Tag Archives: Vicki Viidikas

Richard Tipping’s Instant History

Posted on 2 Jul 2025 | Leave a comment

Richard Tipping, Instant History (Flying Island Poets, 2017)

As a subscriber to Flying Island Poets, I receive a bundle of ten books at the start of each year. The pocket-sized books belie their miniature appearance by being substantial poetry collections. Taken as a bundle they are wonderfully various – poets being published for the first time and poets with established reputations, embittered old poets and bright-eyed young ones, Chinese poets and poets from rural Australia (Flying Island’s co-publishers are Cerberus Press in Markwell via Bulahdealh and ASM in Macao).

I was delighted to find Instant History in my bundle this year. Richard Tipping is a multi-disciplinary creator whose work I have been encountering and enjoying for more than 50 years.

Probably my first encounter was the poem ‘Mangoes Are Not Cigarettes’ performed as a duet with Vicki Viidikas in the Great Hall at Sydney University in the early 1970s, then reprised immediately as ‘Oysters Are Not Cigarettes’. (That poem lives on – I just found the text, with photos, on Michael Griffith’s blog at this link.)

Tipping’s ‘signed signs’ appear regularly at Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea. Photos of a couple of them have featured in recent issues of Overland: in issue 255 two chunky rocks near the shoreline bear gold leaf lettering, ‘SEA THREW’; in issue 256 a road sign reads, ‘FORM 1 PLANET‘.

Tipping’s Wikipedia page lists poetry, art, spoken word, documentary films, an art gallery, and more. Yet he doesn’t look at all exhausted in his cover photo.

Instant History bristles with quotable lines. Rather than focusing on just page 78*, here goes with a brief description of each of its four parts and a couple of lines from each.

‘The Postcard Life’ comprises 33 mostly short, impressionistic poems that are like, well, postcards from travel destinations from New York City to the Malacca Strait. My favourite in this section is ‘Snap’, a collection of short poems that are either haiku-like or snapshot-like, depending on your point of view, that capture a visit to Japan, individually and cumulatively wonderful. For example:

Bullet train to Kyoto
speeding by still river, reflecting rain 
Chain-smoking chimneys
Greyroofed villages, rice fields, cement

‘Rush Hour in the Poetry Library’, for me the most memorable section, has 28 poems that are mainly about art and works of art. I particularly like ‘On Film (for Steve Collins, editor)’, which reads to me as a poem gleaned from conversations with its dedicatee. It begins with this resonant paradox:

Film is painting in light with time 
for the ears' extra pleasure
even if the pictures are better on radio

‘Earth Heart’ has just nine poems, and includes images of his typographic visual poem ‘Hear the Art (Earth Heart)’ – if you write either of those phrases out a couple of times without word spaces, you have the poem, a wordplay that absolutely sings. Its appearance in this book is one of many manifestations. For a land art version in the grounds of the Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, you can go to Richard Tipping’s website.

‘Kind of Yeah’, the final section, feels mostly like a bit of fun with the vernacular, nowhere more so than in ‘Word of Mouth’ which includes this:

It was hair-raising, pulling your leg,
turning the other cheek; quick as a wink
you got me by the short and curlies
just as I'd finally got my arse into gear.

That’s just a taste. There’s politics, Buddhism, whimsy, and always a sense of performance, in the best senses of the word.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, and finished it in a brief pause from heavy rain. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice, honoured in the breach here, is to focus on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , ,

The sixty-eighters’ young appreciators

Posted on 28 Jun 2009 | 1 comment

Beautiful day in Sydney, what better to do than take the bus into town for a free event at the Museum of Contemporary Art. ‘The Young Appreciators‘ was part of the fourth floor exhibition, avoiding myth & message: Australian artists and the Literary world (capitalisation not mine!), which seems to be mainly about artists and literary folk from the late 1960s and on – that is to say, not so much Sidney Nolan–Ern Malley as Tim Burns–John Forbes.

Today is the first time I’ve realised that there is a group of Australian poets known as the 68ers, or perhaps the 69ers: John Forbes, Robert Adamson and John Tranter (whom those in the know refer to by second name only), and quite a few others who are sometimes hard to see because of the long shadows cast by those three. The three speakers at today’s event are younger than the 68/9ers: the oldest admitted to 39, and I’d guess the other two were quite a bit younger. That is to say, none of them had been born in those days when I used to go  regularly to poetry readings to hear John Forbes, who I thought was a bit of a smart aleck and not as interesting as, say Martin Johnston (another 68/9er who doesn’t seem to cast such a long shadow).

Anyhow, it was fun. The first speaker spoke of Vicki Viidikas, beginning her talk by saying she hadn’t known much about her until after she’d accepted the invitation to talk. Since I’d heard the ABC radio programs that she based most of her talk on (with acknowledgement), I can’t say I was riveted. The second tackled John Forbes, mostly, as she said, in terms of marginalia and biography – mentions of herself she’d found in published Forbes letters, for example. It was in her talk that I became aware that those poets of my youth have since become the subject of academic attention. The third, the elegant poet Tim Wright, speaking softly and swiftly enough to be near to incomprehensible to me, talked about Pam Brown, visibly writhing with embarrassment at having the subject of his talk actually in the room.

I loved the moment during the brief question time when Kerry Leves, another of the apparently short-shadowed 68/9ers, admitted that when he’d seen a particular person’s work on a table in the exhibition, he’d said, ‘I don’t remember her!’ It’s a small world, the world of Australian poets and artists.

And I got a real hand in my understanding of Pam Brown’s poetry. I managed to hear Tim Wright say that her work was in many ways similar to Jennifer Maiden’s, but that whereas you tend to read one of Jennifer Maiden’s poems right through to the end, and when you do you feel you’ve learned something (a true statement), with Pam Brown’s work it’s not like that. You tend to stop and ponder a phrase, stare into space, let it sink in or just be distracted (he called her the master of the poetry of distraction, or something of the sort), then go back and read it again: it’s perfect for reading on public transport. I realised that my unexamined working assumption that reading is a linear process – you start at the beginning and go to the end and derive meaning on the way – has made quite a lot of poetry hard to enjoy. And I do read it while walking the dog — surely picking up a bag of dog poo or playing tug-of-war with a stick between lines should have put me in the perfect state of mind. I’ll try again, not so much harder, as with less resistance to the forces of distraction.

1 Comment

Posted in Diary

Tagged , , , , , , ,