Tag Archives: anthology

Queersland

Posted on 15 Oct 2025 | 2 comments

Rod Goodbun and Edwina Shaw (editors), Queersland (AndAlso Press 2025)

Disclosure: Edwina Shaw, co-editor of Queersland, is my niece. The anthology includes a personal essay by her in which I am mentioned, as well as my mother, my brother and other close family members. Members of my extended family make cameo appearances in other essays, with some names changed.

Queersland‘s back cover describes it as made up of ‘stories from queer Queensland writers spanning 80 years of dynamic social histories, as varied as the landscape itself’. True, there is a story of covert male homosexuality during World War Two, a poignant tale of secret love between men in a 1960s country town, and a couple of 21st century pieces dealing with gender-fluidity. But the book’s main subject is the extraordinary flourishing of the queer activism, creativity and community in south-east Queensland under the ‘corrupt, repressive, authoritarian, anti-feminist, anti-queer’ government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the 1980s (the adjectives are from ‘Imagine Living in a World …’ by Chantal Eastwell and Karin Cheyne) and the tentative easing of anti-queer laws under his successor as premier, Wayne Goss, in the early 1990s.

Drug-fuelled teenage ‘naughtiness’ on the dance floor, flamboyant costumes, demonstrations, police brutality, the AIDS epidemic, a world of music, intergenerational tensions, First Nations voices, Inkahoots screen-printing company, censorship, the Brisbane Pride Collective, coming-out stories that still feel raw more than 40 years after the event, the Women’s House rape crisis line, intersectionality, tragedy, exhilaration, the growing awareness of gender issues: this is an amazing piece of social history told by a multitude of voices (roughly 40, to be literal) with passion, humour, and above all a sense of community.

A dozen illustrations capture both the flamboyance and the seriousness of the stories. Though I’m a committed lover of books-as-objects, I am sorry this one couldn’t include videos. Several mentions of Lance Leopard sent me searching for the new romantic synthpop band the Megamen – and I found a magnificent, blurred video of ‘Designed for Living‘ from 1983 that makes a beautiful exo-illustration of the book.

I have come to Queersland as a rank outsider. Almost all its cultural references drew blanks with me, and not just the pop music ones. There’s a foreword by Darren Hayes. It’s an elegant and pointed coming-out story, but I couldn’t see why it was featured as a foreword – which I would have seen, of course, if I’d heard of Savage Garden. I know of Kris Kneen, have heard them speak and read reviews of their work, even clapped eyes on them at Brisbane’s Avid Reader bookshop, but ‘Something Other’, the most literary piece in the book, and w-a-a-a-y too much information in any other context, is my introduction to their writing. The other familiar name is Steve MinOn, whose novel First Name Second Name I blogged about recently: his memories of watching a John Travolta movie (Ah, a reference I did recognise!) in Proserpine in ‘Saturday Night Poofta’ confirm my suspicion that the zombie hero of his novel might share some of his own history.

The story of LGBTQI+ communities in Australia often focuses on Sydney and the 1978 Mardi Gras. The Queensland history is just as interesting. This book tells it beautifully.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I have been privileged to live for decades, though I did live on the outskirts of Meanjin, on Turrbal land, for two years. I acknowledge Elders of those countries past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Pádraig Ó Tuama’s 44 Poems

Posted on 8 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Pádraig Ó Tuama, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection (Cannongate Books 2025)

Books are risky gifts. I’m very glad the friend who gave me this one took the plunge.

It’s a collection of 44 poems, with commentary. I stumbled across an online review that said something like, ‘The poems are excellent, but I could have done without the commentary. It would probably be helpful for people who are learning how to read poetry.’

With all due respect, that person needs to have another look. It’s true, all 44 poems in this anthology are excellent, but the commentary isn’t there to help the ignorant (though it might do that): Pádraig Ó Tuama is a warm, charming, reader companion. Rather than assuming his readers are incompetent, needing to be instructed in the art of reading, he tells us how he reads poems himself – bringing to them his own history, knowledge and concerns, and by implication inviting his readers to do likewise. In a time when so much writing about poetry comes from the more esoteric corners of academia, his is fresh, conversational, smart, humble and completely engaging.

The anthology is an offshoot of the podcast, Poetry Unbound, and follows its format. First there’s a single page, printed white on black, in which Ó Tuama sets up a context with a personal anecdote or a reflection on life or literature. Then there’s the poem, followed by several pages of discussion. Ó Tuama finishes each podcast with a second reading of the poem, which readers of the book are of course free to do. I love the podcast, and I love the book.

Ó Tuama isn’t out to create a canon of ‘best’ poems. He may have what Trumpians would call an undeclared DEI agenda. Most of his poets are from non-mainstream groups of one kind or another: LGBTQI+, Native Americans, African heritage and other People of Colour, people with disabilities. A couple of poems are translated from other languages. But it’s far from being an exercise in box-ticking inclusiveness. There’s a clue in the book’s title – these poems are gathered from a wonderfully diverse range of poets, and together they create a sense of what it is to be together on this planet.

If I were to stick to my practice of writing about page 78*, I’d now look at the discussion of the shortest poem in the book, written by its most mainstream poet – ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ by Mary Oliver. But instead, I want to go to pages 310 to 315. The poem is ‘The Change Room’ by Andy Jackson. It’s the book’s only Australian poem, but my reason for focusing on it is that I already know it well, and have discussed it in this blog. Here’s a link where you can read the poem and, if you want, my discussion of it. (For those who don’t click: the poem consists of seven three-line stanzas and a two-liner. The poem’s speaker has three encounters at a swimming pool: a young child asks about his physical shape, a woman admires his tattoos, and a man chats with him in the shower after his swim.)

Ó Tuama’s introductory page, just 11 lines, tells us how the poem is personal to him. ‘Where do you carry shame in your body?’ he begins. And he ends:

The story of my body’s relationship to my own body – and the bodies of others – is a poem that’s asking for my attention.

You wouldn’t know from this that ‘The Change Room’ deals with disability or marked physical difference. Ó Tuama approaches it, as he does all the poems, from the standpoint of a shared humanity – a ‘being together’.

After rereading his discussion just now, I had another look at my blog post (here’s the link again), and I like the conversation we’re having.

We both discuss the rich ambiguity of the title of the book the poem comes from, Human Looking. Ó Tuama adds a reference to the tagline of Andy Jackson’s website, which includes the phrase ‘a body shaped like a question mark’, and relates that to the children’s questions in the poem. He pays close attention to the language:

In ‘The Change Room’ we read of nostrils, skin, tattoos, gaits, swimming, floating, showering, nakedness, proximity, speaking: all parts, functions and experiences of the body, all vehicles for body language, all ways in which the body is in conversation with itself and others.

Both of us puzzled over the poem’s last line, ‘Speaking, our bodies become solid.’ On rereading my blog post I quite like what I wrote about it, even if my reference to the Latin Mass may be a bit idiosyncratic. Here’s what Ó Tuama writes, to give you a taste of his prose:

‘Bodies’ here are held in a plural pronoun ‘our’. Why have they become solid? Were they not before? Were they fluid, or see-through, or gaseous? Perhaps solid is meant as the antonym for unreliable. The final stanza is composed only of two lines, in comparison with the seven tercets that preceded it. The missing third line of the last invites, perhaps, buoyancy, nature, exchange, consideration among all the bodies in, and reading a poem about, ‘The change room’. The poem asserts a shameless body-knowledge it establishes for itself.

I love the way he draws our attention to the precision of the language, and then the way, like Andy Jackson’s missing last line, he opens out to possibilities, rather than closing down on a particular reading.

I recommend this book, for yourself or as a gift to someone who likes a bit of poetry – for the poems, and for the companionship of the editor.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, under an almost cloudless sky and feeling the chill from a mildly bitter wind. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

 

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Dombóvár, the anthology

Posted on 21 May 2025 | Leave a comment

Hunter Writers’Centre, Dombóvár: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2024 (Hunter Writers’ Centre 2024)

On its web page, the Newcastle Poetry Prize describes itself as the most prestigious poetry competition in Australia. Few people would disagree.

The Hunter Writers’ Centre has coordinated the prize since 2002, and it publishes an anthology every year that includes the prize winning poem, the runners up, a number of subsidiary prize winners and a selection of other submissions.

As the 2024 judges Caitlin Maling and Peter Boyle, each with their own impressive list of prizes, point out, a distinctive feature of the prize is that poems up to 200 lines are accepted. And most of the poems in this anthology are of substantial length – the shortest is 27 lines. The anthology is a rare opportunity to read a selection of longer poems from a wide range of Australian poets.

As my regular readers know, I read quite a lot of poetry, if not enough to call myself a critic. I was happy to read poems here by people whose work I respond to:

  • Mark Tredinnick, whose ‘A Godwit Sonnet Cycle’ won the Hunter Writers’ Centre Member Award
  • B. R. Dionysius, whose three-line stanzas in ‘Fishbone Ferns’ give us scenes from life on the Darling Downs – ‘it can be quite WW1 out on the downs, bodies / hung up on barbed wire, left to rot as a sign to / others – don’t try it, don’t cross into no man’s.’
  • Brendan Ryan, with another of his wonderful cow poems, ‘The snaking accuracy of cow trails’
  • Kathryn Lomer, with ‘Hyaenia song’, a narrative poem set in Ethiopia.

And there’s the immediate reason that I bought a copy, Christopher (Kit) Kelen’s ‘Dombóvár’, which won the prize and gave its name to the anthology. I don’t envy the judges their task, but they’ve chosen well with ‘Dombóvár’, which evokes the small Hungarian town that Kit Kelen’s family come from (at least that’s how I read the poem).

I can’t do better than quote the judges (a PDF of their report is available at this link, and is worth reading in full):

‘Dombóvár’ skilfully integrates thoughtful reflection on important issues, humour, inventiveness and an engaging partly colloquial tone. This evocation of small town rural Hungary carries echoes of the moral ambiguities and violence of settler societies like Australia. Throughout the poem there is the suggestion of a larger, potentially national, narrative, but the reader is left to work through the weave themselves … With great skill the poem breaks standard idioms and expected word choices to produce a clipped, very tight effect that intensifies the reader’s experience. ‘Dombóvár’ uses the form of a poem sequence to powerful effect, shaping a masterful poem that can be read on multiple levels.

this is the land of forgive ourselves
for all we've done, will do

There’s lots more in the anthology. To be true to my page 78* practice, I’ll mention ‘The Keeper of the Field’ by Mal McKimmie (pages 74–80). It’s one of several sonnet sequences in the anthology, and a quick web search informs me that it’s far from being the only one written by Mal McKimmie.

The sequence is prefaced by a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, and I’m guessing that the ideas it explores are related to Hinduism: the field is (crudely speaking) the mind, and it is populated by sheep (ideas? poems?). The sonnets circle around the notion of an empty field – mind empty of thought, perhaps. In the two sonnets on page 78, the sequence moves forward to the notion that all fields (all minds?) are connected – we are not the isolated individuals that we think we are in the West. That might sound abstract and difficult, but the poems are remarkably lucid. Here, ripped from its context, is one of the two on page 78 to give you a taste:

Did I say this field has a fence? Well, it 
doesn't anymore. It seems the fence came 
down, was taken down, or disappeared 
with the sheep, as if they were interdependent 
(I faintly recall a lyric passing 
through here, singing something along these lines).
Given the absence of a fence, where is 
the distinction between this field and another?
Do I tend a disappearing border?

Leaves of grass, field to field, lean in sympathy, 
mirror each other; flowers too; even 
weeds copy their kin; creepers creep towards 
each other; and roots, well, roots have always known: 
nothing is alone, nothing under the sun.

if the poem is exploring ideas from Hinduism, it manages to remind us that the quintessential North American poet Walt Whitman was in similar territory – his poem ‘Song of Myself’ includes lines like ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’ And recent science about tree roots supplies the poem with a beautiful metaphor for interconnectedness.

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Growing up Aboriginal in Australia

Posted on 11 Jul 2021 | 6 comments

Anita Heiss (editor), Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (Black Inc 2018)

I’m coming to this book late, but it’s a book that will remain fresh for a long time yet.

It contains 52 essays from First Nations people of Australia. The range of contributors is huge: people from all parts of Australia, urban and remote, from Cape York to the Western Australian wheat belt; some who are household names, some who should be, and some who live quiet lives far from the limelight; people who were strongly connected to culture and community as children and people who discovered they were Aboriginal only in adulthood; old (several contributors were born the same year as me, 1947) and young (one was 13 at the time of publication); sports stars, poets, novelists, classical musicians, prisoners.

Anita Heiss writes in her introduction:

There is no single or simple way to define what it means to grow up Aboriginal in Australia, but this anthology is an attempt to showcase as many of the diverse voices, experiences and stories together as possible.

The attempt succeeds admirably.

I was struck by the sheer number of almost identical incidents in which someone challenges a young person’s Aboriginal identity. Here’s one of them, as told by Keira Jenkins, a Gamilaroi woman from Moree in New South Wales:

I was six years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor in my checked dress, which was slightly too long for me, looking eagerly up at Miss Brown – at least I think that was her name – the first time I had a blow to my sense of identity. We were learning about Aboriginal people and I piped up very proudly.

‘I’m Aboriginal.’ I waved my hand in the air.

‘No, you’re not,’ my friend Alison said. ‘You’re too white to be Aboriginal.’

I don’t remember what happened after that; I just remember feeling ashamed.

(Pages 119–120)

The challenger isn’t always another child. Sometimes it’s an adult in authority, sometimes even another Aboriginal person, but the confident refusal to accept that a child with fair skin can be Aboriginal occurs again and again in almost exactly the same words, never without impact on the child. No wonder Andrew Bolt was taken to court over his 2009 slur against ‘light-skinned people who identified as Aboriginal’ (news story here if you don’t know about that): the people bringing the case must have been desperately sick of that pernicious stuff.

The sameness of attacks stands in striking contrast to the tremendous variety of the life stories. I loved reading how eleven-year-old Miranda Tapsell refused to go to an event as Scary Spice just because Scary Spice was brown like her, and risked the ire of her non-Indigenous friend by going as their shared favourite, Baby Spice; how Adam Goodes disobeyed a teacher on a zoo excursion and stared at a gorilla; how Karen Davis, a Mamu–Kuku Yalanji woman who grew up n Far North Queensland in the 1970s and 80s sang songs on long car trips with her family pretty much the way I did with mine in the 1950s.

Some of the stories defy belief. William Russell, who describes himself as ‘a black, fair ex-serviceman with PTSD, blind and with a severe hearing impediment, and a long list of other physical problems from military service’, is a case in point. He tells of a time when his mother, with a babe in arms and four-year-old WIlliam by her side, faced a crowd of drunk, angry white men in the tiny town in Victoria where they had just come to live as the only Aboriginal family. Her grandfather stepped out of the shadows to save the day, naked ‘as always’, painted up in ochre and kaolin, and discharging a shotgun. This was in the 1950s. Hm!

There are tragic stories of the damage done by of colonisation to individuals and communities,featuring alcoholism and addiction; diabetes and diagnoses of mental illness; family violence and dysfunction; premature death. And there are stories of heroic resilience. Tony Birch’s story of his father is a beautifully told study in reversing fortunes. After years of violence and anger, followed by years of medication, electric shock treatment and institutionalisation, he ‘is saved’:

The Aboriginal community of Fitzroy gather around and care for him: men and women who had known him when he was a kid, during the years before any of them were ravaged by the force of racism and exclusion. He moves to the countryside and begins working with young blackfellas in schools. The experience is life-changing, for both my father and his family. I discover, a little to my own surprise, that I love him.

(Page 35)

My copy of Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a loan from my Book(-lending) Club. I consider it belongs in the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2021: it’s edited by a woman, and more than half the contributors are also women. So I’m counting it as the eleventh book I’ve read for the challenge.

This blog post is also a contribution to Indigenous Literature Week hosted by Lisa at ANZ LitLovers blog.

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Now You Shall Know the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology

Posted on 29 Dec 2013 | Leave a comment

Dennis Haskell and Jean Kent (editors), Now You Shall Know: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2013 (Hunter Writers Centre, October 2013)

1nysk The Newcastle Poetry Prize is described on its website as ‘the richest and most prestigious stand-alone poetry competition’ in Australia. It has existed for more than three decades under one name or another, and for some years now the Hunter Writers Centre has published an anthology comprising the winner and a selection of other entries. This year’s anthology, named for Jennifer Compton’s winning poem, contains 27 poems and runs to 140 pages, so it’s distinguished from other annual anthologies by including mainly longer poems.

The book is a feast, and even though it owes its existence to a poetry competition it’s a beautiful demonstration of the silliness of pitting poems and poets against each other so that one must emerge as The Best. Not that I challenge the judges’ decisions: all the prize winners and commended poems deserve to win. But so do almost all the others.

Among many pleasures, there’s a strong element of place in the collection. Jennifer Compton’s ‘Now You Shall Know’ kicks things off with a brilliant evocation of the non-place of a passenger plane in mid-flight. Of the two other prize winners, Karina Quinn’s ‘Always Going Home (a domestic cycle)’ has a section named ‘A nowhere place’, which refers to a very specific not-quite-room in the family home, and among other things the poem is about the power exerted on the speaker by the place that is home; and Mark Tredinnick is in full Blue-Mountains-bardic flight in ‘Two or Three Days with Claude Debussy in Late October’. In Kathryn Lomer’s ‘Vapour Trails over Sassafras’ the speaker visits the Tasmanian landscape of her childhood. The dialogue in Ron Pretty’s ‘Picnicking on the Safety Ramp’ creates a gloriously recognisable rural masculinity; Christopher Kelen’s ‘The Shed’ is a location where a similar masculinity finds solitude; the title of Rachael Mead’s ‘Lake Eyre Cycle’ doesn’t mislead.

Two pieces resonated strongly for me as a north Queenslander.  B R Dionysius’ ‘Unicorns Cross Here’  is a sonnet sequence that tours the north, beginning with the giant statue of James Cook in Cairns and visiting the Daintree and the Atherton Tableland. Here are the opening lines of the third sonnet, describing the environment of my childhood:

Through the silk thin mist, sugarcane fields stand as Roman armies
At the end of empire. Forlorn, thirsty, they occupy the flat ground,
Blades held stiff as they form up, row upon green row in perfect
Drilled unison. A thousand years of domesticating iron has tamed
the wilderness. Axes bite deeper than words, saw teeth whisper in
Death’s white noise. On the hills behind them, the rainforest seethes
In undisciplined chaos; disordered ranks thrown back in confusion.

Where Dionysius is a visitor to cane country, the speaker in Victoria McGrath’s ‘Cane Smoking’  comes from there:

I was cradled deep within the blackened root of something
rank and rich in déjà vu, and my curves and crannies,
like so many cinerary urns, claimed without question
the confetti-ash that drifted inevitably to earth.

Carmel Macdonald Grahame’s ‘Wishful Thinking’ isn’t particularly a place poem, unless you count a certain kind of Catholic childhood as a place. From its first lines

You grew up learning not to say
things you were told you should not think

you know exactly where you are. The poem does what I would have thought impossible – it deals with child sexual abuse and keeps its head, even managing moments of playful wit:

it was never the cat that got your tongue,
it was the catechism.

There’s much more, as they say in the ads. Andy Jackson’s ‘Marfan Lives’, Ian Crittenden’s ‘The Red Soil Elegies’, … Really, it’s a wonderful collection.

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Two Launches (with pic added later)

Posted on 18 Dec 2013 | Leave a comment

I’ve been sick with a cold since last Monday, and going stir crazy. Perhaps unwisely, I’ve struggled out of the house two nights this week to go to book launches.

rabbit10The first, on Monday night, 1XIII-Poemswas a double launch at Gleebooks – of the tenth issue of Rabbit, a Melbourne-based ‘quarterly journal of non-fiction poetry’, and XIII Poems by Jordie Albiston, the first in a series of booklets to be published by the journal. Both books are beautiful to look at and to hold, and I’m looking forward to reading the copies I bought on the night. Among other tempting morsels, the Rabbit offers poems by Julie Chevalier, Jordie Albiston, B R Dionysus, Lachlan Brown (to name the poets whose work I know), photographs, an essay, an interview and reviews, including one by A J Carruthers of two books I’ve loved, Jordie Albiston’s Book of Ethel (blog post coming soon) and Pam Brown’s Home by Dark (blog post here). And I’m fast becoming a Jordie Albiston fan, so I’m looking forward to reading what she calls orphan poems.

There were 17 people in the upstairs room at Gleebooks for the launch, of whom 8 spoke or read, all interestingly, and one or two others were part of the team who had flown up from Melbourne for the occasion. Jessica Wilkinson, Rabbit‘s founding Editor-in-Chief, graciously described it as an intimate affair, and urged us to take some grapes or cheese home in our pockets since the modest catering was clearly far in excess to requirements.

Whatever the cause for the poor turn-out, the launch was convivial, with plenty of humour about poets becoming members of the Warren, etc, and much joy in language used with precision and passion. I was glad I’d struggled up from my sickbed to put a bum on a seat and at least half a mind into the room.

As a segue, I’ll mention that at least one of the speakers mentioned their students, and one poet explained that she wasn’t reading her poem from the Rabbit because it was too much a ‘page poem’.

1lcThe next night’s launch was a completely different affair. The Last Conversation is an anthology of poems that have been read at the Bankstown Poetry Slam – that is, a collection of spoken word pieces attempting the transition to page poems under the guidance of slam co-founder and anthology editor Ahmad Al Rady.

The monthly Bankstown Poetry Slam has grown in the year of its existence into the biggest slam in Australia. I’ve never managed to get there, and if last night’s event is any indication of the nature of the experience, I’m missing out on something excellent. Ahmad Al Rady and his co-founder Sara Mansour were fabulous MCs – charming, witty, self deprecating and lavish in their appreciation of others. As many as 10 poets performed: a militant hymn to Gandhi and Mandela (timely, though obviously the poem was first performed when Mandela was still alive); cries from the heart from young men against violence against women; a disturbing piece about cutting into flesh after which the poet reassured us that she was not a serial killer or self-harmer but a surgeon; a passionate piece about the detention of asylum seekers; two sisters mining the rich field of sibling rivalry and sibling support.

The theatre at Bankstown Arts Centre was full to capacity,mainly with young people dressed in their best, as if for graduation. The audience whooped, cheered and (during the readings) clicked. It was a huge, enthusiastic celebration not just of the slam and each other, it seemed to me, but of what can happen when language is unleashed. At the start of the evening, Sara Mansour described how the Bankstown slam had started. It was laziness. She and Ahmad were tired of driving all the way into the city for poetry slams. Bankstown needs its own slam, they thought, and hunted around until Tim Carroll, the generous and welcoming CEO of BYDS (Bankstown Youth Development Services) gave them a home. At the end of their first year, she said, she realises they were wrong on two fronts: running a slam in Bankstown was a lot more work than driving into the city once a month; and Bankstown didn’t need a poetry slam – poetry needed Bankstown.

(By way of full disclosure: I played a small consultative role in the editing of the anthology.)

Added later: This snap I took with my phone at the end of the evening shows something of the mood. These are the poets who read plus some others who are in the book.

last conversation

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Contemporary Asian Australian Poets

Posted on 6 Oct 2013 | Leave a comment

Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey & Michelle Cahill, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann 2013)

1caap

This book seems to be part of a current efflorescence of attention to Asian Australian writing, and of Australian attention to Asian writing. The current Southerly focuses on ‘Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Poetries’, with particular attention to Asian Australian (or Asian-Australian, or Asian/Australian etc) work. The recent OzAsia Festival in Adelaide included a two-day OzAsia on Page component which featured ‘significant and contemporary Asian and Australian voices’. Vagabond Press’s Asia Pacific Writing Series is looking formidably good.

It’s hard to imagine a more disparate gathering of poets than those collected between these covers, not just in nationality or ethnicity (‘Asia’ is a big and varied place, and there seems to be someone here from just about every part of it except, interestingly, Japan), but in just about every other conceivable way as well. The poetry ranges from work with the exuberance and directness of Spoken Word to compressed, elliptical, allusive capital-L Literary offerings. It’s the poets who are Asian Australian, not necessarily the poetry, so though there are poems of the pain of loss of home and culture (I was going to say ‘nostalgia’, but that’s a word that no longer conveys any sense of real pain), poems that explicitly deal with or enact cultural duality or hybridity, poems about multicultural relationships, poems that tackle white racism head-on, and poems exploring questions of cultural identity, there are also poems that don’t do any of those things.

There is a brief introductory essay from each of the three editors. Adam Aitken outlines and celebrates the extraordinary range of voices and attitudes in the anthology, and the range of possibilities in the term ‘Asian Australian’ itself. Kim Cheng Boey focuses on the experience of migration:

Home is never a given, for first-generation migrants, and continues to be a complex issue for subsequent generations. Being beneficiaries of two or more cultures, and entangled in a complex web of affiliations and attachments, they are wary of identity politics and monolithic formations.

Michelle Cahill points out the anthology’s significance in bringing greater visibility to Asian Australian women poets, who experience ‘the double exile of migration and mediation of patriarchal terrain, so inimical to the female psyche’. Seventeen of the 37 poets in this collection are women, and very few Asian Australian women have been included in any previous anthologies.

All three introductory essays are worth reading, and they give invaluable guidance to the poetry. But in the end, it’s the poetry you pay for – and I’m happy to report that I was immersed in this book for days, being dragged from one engaged mind to another. Christopher Cyrill, whom I have previously known as the events organiser at Gleebooks who always spoke too softly when introducing people, here turns out to have a clear, strong, brilliantly modulated voice in the extract from his prose poem novella Quaternion (and that’s me saying it who hates extracts and doesn’t much care for prose poems). Andy Quan’s ‘Is This?’ is a brilliant abstraction of the moment of anticipation on meeting a new person. Omar Musa contemplates buying a pair of shoes and redefines the notion of choice. I finally get to read Kim Cheng Boey’s ‘Stamp Collecting’, which I’ve heard him read at festivals and loved, and his ‘Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB’ – what can I say? Eileen Chong is here, with some of the finest poems from ‘Burning Rice’. I was about to read Debbie Lim’s ‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ aloud to a friend and then realised I wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone who didn’t have plenty of time to recover. Merlinda Bobis’s ‘Covenant’ (‘after you bomb my town / I’ll take you fishing / or kite-flying or both’) conveys the poignancy (another word that has lost its hard meaning) of peace for a defeated people. Jaya Savige’s ‘Circular Breathing’ could hardly be more mainstream Australian, a kind of version of Les Murray’s ‘Perfectly Ordinary Rainbow’ set it in Europe and acknowledging Indigenous Australia (with only the barest allusion to Asia, but who’s counting?). Louise Ho’s ‘A Veteran Talking’ is a killer poem, a chilling, hard, dry killer. I’m glad Adam Aitken included a decent, brilliantly varied selection of his own work.

Please don’t let this book be seen as a marginal anthology of poems by the marginalised. It’s a fabulous collection and belongs at the centre of our culture.

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The colonial past keeps changing

Posted on 6 Aug 2013 | Leave a comment

Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell, Bards in the Wilderness: Australian colonial poetry to 1920 (Nelson 1970)

1bwTo judge by pencil notes in the margins, I read Bards in the Wilderness 40 or so years ago, but – such are the joys of age-related cognitive decline – I didn’t remember any of it when I picked it up again recently, looking for information on how white settlers in New South Wales thought about Aboriginal Australians in the first half of the 19th century. The book’s title didn’t bode well – you can only refer to Australia as a ‘wilderness’ if you ignore millennia of prior occupancy: those ‘bards’ were actually living in what Bill Gammage describes as The Biggest Estate on Earth.

Elliott and Mitchell’s introduction explains that poems were selected for what they demonstrate about the colonies’ preoccupations – ‘political, social and moral’, ‘for what they contributed to the foundation of the Australian literary tradition’.

On the evidence of this selection, the settlers didn’t think about Aboriginal people much at all. Up to 1850, which is as far as I read, there are exactly four references:

  • Charles Tompson’s 1826 ‘Black Town’ is an elegy for a failed attempt by Governor Macquarie, ‘the chosen Delegate of Heav’n’, to educate ‘Poor restless wand’rers of the wooded plain’ in the joys of tenant farming – the failure, it is strongly implied, being the result of the Natives’ fecklessness (rather than because, as Heather Goodall puts it in Invasion to Embassy, to take part in the scheme ‘would mean that they would lose control over their children and be denied access to other areas of their country’). Aboriginal people themselves are notably absent from the scenes portrayed in the poem.
  • John Dunmore Lang’s ‘Colonial Nomenclature’ rattles off a list of ‘native names’ as preferable to ‘Downing Street appellatives’, though again none of the people who gave the settlers words like Parramatta, Illawarra and Woolloomooloo are acknowledged.
  • Charles Harpur’s ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ does feature frontier violence and there are Aboriginal actors in its drama, but the poem tells of an unprovoked lethal attack by ‘stript and painted Savages’, who turn out to be terrible at bushcraft as well as mindlessly violent.
  • ‘Tullamarine’, by Richard Howitt, comes the closest to acknowledging a common humanity with Aboriginal people: the speaker is an Aboriginal woman who utters a distinctly Victorian lament for a child who has died – of natural causes, nothing to do with any dispossession.

So what some people these days consider the most interesting thing – politically, socially and morally – about the early colonial period is passed over in virtual silence, sometimes silence of a pretty aggressive kind, as in the common trope that this new land has no history, these plants and animals have never been celebrated in song.

Perhaps one has to look elsewhere than to poets to find the traces I was after: the notebooks of William Dawes (which hadn’t come to the attention of scholars when this collection was published), the journals of early settlers as explored by Inga Clendinnen (in Dancing with Strangers) and others, the journals of explorers like Eyre and Sturt, who had a lot to report. Forget the poets.

But hold on, maybe it’s not so much that the early colonial poets ignored Aboriginal people so much that these editors de-selected poems that didn’t ignore them. The book’s scholarly paraphernalia suggests this might be so. According to the note on ‘Tullamarine’, Charles Harpur wrote unsuccessful ‘poems on elegiac Aboriginal subjects’ (not included here because, presumably, the editors didn’t consider that they contributed to ‘the foundation of the Australian literary tradition’). And William Charles Wentworth’s long poem, ‘Australasia‘, of which no excerpt is included, is quoted in the Introduction as referring to ‘the mournful genius of the plain’, which, the editors gloss, may or may not signify ‘aborigines’ [sic]. ‘Australasia’, it turns out, includes a passage of 64 lines addressed to Aboriginal people. They may not be great poetry, they may include sentiments that make a modern reader of whatever heritage cringe, but they’re there, acknowledging the pre-colonial inhabitants, beginning:

Ye primal tribes, lords of this old domain,
Swift‐footed hunters of the pathless plain,
Unshackled wanderers, enthusiasts free,
Pure native sons of savage liberty,
Who hold all things in common, earth, sea, air

I can only surmise that in 1970 non-Indigenous literary scholars felt that the kind of verse written about contact between Europeans and Indigenous Australians was best left undisturbed in its place of first publication.

A quick look at John Kinsella’s 2009 Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry suggests that times have changed: even though this anthology doesn’t have a particular emphasis on colonial times, it includes three poems by Eliza Hamilton Dunlop that indicate a level of awareness not even hinted at in the Elliott and Mitchell anthology.. ‘The Aboriginal Mother’ is similar in tone and form to Howitt’s ‘Tullamarine’ but the mother is lamenting the loss of her man and her firstborn in, according to the site I’ve linked to here, the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838. Her other two poems are ‘The Aboriginal Father’, a transliteration of an Aboriginal song, and the translation of a poem by an Aboriginal man named Wullati.

I wonder if any scholars have taken on a 20-teens version of the Elliott and Mitchell anthology that reflects early colonial poets’ contributions to what we now see as ‘the Australian literary tradition’.

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Tranter’s Choice

Posted on 17 Dec 2012 | 1 comment

John Tranter (editor), The Best Australian Poems 2012 (Black Inc 2012)

bp2112My note on this book in the little blog where I keep a note of my reading provoked an anonymous comment full of rage and despair. (I’m linking to it, because it seems a pity that such passion should go almost unheard.) It may be that the commenter didn’t actually have this book in mind, since the poem s/he singled out for particular spleen is actually in last year’s Best Australian Poems, but it’s probably inevitable that any anthology claiming to be the best of something will annoy someone, especially if they’ve got a dog in the fight themselves.

Although I’d secretly love someone to decide that my November Sonnets were works of genius, I didn’t actually  have a dog in this fight. So I wasn’t annoyed. I can’t say that I was swept away either. I’d read and enjoyed about half a dozen of the poems, and was delighted to see them included. And there are fine poems by many writers whose work I know, and by many I don’t. John Tranter’s own contribution, at the conclusion of his introduction, is a kind of cento – an assemblage of lines and images from the chosen poems, but with Tranteresque impersonality they don’t form a coherent whole but are ‘chosen more or less at random’.

Some previously unpublished poems were submitted directly to this anthology. But most appeared previously in a wide range of publications, including books, literary journals and newspapers. Both Quadrant and Overland get a guernsey, likewise both Fairfax and Murdoch – a touch of poetry making the whole world kin? But why, I ask querulously, is there nothing from the paper I subscribe to, the Sydney Morning Herald? And I answer even more querulously because poems turn up in the Sydney Morning Herald only slightly more often than teeth in hens. SMH, Susan Wyndham, literary editor of the SMH.

Added a couple of hours later: I know this post isn’t a review. As it happens, Ali Alizadeh’s excellent discussion of the book went up on the Cordite Poetry Review site not long after I posted my little piece. I recommend it.

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Western Sydney on Western Sydney

Posted on 1 Oct 2012 | 3 comments

Michael Mohammed Ahmad & Felicity Castagna (editors), On Western Sydney (Westside Publications 2012)

In early 2011, an issue of the University of New South Wales’ student newspaper Tharunka had a cover illustration of maps of Sydney according to four different regions. Like Yanko Tsvetkov’s stereotype maps, their probable inspiration, they manage to be cheerfully offensive about just about everyone, but you’d have to be thin skinned to take serious umbrage.
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All the same, look at Western Sydney: ‘out there’, ‘someone has to live there’, ‘yummy exotic food’, ‘cultural cringe’, ‘refugees’, ‘day trip’. The anonymous cartographer has caught something, but if you stop and think for a bit you realise that he/she/they has/have surely pulled her/his/their punches, avoiding any references to drugs, sexual violence, Islamophobic stereotypes or the class attitude invoked by the word westies. More interestingly, there is no ‘Sydney according to Western Sydney’ map. Evidently, in the mind of the maps’ creator(s), Western Sydney lacks a view of its own.

Westside Publications exists to create a counter-narrative: to provide a platform for Western Sydney voices and, at least in part, to undermine the stereotypes, less by denying them outright than by seeking to paint a fuller picture. ‘I don’t mind a story that makes us look bad,’ writes Michael Mohammed Ahmad, chief editor of Westside, in his introduction to On Western Sydney, ‘so long as it’s honest and complex.’

Under the auspices of BYDS (Bankstown Youth Development Service), Westside has work for years in schools and the community to develop skilled writers. On Western Sydney is their twelfth anthology featuring established and/or emerging writers and artists connected to the region. Ahmad says the goal has been ‘to source writing from Western Sydney and writing about Western Sydney’. Of course it’s not the only place where writers from Western Sydney get published – in my time at the School Magazine, for instance, some of our regular contributors were from the west, and off the top of my head eminent poets Jennifer Maiden and Peter Minter have strong Western Sydney connections. And a number of the writers in this anthology have been published elsewhere, including in the definitely Inner West This is the Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories. But there’s no doubting the significance of Westside. Last week Mohammed Ahmad received the Australia Council’s Kirk Robson Award which honours ‘outstanding leadership from young people working in community arts and cultural development, particularly in the areas of reconciliation and social justice’.

20120921-175932.jpg So On Western Sydney is a phenomenon. It’s also a good read, and not at all the dry sociological collection the title might suggest. It includes short stories, poetry, absurd parables, a photo essay; there’s lyricism, satire, rap, stinging social commentary, domestic observation, fantasy, memoir (I think), travel writing … from as culturally diverse a bunch of writers as you’re likely to find anywhere. Many of the contributors are familiar from Westside’s readings at recent Sydney Writers’ Festivals, and scattered throughout are Bill Reda’s photos of Moving People, this year’s event.

I wouldn’t rush to say that the stereotypes are completely repudiated. Some are reversed with varying degrees of subtlety. Two poems – Andy Ko’s surreal ‘A South Line Travel Guide’ and Fiona Wright’s deliciously ironic ‘Roadtrip’ (which begins ‘And it certainly felt like a Food Safari, such a long way from Kirribilli’) – could be read as direct, mocking responses to Tharunka‘s ‘day trip’ and ‘yummy exotic foods’ stereotypes. Predatory men are scarily realised in Amanda Yeo’s train-story ‘Nine Minutes’ and Frances Panapoulos’ poem ‘”puss puss”‘, though there’s no racial profiling in either. The class attitudes not quite articulated by Tharunka are challenged throughout, as when the protagonist of Peta Murphy’s ‘Roughhousing with Aquatic Birds’ suffers through some kind of arty inner west event (‘She doesn’t speak to me, / it’s as if she can see my Bunnings uniform’). The world evoked in Lachlan Brown’s long poem ‘Poem for a Film’ could well be labelled ‘Someone has to live there’, but there’s art – and heart – in the telling:

______On a blistering afternoon
a council truck is removing tall trees

so that no one will confuse this vista with
a place of moneyed elegance. And maybe

the scream of the chainsaw means you’re
not ignored, as cut limbs crash through

the dry air. And maybe what’s left is
for your own good, and the streetscape

becomes a mouth mashed up during a bar fight,
with its bare stumps grinning cruelly in the heat.

My guess is that the writers are mostly under 35. The problems of negotiating relationships is a dominant theme: under the judgemental gaze of older Arab women in Miran Hosny’s ‘The Weight Divide’; by phone in Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s own brief contribution, the deeply unsettling ‘The First Call’; in the gap between the world of song and the world of experience in Luke Carman’s ‘Becoming Leonard Cohen’ (though it’s pretty impertinent to describe Carman’s weird tangential verse as about anything); in bitter-sweet recollection of a high school crush in Tamar Chnorhokian’s ‘Remembering Leon’.

There’s so much to like. We’re told that this will be Westside’s last print publication. Maybe there’s a sense that its work is done, and the writers it has fostered can now find platforms further afield – in Asia Literary Journal, for example, whose current issue has a number of pieces exploring migrant identity. I hope so.

I received my copy free from BYDS. You can buy one from independent book shops in Sydney or directly from BYDS (email in@byds.org.au with your postal address and they’ll give you details on cost and bank transfer details).

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