.S.W.] : Frensham Press, 1937)

Most of the standard reference works such as Miller and Macartney’s Australian Literature, and the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature give Rosemary Dobson’s first publication as In a Convex Mirror (1941), but in fact she had published this slim volume of verse in 1937, when she was only 17. The poems are in a variety of styles, but show a precocious gift.

44. Ingamells, Rex, 1913-1955.

Forgotten people / by Rex Ingamells. (Adelaide : F.W. Preece Ltd., 1936)

Rex Ingamells was the founder of the Jindyworobak school of Australian literature. It thrived from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. Their aim was to forge a national identity through employing specifically Australian themes and images and using aboriginal words in an attempt to enrich the language.

Ingamells took a sympathetic interest in aboriginal culture, and is perhaps best-remembered for his novel, Aranda Boy (1952).

As well as publishing several volumes of verse, he edited the Jindyworobak Anthology, a collection of poetry by various Australian writers, which appeared annually from 1938 to 1953.

1940s

The 1940s began with Australia at war. Included here are some of the volumes of war poetry produced as a response to the times.

 

45. Dutton, Geoffrey, 1922-1998

Night flight and sunrise / by Geoffrey Dutton; introductory statements by Max Harris. (Melbourne : Reed & Harris, 1944 (Adelaide : Hassell Press)

Geoffrey Dutton served in the RAAF as a flight-lieutenant. His poetry is modernist in style, and he published in the avant-garde Australian periodicals, Angry Penguins and A Comment. The book on display, with its Sidney Nolan cover design, and introduction by Max Harris, was published by Reed and Harris. John and Sunday Reed were the leading lights in the Heide school of art and literature in Melbourne at the time.

46. Stewart, Douglas, 1913-1985.

Elegy for an airman / by Douglas Stewart ; with decorations by Norman Lindsay. (Sydney : F.C. Johnson, 1940)

Douglas Stewart was a New Zealander who came to Australia in the late 1930s and became editor of the Bulletin’s "Red page". The 1940s was the period of Stewart’s greatest productivity. As well as poetry, he also wrote the plays, Ned Kelly and Fire on the Snow, in the 1940s.

 

47. Malley, Ern.

The darkening ecliptic / by Ern Malley. (Melbourne : Reed & Harris, 1944) Illustration by Sidney Nolan. Introduction by Max Harris.

The most famous, or notorious, literary incident form the 1940s was the "Ern Malley hoax". The poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, wrote a series of deliberately nonsensical poems in the modern, free-verse style. To complete the ruse, they constructed a persona, Ern Malley, a supposed working-class author who died young, leaving a bundle of manuscripts. They tricked Max Harris into publishing the spurious works in a special number of his magazine, Angry Penguins, (Autumn 1944).

It was an attempt to discredit the modern vogue in poetry, but, ironically, some of the poems are among the best from the period, in particular the poem, "Durer: Innsbruck, 1495". This poem was not written as a hoax. It was one of McAuley’s serious pieces, dealing with the difficulties of experiencing culture at a remove. This was used to entice Max Harris into accepting the Malley oeuvre. Any editor would have been excited when offered work of this standard. Certainly Stewart and McAuley were unable to attain to such heights again.

I had often, cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing than that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dreams,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters. (p. 16)

The Ern Malley poems have achieved cult status world-wide, and have been cited as an influence by such poets as John Ashbery.

48. McAuley, James, 1917-1976.

Under Aldebaran / by James McAuley. (Melbourne : Melbourne University Press, 1946)

Under Aldebaran was James McAuley’s first book of poetry, although he had already published poems in magazines and anthologies, and was a well-known figure on the Australian literary scene. The poems in this book include "Jindyworobaksheesh", an attack on Rex Ingamells’s group of poets, and "The True Discovery of Australia", a long poem satirising the fashion for celebrations of our early history. McAuley points out that Swift’s Gulliver found Lilliput in the area around the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. This gives the poet the opportunity of attacking Australians and their view of their own importance. Using Swift as a mouthpiece, McAuley writes,

"The place, my lord, is much like Gideon’s fleece
The second time he laid it on the ground;
For by the will of God it has remained
Bone-dry itself, with water all around.

"Yet as a wheel that’s driven in the ruts,
It has a wet rim where the people clot
Like mud; and though they praise the inner spaces,
When asked to go themselves, They’d rather not.

"The men are brave, contentious, ignorant;
The women very much as one expects.
For their religion, I must be excused,
Having no stomach to observe their sects.

"You must be wary in your conversation;
For, seeing them thumb-high, you might suppose
They recognised their stature, but beware!
Their notion of themselves is grandiose. (p. 69)

49. Green, Dorothy, 1915-1991.

Kaleidoscope, / by Dorothy Auchterlounie; ornaments by Bessie Mitchell. (Sydney : Viking Press, 1940)

Dorothy Auchterlounie married the Australian critic H. M. Green in 1944. This was her first volume of verse. It consists of a single poem in mock-heroic couplets, with a series of vignette illustrations, describing a trip through Sydney. The protagonist arrives at Wynyard Station, pays a bill, goes to the bank, relaxes in Hyde Park, goes to Luna Park, to the movies, and then home, where the radio holds sway,

And conversations are no more
Since radios have held the floor;
One’s private views are out of place
Above the bronchial ground-bass
Of toothpaste merchants, commentators
On sundry Aryan dictators …

…

Then shall we all with one accord
Sing praises to the learned horde
Of toilers in devout alliance
Who gave to us the fruits of science?

…

Yet pity ‘tis they gave so much
When men but ruin what they touch –
For men, of gods the prototype,
Would take a star to light a pipe.

50. E, [i.e. Mary Fullerton] 1868-1946.

Moles do so little with their privacy : poems / by E; preface by T. Inglis Moore ; explanatory note by Miles Franklin. (Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1942)

Mary Fullerton is best-known as the author of Bark House Days, an account of her early life in Gippsland. She left for England in 1921 and died there in 1946. Nothing in her earlier work prepared her audience for the poems in this book and in her last volume of verse, The Wonder and the apple, (1946) both of which appeared under the pseudonym, "E". They contain much that is acerbic and cynical, and with their concise imagery recall the poems of Emily Dickinson. As an example of the unexpected angle we are likely to find in the best of these poems, "Crisis" deals with the human failure to respond to another’s need,

If I let go my strength
To hold your twisted strand,
It could but sear at length,
And hurt my coward hand.

Cling not upon my mind;
Though it be full and strong,
It was not made to bind,
More than myself for long. (p. 53)

51. Davis, Norma L. (1905-1945)

Earth cry : poems / by Norma L. Davis. (Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1943)

Norma Davis is now best-remembered as the poet who is rumoured to have died after reading a bad review of her work by A. D. Hope. Hope’s review of Earth cry appeared in Poetry: the Australian quarterly of verse, no. 15 (June 1945) p. 31-33.

Her poems are unpretentious descriptions of nature and life written in a self-conscious, deliberately poetic style, such as unfashionable poets still commonly adopt. Hope applied his own high standards to the work, writing such comments as,

The whole technique of her verse gives the impression that her poems escape from her in a crisis of emotional fever and that she never looks at them again.

He was shaken by the death of Miss Davis, and stopped reviewing until the 1950s.

 

52. Kershaw, Alister, 1921-1995.

Excellent stranger / by Alister Kershaw ; with preface by A.R. Chisholm. (Melbourne : Reed & Harris, 1944) (Adelaide : The Hassell Press)

Alister Kershaw was another of the writers from the Melbourne avant-garde. A friend of artists such as Adrian Lawlor, and a frequenter of Heide. He wrote in a cosmopolitan style which was well received by Max Harris and the Reeds.

Excellent stranger was his second book of verse. It includes some war poetry, for example, "Bomber Pilot: presumed dead":,

Curt notation; and no use to say:
By this is discarded torment and the throes
Of the enemy’s miracle. End of the war for him.
Oh, do not appraise his ineffectual trials,
The ill campaign that shuttered the stars
And the head enclosing its dim report –
Noting with dreadful fluency
The sweet injustice of the sun still shining. (p. 11)

After the war he went to Paris as an ABC correspondent and spent the rest of his life there.

53. Wright, Judith, 1915-

The moving image : poems / Judith Wright. (Melbourne : Meanjin Press, 1946)

This was Judith Wright’s first book. She is widely regarded as one of the best of the post-war Australian poets, and is certainly the most popular. Her style is plain but emotionally honest, and she is equally adept at writing about nature, and about human relationships. She is perhaps the most characteristically Australian of our modern poets.

Her first volume contains some of her best work, e.g. the powerfully moving poem on ageing, "Brother and sisters"

Feeding the lambs deserted in early spring
Lucy looked up and saw the stockman’s eye
Telling her she was cracked and old.

54. Webb, Francis, 1925-1973.

A drum for Ben Boyd / by Francis Webb ; with illustrations by Norman Lindsay. (Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1948)

Francis Webb was born in Adelaide, but raised in Sydney. He served in the RAAF during the war, training in Canada, where he was living when this, his first book, was published. The title poem appeared originally in the Bulletin, in 1946. It concerns Ben Boyd, a legendary 19^th century Australian entrepreneur who established Boyd Town as a whaling station on the south coast of New South Wales.

Webb suffered from schizophrenia, and spent much of the 1950s and 1960s in mental institutions. He did, however, publish five volumes of verse, and is highly regarded among post-war Australian poets. Here, from the volume on display, is a stanza describing Boyd’s response to his financial ruin. Webb has plainly borrowed the imagery from his experiences as a mental patient,

And the man on the bridge of his own self-scuttled wreck?
You cannot picture him broken or prostrate;
Success was the terror that might have tensed his back
To an unnatural arc, turned him away, out-patient,
Healed, and thoroughly dead to his right mind and fate. (p. 31)

1950s

The 1950s saw a return to more traditional verse styles after the experimentation of the 1930s and 1940s. Australian poets reverted to a more insular view, concentrating on nature and domestic concerns with some writing in the philosophical or satirical vein.

55. Hope, A. D. (Alec Derwent), 1907-

The wandering islands / A. D. Hope. (Sydney : Edwards & Shaw, 1955)

A. D. Hope is usually considered to be the best Australian poet; perhaps the only one with an international reputation. He writes in a polished intellectual style, using traditional verse forms with apparent ease. Although he had published in magazines, such as Meanjin, Southerly, even the Jindyworobak Anthology, and had been involved with Harry Hooton and others in some small verse booklets, The wandering islands was his first book of poetry.

The book includes well-anthologised pieces such as the title poem, "The Wandering islands", "Pyramis, or the house of ascent", and "The Death of the bird", but he was also able to make poetry out of everyday preoccupations. Here are the first two stanzas of "Giving it up",

The amputated cigarette
still nags. He can’t forget
the lost volcanic limb
so much a part of him,
the smoking finger which
in crooked wreathes would sketch
detachment’s abstract rose,
his ritual of repose.

Maimed of this human part
the wounded gestures start,
recoil with panic shock:
"Thank you – I do not smoke!"
And where the empty sleeve
hangs grows a make-believe:
"Thank God – no more a slave,
What will-power, too, I have!" (p. 65)

56. Stewart, Harold, 1916-1995.

Orpheus and other poems / by Harold Stewart. (Sydney Angus and Robertson, 1956)

57. Stewart, Harold, 1916-1995.

Fireflies : translations of Japanese Haiku [manuscript] / by Harold Stewart.: [s.l. : H. Stewart , 195-?] [76] leaves ; 13 x 18 cm.: Typescript. (Accompanied by letter from Harold Stewart to Monash University concerning the typescript)

Harold Stewart will doubtless be best-remembered as one of the authors behind the Ern Malley hoax, but he was an accomplished poet in his own right with an interest in Asian culture unusual in Australian literature.

Orpheus is a sequence of poems on Greek myths, but also included in this book are some poems on China.

After Orpheus he turned more to Japanese verse-forms, in particular, haiku. His next book was A Net of fireflies (1960). At Monash we have a small typescript book which contains some of the haiku later included in the 1960 publication.

In 1965 he moved to Japan, where he ultimately became a Buddhist. He continued to produce volumes of haiku bound and decorated in the Japanese manner.

58. Wright, Judith, 1915-

The gateway / by Judith Wright. (Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1953)

The gateway was Judith Wright’s third book of verse. It includes many poems about her place in the Australian landscape and continues the concerns of her 1949 volume, Woman to man, in such poems as "All things conspire",

All things conspire to hold me from you –
even my love,
since that would mask you and unname you
till merely woman and man we live.
All men wear arms against the rebel –
and they are wise,
since the sound world they know and stable
is eaten away by lovers’ eyes.
All things conspire to stand between us –
even you and I,
who still command us, still unjoin us,
and drive us forward till we die.
Not till those fiery ghosts are laid
shall we be one.
Till then, they whet our double blade
and use the turning world for stone. (p. 33)

59. Dobson, Rosemary

Child with a cockatoo and other poems / by Rosemary Dobson. (Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1955)

The title poem is part of a series, "Poems from paintings". Robert Browning is an obvious influence, but Rosemary Dobson has her own voice and her poems show an impressive level of poise and self-composure. The final section of eight poems deals with her feelings as a woman and mother. In "The Birth" she turns the pangs and the emotions felt as she struggles to give birth to her child into a powerful series of images:-

Eight times it flowered in the dark,
Eight times my hand reached out to break
That icy wreath to bear away
Its pointed flowers beneath the heart.
Sharp are the pains and long the way
Down, down into the depths of night
Where one goes for another’s sake.

Once more it flowers, once, more I go
In dream at midnight to that tree,
I stretch my hand and break the branch
And hold it to my human heart.
Now, soft as petals of a rose
Those flowers unfold and grow to me –
I speak as of a mystery. (p. 49)

1960s

Until about 1967, the Australian poetry scene of the 1960s was similar to that of the previous decade. The predominant forms of poetry were meditations on Australian scenery and analyses of personal relationships, written in traditional verse forms, but more often, in free verse. Poetry Australia was the most popular poetry journal. It was challenged only late in the decade when its rival, Poetry magazine, was taken over by Robert Adamson and Carl Harrison-Ford. They began to publish more avant-garde work, changing the title of the magazine to New Poetry in January 1971.

By the end of the 1960s, the established poets were being swamped by the younger generation. This is more obvious if one looks at the poetry magazines of the time. Adamson, and John Tranter were not to publish their first volumes of poetry until 1970; Tranter’s Parallax appearing as a special number of Poetry Australia.

60. Beaver, Bruce, 1928-

Under the bridge : poems / by Bruce Beaver. (Sydney : Beaujon Press, 1961)

Bruce Beaver is a Sydney poet. Under the bridge was his first volume of verse. Beaver had a difficult early life and was plagued by mental problems. He used this to good effect in his first major collection, Letters to Live Poets (1969) where the poems show the influence of the American confessional style of Robert Lowell. He was, with Grace Perry, an associate editor of Poetry Australia.

61. Perry, Grace, 1927-1987.

Frozen section / Grace Perry. ([Sydney] : Edwards & Shaw, [1967]) Grace Perry was the editor of Poetry magazine from 1961 to 1964 when she left to found Poetry Australia. She was a paediatrician and in Frozen section she included several poems on medical themes. Perhaps her most appealing poems show an ability to combine natural imagery with personal observation, for example, in "Girl at the Piano",

Swinging thin legs, the child bends to the keyboard,
head tilted sideways looking at the sea,
while fingers follow the familiar patterns
with assumed precision and agility.

Incessant crests ride tirelessly to meet her
and spill themselves in long irregular runs
until her mind is full to overflowing
with unbridled oceans leaping to the sun.

Immersed in summer through the open window,
she will go out along the beach, alone.
She will not see the dark turbulence building
to break in spray against high walls of stone. (p. 34)

62. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo, 1920-1993.

The dawn is at hand : poems / by Kath Walker. (Brisbane : Jacaranda Press, 1966)

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, formerly Kath Walker, was an aboriginal poet from Stradbroke Island outside Brisbane. She changed from her western name to her tribal name in the late 1980s. Her poems are written out of a deep concern for her people and with the avowed intention of helping to raise awareness of their plight. Those who read her verse can hardly ignore the issues. Take for example, the poem, "Dark unmarried mothers":-

All about the country,
From earliest teens,
Dark unmarried mothers,
Fair game for lechers –
Bosses and station hands,
And in town and city
Low-grade animals
Prowl for safe prey.
Nothing done about it,
No one to protect them –
But hush you mustn’t say so,
Bad taste or something. (p. 16)

63. Porter, Peter, 1929-

Solemn adultery at Breakfast Creek : an Australian ballad/ by Peter Porter ; Set to music by Michael Jessett with guitar accompaniment and embellished with three linocuts by Paul Peter Piech. (London : Keepsake Press, 1968)

Peter Porter was born in Brisbane, but left for London in 1951 where has lived ever since. He began to publish his poetry in the early 1960s. It has a witty cosmopolitan flavour, but individual poems deal with his attitude to his homeland. His poem on Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum is perhaps his best-known. To Porter, Australians appear as physical rather than cerebral people.

Solemn adultery at Breakfast Creek is an exercise in the ballad form, reminiscent of attempts at the genre by Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. It tells of a Greek boy who lived at Breakfast Creek, an inner-suburb of Brisbane, who has an affair with a married woman, kills her and then kills himself. The final stanzas of the poem consist of his suicide note,

Beauty, he wrote, is an acid that cuts
               The plate of the soul of man,
But love is a bullet in the guts
               And suspicion a five year plan.

I loved my panda when I was a boy
               And burned it to keep it pure,
You, my love, were more than a toy,
                Of you I had to be sure.

Tonight we will walk upon the stars,
               Tonight we’ll drink up the sea,
We’ll gobble the world like chocolate bars,
               And sit down with God to tea.

The teacups of heaven will tinkle and rock,
                The cats in the corridor purr,
Time will step down from the face of the clock
               When God invites us to pour.

And then on us both the rain will fall
               And wash us clean as the sky,
No one but us will exist at all
                And we’ll never have to die.

64. Hall, Rodney, 1935-

Forty beads on a hangman's rope : fragments of memory. ([Newnham, Tasmania] : Wattle Grove Press, [1963])

Rodney Hall was born in England but migrated to Australia where he graduated from the University of Queensland in 1971. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s he published several volumes of poetry. He was the poetry editor of The Australian from 1967 to 1978, and from 1972 to 1975, poetry advisor to Angus and Robertson, traditionally the major literary publisher in Australia. Since 1972 he has published fiction, and with Just Relations in 1982, established himself among the foremost Australian novelists.

His poetry is often witty and shows a considerable mastery of different verse forms. He specialises in the long sequence of short poems. The Law of Karma (1968) is perhaps the best example of this, but Forty beads on a hangman's rope shows that he was experimenting with this approach earlier in his career.

1970s

The 1970s was the most experimental period in modern Australian poetry. Early in the decade young poets published their works on gestetners and roneo machines supporting each other in groups in the inner cities, and on University campuses. In Melbourne there was an active set of writers around La Mama and the Pram Factory in Carlton. In Sydney they centred on Balmain, Paddington and Glebe.

65. Buckmaster, Charles, 1951-1972.

Deep blue and green; poems. [Selected by Michael Dugan.] ([Heidelberg West, Vic.] Crosscurrents, 1970)

Charles Buckmaster was involved in the La Mama poetry workshops, and was the editor of the magazine, The Great Auk. He was also involved in the drug scene, and his poems reflect the preoccupations of the period. Born in Gruyere in the Victorian countryside, he wrote about the natural values under threat from urban materialism. Sadly, he committed suicide when he was only 21, having published two volumes of poetry, Deep blue and green and The Lost Forest.

66. Dransfield, Michael, 1948-1973.

Streets of the long voyage. ([St. Lucia, Q.] University of Queensland Press [1970])

Michael Dransfield was also an habitue of the drug sub-culture. His third book was called, Drug poems (1972). He was however a much more prolific poet than Buckmaster and he certainly had a flair for capturing the flavour of this rather idealistic period. Streets of the long voyage was his first book. It was published in the first batch of "paperback poets" published by the University of Queensland Press, along with Rodney Hall’s Heaven, in a way, and David Malouf’s Bicycle and other poems. Poems such as "fix" must have seemed very alluring to young bohemians,

It is waking in the night,
after the theatres and before the milkman,
alerted by some signal from the golden drug tapeworm
that eats your flesh and drinks your peace.
…
probe for a vein, send the dream-transfusion out
on a voyage among your body machinery. Hits you like sleep –
sweet, illusory, fast, with a semblance of forever.
For a while the fires die down in you,
until you die down in the fires.
Once you have become a drug addict
you will never want to be anything else. (p. 52)

Michael Dransfield died of an overdose in 1973. Not all of his poetry is drug-related. He wrote lyrical descriptions of the countryside, and used urban imagery well, usually when writing of the flawed relationships between himself and those around him.

67. Adamson, Robert, 1943-

The Rumour. ([Sydney] : New Poetry, [c1971])

Much of Robert Adamson’s poetry is coloured by his early experiences in prison, although he also writes of the natural beauty of Double Bay, north of Sydney. Since the late sixties he has been the driving force behind the "New Australian Poetry" movement, through his influence as editor of New Poetry and Prism Books.

The Rumour, his second book, allows us to see the range of his thematic and stylistic preoccupations at the time. He was influenced by the American "tough-guy" style of modern poetry. Here is "Wow, Those Symbolists"

Rimbaud’s poems being taught in french schools
Morrell went on: came out of it
Okay to be in charge of the prison keys
Morrell says, tom raworth

Said: "I’ve been throwin’ people down and cuttin’
Their throats all my life I don’t know
What honour is. But if you wanna
Give me a chance to cut your throat why, alright

Like warm beer in a dovecote a million poems
Burn softly inside me. But then,
When I’ve carefully swallowed my dreams: I turn
After drinkin’ six cold beers

& pull myself together to relieve a bitter
need as sweetly as morrell
I piss towards the dark skies, very high & very
Far

French schools throwin’ kids down & cuttin’ poems
Okay I don’t know what honour is
To be in charge of prison keys rimbaud charges
Verlain for shootin’ him

In a dovecote I’ve carefully swallowed six beers
& if you wanna give me a chance
wow those symbolists (p. 9)

The title poem is quite a different work. In it Adamson considers poetic truth as akin to rumour. He invokes many of the modern American poets such as Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky, to help him in his search for enlightenment.

68. Ravlich, Robyn, 1949-

The black abacus / Robyn Ravlich. (Sydney : New Poetry, 1971)

Robyn Ravlich was born in Broken Hill but studied in Sydney where she established herself as part of the new poetry scene. This was her only volume of verse, although she also appeared in the 1972 collection, The poems again, published in Sydney by Cocorico, and in the 1974 Outback press anthology, Applestealers, edited by Robert Kenny. Robyn is working on a new collection of her work, and recently her poem, "The Black Abacus" was used as the basis of a science fiction novel, The White Abacus, by Damien Broderick.

The title poem is a description of Sydney and the literary and artistic set the poet frequented,

All the burnt places
hang out
through the town

& tell the poets
meet in them
Everyone

is discovering
art is made
from abandoned things

…

I’m still
knotting it together
but get distracted

Think of writing
a poem for my friends
comb my hair

& read the I Ching
Dream of being
able to quote Cocteau. (pp. 49, 51)

Since the mid-1970s Robyn has worked at the ABC as a producer of radiophonic, poetic features ("writing on tape") which explore people, place (real and imagined), politics and culture. She is Executive Producer and presenter of the innovative program "The Listening Room". broadcast on ABC Classic FM.

69. Hemensley, Kris, 1946-

Sulking in the seventies / [by] Kris Hemensley. (Clifton Hill, Vic. : Ragman Productions, 1975) Rigmarole of the hours ; 4

Kris Hemensley was born on the Isle of Wight and came to Melbourne in 1966. He was involved in the poetry workshops at La Mama and edited the magazine Our Glass. He went back to England in 1969 to 1972, where he edited Earth Ship and published some books of poetry. When he returned to Melbourne he edited The Ear in the Wheatfield and The Merri Creek or Nero, as well as Rigmarole of the Hours, and published several more volumes of verse and prose. The title poem of this book, Sulking in the seventies, begins,

there is no language for the present time.
we are vested with heartlessness. the
language of times past. neither recognition
at the theatre nor the jackpot for the line
that clicks. whatever are the right words?
my stuttered "quelle heurre est-il?" isn’t
heard by the galley of cool movers combing
each other’s auburn hanks thru their fingers
flicking that illicit ash all over the foyer’s
high pile. observe me merge with fantasy’s
skyline. they scan thru smoke & burn me there.

Kris now has a bookshop, Collected Works, in Melbourne, which specialises in poetry.

70. Hewett, Dorothy. 1923-

Rapunzel in suburbia / Dorothy Hewett. (Sydney : Prism, 1975)

Dorothy Hewett has established a reputation as novelist, poet and more recently as a playwright.

Rapunzel in Suburbia was a controversial publication. The poems deal mainly with the Dorothy Hewett’s personal relationships. Lloyd Davies, her first husband, brought a court case against her over the poem, "Uninvited guest"; as a result of this the book is still banned in her home state of Western Australia. It was withdrawn and re-issued without the offending poem. However, Davies then threatened action over four more of the poems and the book was completely removed from sale.

71. Lea, Shelton, 1946-

Drunk and the "Steve" poems ([Sydney, Pi O, 197-])

Shelton Lea’s first book of poetry appeared in 1962. During the 1960s he lived at Kings Cross in Sydney, later coming to live in Melbourne, where he was part of the Heide set. He was associated with Barrett Reid on Overland. Shelton has long been prominent on the Australian poetry scene, encouraging other writers and helping to get them published. He regularly performs his works, sometimes in conjunction with a jazz group. He has a bookshop, De Havilland on Wellington, in Clifton Hill, an inner suburb of Melbourne where he specialises in poetry books.

The book on display was published in Sydney on a copier by Pi O. It consists of two poems. This is from "Drunk",

At the empty streets of morning pattering
To the eternity of the last cries of child
Hood of innocence parks sway like dizzy
Visions like the cracked photographs of the past
Swings the eternal perambulators of the arse sway ever so gently in the winds amazed
In the middle of life I begin to think of
Childish things like how to climb to the moon
Or swim across the oceans of the world
Adventures bloom like flowers dreams dream
Hands pass over the gentle fur of grass on forgotten lawns

72. Tranter, John, 1943-

Dazed in the ladies lounge : poems / by John Tranter. (Sydney : Island Press, 1979)

John Tranter is Sydney writer. He and John Forbes are perhaps the most polished of the modern Australian poets. Both were influenced by the American poetic tradition traced through Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery and the New York school. Their poetry is very cool and often ironic, with quirky imagery which appeals to an audience with sensibilities formed in the late 1960s and 1970s.

For Forbes and Tranter, poetry is meant to be enjoyed, but you must catch all the allusions to be in on the joke. Here is the beginning of his "Ode to Col Joye",

You open your eyes and realise
It’s the morning of a summer’s day in Sydney
And it’s going to be – not a John Betjeman day,
Though you can hear church bells
               Faintly across Annandale,
And not a John Forbes day, though
the first thing you notice is your suntan lotion
On the dressing table beside a beach towel
Decorated with a crude scene of coconut palms
               And a jet bomber
Pencilling a faint vapour trail
               Across a Malayan sky
                                                  no,
not one of those days, and you think about
               the exact shape of your headache
and the taste of the first disprin of the day
and you wonder if it will be fine or cloudy
               and then
the hollow yet insistent sound of a Coke can
               rolling along the gutter
fills you in –
                    it’s a Ken Bolton day!
                                                  and,
as if to underline the accuracy of the hesitance
of your mental sketch of the approach
               to the definition of the day itself
a paperboy shouts something like
                                        New York!
               New York!
(you’re not sure … perhaps "No Work?")
               and when you get up
wearing your shortie pyjamas
               you find a note on the kitchen table
                              on a sheet of blue and white paper
to say that Bill and Kerry have gone to the beach,
               and after that
a lunch party at Anna’s, hard-edge
               coloured cocktails!
to which no one will be invited! You
                                         gasp
as the water gushes
                                    cold out of the shower –
it’s enough
                                        to be having a shower
                                                  in the hot
blue summer morning in Sydney, an ambience
that no Melbourne poet will ever appreciate,
               and you almost
blame them for that! But "blame" is very
               un-Sydney, so you
smile and finish your shower (p. 57-58)

 

73. Forbes, John, 1950-1998.

On the beach / [by] John Forbes. (Sydney : Sea Cruise Books, 1977)

John Forbes won the Poetry Society of Australia award in 1972 for his sequence, "Four Heads & how to do them" published in New Poetry. He was born and died in Melbourne, but spent much of his writing career in Sydney.

The cover design of On the beach is referred to in the Tranter poem quoted above. It is in the style of Forbes’s poetry magazine, Surfers Paradise. His poem "Rrose Selavy – for Julie Rose" begins with a quote from that coolest of seventies groups, Steely Dan. It is a love poem which communicates the poet’s rapture

                                             with Julie

               more luminous than a burning patio/
                         more tasteful
                    than a day at the Zoo.
…
                          More precise than a stocking,
               Julie lounges at the pool
She moves like a heatwave in December. It’s the year slipping by
it’s the strange coast of Mozambique I’ve never seen-
                                   No, it’s Julie
                                             buying a blazer.

 

1980s

74. Hart, Kevin, 1954-

Your shadow (poems 1980-83) / Kevin Hart. (Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1984.

Kevin Hart was born in London and was educated at ANU. He is currently a Professor in the English Department at Monash University where he teaches modern literary theory. His first volume of poetry, The Convert : three sonnets, appeared in 1975. He has written a book on A.D. Hope (1992) and is the editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (1994).

The book includes four separate poems entitled "Your shadow" and one called, "Your shadow’s songs". They deal with the fear of death. This is from one of the title-poems,

Not the one in mirrors,
not the one shut up in photographs,
not the one who feels her hand at night,
not the one who trusts in words –

The one without a face,
who sways with your each movement, the snake charmer;
who keeps his ear to the ground,
who puts on circus stilts when evening comes.

This is the one
the sun has given you for company;
a fallen guardian angel,
a butterfly stuck to its chrysalis,

…

one day you will become
that other man, the silent one, the one in black. (p. 25)

 

75. Scott, John A., 1948-

Smoking / John A. Scott. (Melbourne : Scripsi, 1983)

John A. Scott was also born in England. He has worked in Australia lecturing in media studies and has published several volumes of poetry. However, since the 1980s he has increasingly turned his attention to writing novels.

Smoking was published as a supplement to an issue of the Melbourne literary magazine Scripsi. Scott is a very shrewd judge of people’s motives as revealed by their mannerisms, a skill he uses to good purpose in his novels. This is the first stanza of the title poem, "Smoking",

She "owed him" too much, her wild and ugly man. Her
Violent man. Swapping that mute endurance for something
Ten years ago; she’d never say. And if you asked her how
Things were, she’d take a little long to say "they’re fine", or
Light a cigarette – her waking hours saved for cigarettes –
"…fine"; and the nervous catapult of ash: all you ever
know or guess about people. (p. 19)

76. Biarujia, Javant.

Warrior dolls / by Javant Biarujia. (Melbourne : Nosukumo, 1982)

Warrior dolls was published by Nosukumo, a small Melbourne press which operated until recently from Labassa, a National Trust house in Caulfield. Javant Biarujia was the guiding force in Nosukumo. The publications are invariably handsome, often with a Japanese flavour to their design, particularly in the choice of papers, and style of decoration. Javant’s latest ventures have been in the field of drama. His prize-winning play "Comfort" is currently being produced at the Glen Eira Arts Complex in Melbourne.

Javant writes openly about his homosexuality. Here is one of his more sweetly restrained poems, "Le beau est toujours bizarre",

David
Frangipani giver
I feel like a virgin each time
Stolen kisses in arcanum
A naif lover who prefers to kiss shadows (p. 33)

77. Cowley, Des.

Involution / Des Cowley. (Mooroolbark, Vic. : Post Neo Publications, c1986)

This is Des Cowley’s only literary publication to date. Born in Sydney, Des now lives in Melbourne where he is in charge of the Rare Printed Collections at the State Library of Victoria. He has published a number of journal articles on Australian history and literature. Des has a strong interest in jazz, and is a regular contributor to the music magazine Rhythms. He was fiction editor of Overland Extra, the new writing supplement to Overland, and was one of the judges for the 1998 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for fiction.

Involution is a volume of prose poems, most of which seem to induct the reader into the poet’s dreams. The two-part poem "Eye of the painter’ is, however, a meditation on the act of creation in art as it relates to life. The second part begins,

If I had thought it permanent I would have abandoned the effort by now, thrown myself to the uncertainty of the first unattainable image, the painting that sat there before me, offering the past as if it were nothing more than a learned vocabulary. For every time I touched the outline of the canvas I was reminded again of the complicity of eyes and words in the act of seeing, a terrifying conjunction of body and language the nature of whose ambiguity propelled me forward to seek out my dreams in the bodies of others. The humiliating communion we found ourselves in was proof again of the inability of the flesh to make real the visions carefully wrought prior to the act of seeing. (p. 49)

Post-Neo Publications was run by the poet, Pete Spence. His philosophy is to encourage "experimentalism". He is most interested in the non-narrative style, particularly writing influenced by elements of Dada, Surrealism, Concrete Poetry, and the contemporary American Language School.

78. Sasnaitis, Jurate.

Sketches / Jurate Sasnaitis. (Melbourne : Nosukumo, 1989)

Jurate Sasnaitis is a Melbourne poet and artist. Currently she runs Greville Street Bookstore which specialises in contemporary design, music, and literature, and in the latest American publications. Her Sketches was published by Javant Biarujia’s Nosukumo Press.

As with Des Cowley, Jurate writes prose poetry. Here, in the beginning of one of her "Sketches", she describes the self-awareness involved in adopting an image,

The search was long and thorough before I found a face of which I could approve, the one bent forward as if animated by conversation, a cigarette resting carelessly between the fingers close to the smiling mouth, the casual air, and thought with relief that I would have no cause to be embarrassed should I ever be likened to this face. The shadows were deep on the dress but I recognised palm-fronds and the fall of silk beneath the elbows leaning on the covered knees. I couldn’t imagine whether the emotion felt by this face compared to mine, but so much else was similar. (p. 23)

1990s

79. Strauss, Jennifer, 1933-

Tierra del Fuego : new and selected poems / by Jennifer Strauss. (Altona North, Vic. : Pariah Press, [1997])

Jenny Strauss is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Monash. She published her first volume of verse in 1975. Tierra del Fuego is her fifth book of poems. She has also written Stop laughing! I’m being serious (1990), a study of three modern poets, Judith Wright, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and John Forbes; and is the editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems (1993).

Her perceptive images of relationships are often disturbingly accurate. Here is "The Melancholic at the Dinner Party", one of the new poems in this collection,

Watching her love in animated talk
She’s overcome to see
That glowing territory of otherness
Ignite with all
Its fiery first attraction;

Averts her gaze, as if afraid
A speaking look might cry:
Remember me!
Aquarius the waterbearer,
Quencher of flames

Sadness drags at her spirit’s gut,
A menstrual pain
that will not bleed away
but cramps and grinds.
"How long" she asks impassively, "can love

survive the dwindling of desire?"
The conversation hiccups,
Rejects this tasteless morsel,
Flows again. She knows
The answer must be sweated out in silence. (p. 13-14)

80. Kefala, Antigone. 1935-

Absence / [Antigone Kefala, Peter Lyssiotis]. ([East Burwood, Vic.] : Masterthief Enterprises, 1990)

Antigone Kefala was born in Romania of Greek parentage. She has been writing poetry and novels since the 1970s. Absence is a single poem dealing with death. It is illustrated in sympathetic fashion by the Greek-Cypriot writer and surrealist photographer, Peter Lyssiotis.

81. Duggan, Laurie. 1949-

Adventures in paradise / by Laurie Duggan. (North Adelaide : Little Esther Books, 1991)

Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949. He is a former student of Monash University. His first book of poetry, East: Poems 1970-1974, (1976) won the Anne Elder Poetry Award. The Ash Range, (1987), a documentary, epic poem about Gippsland, won the 1988 Victorian Premier's ANZ New Writing award. In 1987 Laurie took part in an Australia Council sponsored reading tour of the USA, and Canada. He was until recently the poetry editor of Meanjin, but now has left Melbourne to live in the Blue Mountains.

Adventures in Paradise first appeared in 1982, published by Ken Bolton’s Magic Sam. This 1991 revised edition was also published by Ken Bolton, through his imprint, Little Esther Books.

It includes satirical sequences of poems, "The Great Tradition" and "The New Australian Poetry, Now!" in which he satirises his predecessors and contemporaries including Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Hope and Les Murray (and Kevin Hart). The title poem is autobiographical. Here are the stanzas where he describes his time at Monash.

I raged at Monash in check pants and black
roll neck jumper. This was the age of "progressive
rock". Someone got into trouble for staging
a mock crucifixion outside the Union Caf.
The vice-chancellor sputtered about the disinterested
Pursuit of knowledge. I stopped copying Keats

And started to copy William Carlos Williams:
The absurd sonnet turned into the stick poem.
Lots of grown up poets visited the university
And read to the Lit. Club, all pissed on flagon sherry.
Chris Wallace Crabbe competed with billiards
Near the billiard room and the billiards won.

Some of the other poetry was more fun,
Like Robert King dancing to bongo drums
And ripping his shirt off, or when B. A. Breen
Read concrete poems with repeated words and when
An old academic asked him his definition of verse
Rob Smyth chanted POETRY POETRY POETRY. (p. 11-12)

82. Pi O, 1951-

24 hours / by Pi O. (Melbourne : Collective Effort Press, 1996)

Pi O’s full name is Peter Oustabasidis. Pi O’s poetry, especially in 24 hours, his major work to date, deals with the migrant experience in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Much of it is written phonetically, to convey the accents of the people speaking.

Here is a description of the poet’s visit to a friend who has to appear in court the next day, over possession of stolen goods,

          And then he realised he didn’t have
          a "clock" (so he could get-Up in the morning) an’ started to panic!
          He asked me, if I had one!
I said: No!
          I told him
I could try an’ come round (in the
          Morning) an’ wake him up
If he wanted, and he said, he had a BETTA
          Idea … an’ scrambled across
The floor, up to the phone
          An’ rang-Up the local radio station
He was listening to.
          He told the bloke (on the other end
Of the phone) he was a HOPELESS WOG
          Who had to get-Up (in the
Morning) to go to court, an’ could they
          Yell-out: "WAKE UP GEORGE!" (at
7 o’clock) so he could get-Up
          …only,
the bloke (on the other end
          of the phone) told him
he had a BETTA idea: DON’T GO TO SLEEP! He said
          an’ hung-Up! (p. 463-464)

Pi O has edited a number of poetry magazines such as Fitzrot, Born to Concrete, and 9.2.5, and is a familiar figure at poetry readings.

83. Sometimes, Alicia.

Starstuff / Alicia Sometimes. (Melbourne : Phree Press, 1998)

Alicia Sometimes is a Melbourne poet who participates in readings around the inner city at venues such as The Lounge in Swanston Street and the Barracuda Bar in Smith Street, Collingwood. Her poems appear in such magazines as Voiceworks. For a poem to work at a reading it is best that it be short and that it deals with some easily-recognisable situation, for example, "An Argument",

i know you know me
when i come home
not to
roses or tulips or wattle
or petunias or cacti

but a vase
filled with the stargazing lily. (p. 28)

84. Armand, Louis, 1972-

Seances / Louis Armand. (Prague : Twisted Spoon Press, 1998)

Louis Armand was born in Sydney, but since mid-1994 he has lived and worked in the Czech Republic where he has co-ordinated x-poezie, a poetry performance venue in the centre of Prague. In June 1997 he was awarded the Max Harris poetry award in Adelaide. Seances is his first book of poetry. Currently he is poetry editor of the Prague Review.

Cocaine is once again the fashionable drug. Slessor had written of it in Darlinghurst Nights in the early 1930s. In "Pays de Cocaine", Armand describes the experience more personally than does Slessor in his poem, "Snowdrops",

Time stops through the ice inert
As a lovers hand exhausted by pretence
Cut off from any gesture of denial

You fade / outside is memory
Scarcely real a frozen island of air

Or suffocation or inevitability encloses
In a narrow space / beguiles
With et ceteras & alibis

The time it takes to adjust
A guilty truth in a pale reflection …

None of this matters though
If you can breathe underwater
Like houdini / counting the seconds
Between impossible escapes (p. 65)

85. Ghazarian, Nicolette

[manuscript volume of poems]

The next generation of young poets are now in their teens. They are yet to be published, but they go to the venues where poetry readings are held, contribute to ‘zines, or put their works on the Internet.

Nicolette is fifteen but has been writing poetry for some years. Her poems have been broadcast on Bayside FM radio. The themes include growing-up. In the poem, "Oh, to wear red stockings again", she thinks about at her younger sister,

I look at the dog that you’ve traced from your kiddy colouring book
               And I wish I had crayons again.
…
I want to spend my classtime jumping on a trampoline.
Now, the closest I get is fitness training in P.E.
I want to make pots of steaming soup and drink it out
of plastic cups with slurpy childlike happiness.
The closest I get is tasteless home ec. pasta sauce.
And I want to go to the zoo instead of a geology excursion.
…
               So I make celery and peanut butter
Sailboats for your lunch and grip the knife too
tightly.

You wear the outfits that I want to wear.
Like pleated pink and purple shirts and sometimes
You wear red stockings and they itch.
You’re so anxious to wear those kiddy bras – you know
The ones without proper straps.
And I want to tell you to enjoy your pink bows
On singlets while you can because "you’ll grow up soon enough."
I want to suspend you in time; leave you hanging by your pigtails.
But I can’t.
So I plait my hair into pigtails and crawl around
With you on the grass pretending to be a tiger.

Poetry Magazines

Australia has a long history of literary periodicals. In the 19^th century there were numerous periodicals modelled on the serious quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review and the Westminster Review. Henry Gyles Turner, who was involved in many of them either as editor or contributor, wrote two articles giving details of how they failed for lack of support. (Library Record of Australasia, vol. 1, no. 2, July 1901; and vol. 1, no. 3, Oct. 1901)

The story of the period under review here is fairly similar. Many were well-produced, with high quality contributions but, with the notable exceptions of Meanjin, Southerly, Quadrant, and Overland, lasted only a few issues or at most, a few years.

86. Vision : a literary quarterly / edited by Frank C. Johnson,

Jack Lindsay and Kenneth Slessor. (Sydney, N.S.W. : The Vision Press, 1923-1924) 4 v.

The outstanding periodical from the 1920s was Norman Lindsay’s Vision. It was partly an attempt to escape from the parochialism of the Bulletin school of Australian outback verse and partly an attack on modernism. The alternative it endorsed was Lindsay’s vision of pagan vitality symbolised by fauns and satyrs. The Australian setting was not congenial to this old-world pantheon, and Vision lasted less than a year.

87. The Spinner: an Australasian magazine of verse.

(Melbourne: Edward A. Vidler, 1924-1927) 3 v. Editor: R.A. Broinowski. Issued in annual volumes titled: Poetry in Australasia. Continues: Poetry, continued by Verse.

The Spinner published mainstream, traditional verse by poets such as Zora Cross, Dorothea Mackellar, William Baylebridge, and Furnley Maurice.

88. Stream. ([Melbourne : Stream], 1931). 3 numbers.

Editor, Cyril Pearl, Poetry editor, Bertram Higgins.

There were three issues only, from July to September 1931. This was a progressive literary magazine with the poetry showing the influence of T. S. Eliot and the free verse movement in general. It also included articles on art, written by Melbourne bookshop owner, Gino Nibbi, and on censorship in Australia, by Cyril Pearl.

Continuing a theme dealt with above, in poems by Slessor and Armand, here is "Cocaine", a poem by Pandolph Golding.

fog
creeps through the attic
of my brain
where dreams
like broken toys
lie scattered

                once … things mattered …

life was a scintillant socratic
dialogue
                an equipoise
between cold thought and candentbright desire

life has become a dull insistent noise
an old man mumbling by a burntout fire

               once … things mattered …

there was god and the devil and sin
chance and design
the wicked and the just
insinuant music and wine
laughter and faces and lust
and winder
and strife

                once … these things mattered …

now brain and body rust
like an empty petrol tin
              and life
is a slapstick mummer with a battered
tophat and a mirthless grin (no. 1, Aug. 1931, p. 29)

89. Manuscripts : the Book Nook miscellany.

(Geelong [Vic.] : Book Nook, [1931-1935]) 13 v. Subtitle varies: No. 3 (Nov. 1932)-No. 11 (Nov. 25, 1934); A miscellany of art and letters. No. 12 (1935) A quarterly of art and letters. No. 1 contains original signed and numbered woodcut and linocut prints. Editor; No. 1 (1931)-no. 11 (1934) Harry Tatlock Miller, No. 12 (1934)-no. 13 (1935) Harry Tatlock Miller and A.C. Jackson. From No. 4 (1933)-no. 11 (Nov. 1934) published "at the Bookshop, Geelong". No. 12 (Feb. 1935)-no. 13 (May1935) published "at the Bookshop of Margareta Webber, Melbourne".

Manuscripts was a magazine devoted to art as much as to literature. It was finely produced and included woodcut and linocut prints. The aim was to cultivate a high level of taste in its audience. It included articles and wood-cuts by Margaret Preston. and other contemporary Australian artists. The final two issues included a column by Hirsch Munz on contemporary European literature. Issues 10, 11, and 12 included bibliographies of A. G. Stephens, John Le Gay Brereton, and Christopher Brennan respectively. Poets published included Leon Gellert, Myra Morris, and C. R. Jury.

90. Thyrsus : an Australian magazine of verse.

(Newcastle, N.S.W, Bert Birtles, 1935)

Only two numbers of this magazine appeared, in March and May 1935. After that, Bert and Dora Birtles, the editor, and one his main contributors, left for Greece.

91. Chapbook : an Australian magazine.

(Adelaide : Chapbook Committee, 1935-1936 (Adelaide : Hassell Press) 2 v.

Chapbook was a finely produced Adelaide magazine, notable for its lino-cut illustrations, and for the fact that Rex Ingamells used the word "Jindyworobak" for the first time in no. 2.

Jindyworobak

"Jindyborobak" is an aboriginal word, which means "to annex, to join". It should appropriately indicate what I have tried to do in the poems published here: namely, to express something of the Australian place spirit which baffles expression in English words, so often strongly coloured by European associations. The native words I have chosen seem to me to have in them much of the striking quality of Australian primevalism.

The strange music inherent in "jindyneelingo", meaning "gaunt", "bararang" meaning "ghost", "billadurra" and "erragodin", meaning "platypus" and "waterhole", and "moonawathimeering" meaning "land of the lost" should be apparent. … (p. 23)

There follow three poems illustrating this new approach to the vocabulary of Australian literature. The third of them is entitled, "Moonawathimeering",

Into moonawathimeering,
                Where atninga dare not tread,
Leaving wurly for a wilban,
                Tallabilla, you have fled.

Wombalunga curses, waitjurk –
               Though we cannot break the ban,
And follow tchidna any further
               After one-time karaman.

Far in moonawathimeering,
               Safe from wallan darrenderong,
Tallabilla waitjurk, wander
               Silently the whole day long.

Go with only lilliri
               To walk along beside you there,
While douran-douran voices wail
               And karaworo beats the air. (p. 25)

Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky" springs to mind.

92. Venture : an Australian literary quarterly.

(Adelaide : Hassell Press, 1937)

Venture was a Jindyworobak magazine. The movement was launched in the first issue with the editor, Rex Ingamell’s manifesto, "Concerning environmental values".

93. Garchooka : a magazine for Australian boys, / editor, Rex Ingamells.

(Adelaide : Jindyworobak Publications, 1945)

This was an attempt to broaden the Jindyworobak appeal to the children’s market. Rex Ingamells explains that "Garchooka is an Aboriginal name for a Cockatoo. It is pronounced GAR-choo-KAR" (p.1) The magazine lasted only one issue, April 1945. It included a poem by Ingamells on the aborigines, "Forgotten people".

94. Southerly : the magazine of the Australian English

Association, Sydney. (Sydney : Australasian Medical Publishing Co., 1939- )

Southerly has always been closely associated with Sydney University and usually publishes poetry of a mainstream character. It also includes scholarly articles on Australian literature. Keneth Slessor was the editor from 1956 to 1961.

95. Angry Penguins.

([Adelaide] : Adelaide University Arts Association, 1940-1946) Published by The Hassell Press, nos 1-3; by Reed & Harris nos. 4-9. 9 nos.

Angry Penguins was originally published in Adelaide, but with number four, it moved to Melbourne. Max Harris was the editor. When in Melbourne, it was published by Harris and John Reed. Angry Penguins specialised in avant-garde, surrealist art and literature, and took advantage of the fact that during the war, there were among the American soldiers stationed in Australia, some poets. Harry Roskolenko, for example, started a New York office when he returned to the US in 1944.

The magazine is most famous for its Autumn 1944, "Ern Malley number" devoted to the poems of the spurious Ern Malley.

The journal’s title comes from a line in one of Max Harris’s poems, "drunks, the angry penguins of the night".

96. Angry Penguins broadsheet.

([Melbourne : Reed & Harris, 1946)

This was a supplement to Angry Penguins, and survived its parent by a few months. Ten numbers only appeared, from January to December 1946.

97. Meanjin papers.

(Brisbane : C. Christesen, ([1940]-1946) (Brisbane : Meanjin Press, spring 1942-<summer 1944>; Carlton, Victoria : Melbourne University Press, <autumn 1945>-summer 1946.) Continued by Meanjin.

Meanjin is still the leading Australian literary periodical. It began as Meanjin Papers in Brisbane but the editors moved to Melbourne in 1945, where the publication was taken over by Melbourne University Press.

98. Barjai : a meeting place for youth.

(Brisbane : [Barjai Publishing Service], 1943-1946)

"A bimonthly magazine designed to further cultural activity among the youth of today." Subtitle varies: no. 14-no. 17: the youth literary magazine; no. 19-no. ?: Creative youth; no. 23: magazine of creative youth. Continues: Senior tabloid.

This magazine began among the Senior students at Brisbane State High School, but became an independent magazine for writers under 21. Barrett Reid was one of the main people behind it. He was also involved with Meanjin and later came to Melbourne, where he joined the group around John and Sunday Reed at Heide. Barrett eventually became the editor of Overland.

99. Australian new writing : short stories, poetry, criticism.

(Sydney : Current Book Distributors, 1943-1946) Editors: Katharine Susannah Prichard, George Farwell and Bernard Smith.

This periodical was bas