SEVEN SPIRITS OF THE SOUTH – 19thCentury Australian Poetry
His riding boots made heavy going across the sand, the death-white winter spume of the Southern Ocean, Rider of the White Whale, dashed its spite harmlessly at his feet like a leashed terrier.
Death-white also was his face; despair veiled the wild Spirit in his eyes as he stared into eternity – a wild Spirit that swept up into the windy ether to become one with the wild Spirit of the South itself. Adam Lindsay Gordon shot himself.
The year was 1870, and the talented poet was only 37 years young. The tragedy marked the end-fo-the-beginning of a truly Australian stream of poetic genius.
“The boy’s too wild;” said Gordon’s father 17 years earlier in his thick Scottish brogue, “send him to one of the colonies – Australia perhaps. We can do na more for him here.” He merged again with leather and mahogany, and resumed his translation of an obscure Hindustani text.
This perception of Australia as the Land of the Wild Colonial Boy, was strongly based on reality. The sense of timelessness and illimitable space evaporated the imported pretensions of European society; early settlers had difficulty coping with the rigors of Terra Nullius. Wildness of Spirit seemed to be a survival mechanism in this wild land.
Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poetic Spirit was part of another ich heritage, nurtured in the freezing winds blowing from another Pole. Scotland, home of Robbie Burns, was at one stage the heartland of poetry in the English speaking world. Sit gave birth to a word genius which, in the thymes and rhythms of its apostles, adapted even to wild Australia.
Aye! We had a glorious gallop after Starlight and his gang.
When they bolted from Sylvester’s on the flat;
How the sun-dried reed beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang,
To the strokes of ‘Mountaineer’ and ‘Acrobat’. ‘The Sick Stockrider’
The poet lived his poems, he was a skilled horseman and bushman in an age when the stereotype had hardly emerged; 19th Century Romanticism, in all its preciousness, was abandoned. The wild and youthful poet wrote with swinging saddle rhythms and an exultation of space, air and action.
He both excelled and failed in all things tried – the death of his only daughter, and a business collapse, led to his rendezvous with the wild Spirit of the South on that bleak Victorian beach.
Who is this Henry Kendall? What is a man of Irish descent, born in 1841, doing writing poetry? Irish poetry? That’s a kind of oxymoron – I thought that the Irish only wrote limericks!
By channels of coolness the echoes are calling,
And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling;
It lives in the mountain, where moss and the sedges
Touch with their beauty the banks and the ledges:
Through breaks of the cedar and sycamore bowers
Struggles the light that is love to the flowers.
And softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing,
The notes of the Bellbirds are running and ringing. ‘Bellbirds’
Of course – that’s not poetry, that’s song! If the Spirit of Australian poetry has its provenance in Scotland, that of music is Irish – land of the harp – of the golden larynx of Sinéad O’Connor.
Henry Kendall developed much of his understanding of this strange land by looking at it from the outside. He sailed widely throughout the South Pacific – the Singing Sea – and experienced the euphonious effect Oceania has on Australia. He empathized with Islanders and Aborigines long before it became fashionable. The ‘noble savage’ was to Kendall a joyous, suffering and infinitely dignified human being. In a few seemingly simple lines, he revealed the innermost essence of a Dreamtime culture – of unimaginable age and spiritual dimension.
Will he go in his sleep from the desolate lands,
Like a chief to the rest of his race,
With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,
And gleams like a dream in his face –
Like a marvelous dream in his face.
‘The Last of his Tribe’
Kendall listened to the heartbeat of the Spirit of the South, describing, in lyric strain, its beauty and natural diversity. He obviously spent more time sitting on a mossy rock than in the saddle, and his images snapped forever the chord of longing of much of White Australia for the woods and glens of England. He lived mainly on the nature-blessed North Coast of N.S.W.
James Cuthbertson was born in Scotland in 1851, so it’s no surprise he became a poet! He migrated to Australia with a large group of friends – the Greek gods!
No saddle or mossy rock for James; he used his Scottish word craft to illuminate the star-spangled southern heavens. Being a classics master, he was steeped in the Meteorological culture of Ancient Greece – that of the planetary gods. The title of his poem, Ode to Apollo, is enough to make Crocodile Dundee (another Scottish wordsmith!) puke into his schooner. Is this yet another saccharine sherbet from the Pre-Raphaelites?
We too are island-born;
Oh, leave us not in scorn –
A songless people never yet was great. (How true!)
We, suppliants at their feet,
Await the Muses sweet
Amid the laurels at the temple gate.
Golden Apollo is beseeched to ripen Australian fruit – to fatten Australian grain – t o kindle Australian hearts, with divine music.
The Muses? Did these ephemeral Greek goddesses migrate to Australia too? Especially the 7th Muse, Erato, Muse of Poetry. Her name means ‘to love’ (akin Eros), in the Greek sense, this ‘love’ is a divine gift to Man – an uplifting moral force. The conduit of love from God to Man is said to be the arts – and in particular, Poetry. All sacred texts seem to have an ineffable poetic expressions.
Erato’s son, Thamyris (ourselves), was a Thracian poet; being of divine genesis, he was highly inspired. But being mortal, he was also sadly egotistical. This character flaw led to a muttered assertion that this poetic skills surpassed even those of the Muses – his mother included! Apollo, jealous of Thamyris, dobbed him in.
The Muses were incensed, and struck Thamyris both blind and dumb, effectively ending his poetic career – bards spoke their poems in those days! Worse still, they rendered him ‘talentless’, creating a thrombosis to the Spirit, the source of all true inspiration. Since then, we (Thamyris) have been blindly groping to re-bond with The Source.
Our visions are mostly Earth visions – our words, Earth words. Sometimes a breathtaking epiphany takes place; we speak or write with divine inspiration. It may only be one poem in a life’s work – or one passage in a poem – or one line! The one-line-wonder, better than none!
In Cuthbertson’s tireless search for his elusive Olympian patrons, he closely observed the Southern Sky – richer by far than that of the Northern Hemisphere, and a persuasive element in the mystery that is the indefinable entity – Australia –
The Morning Star pales slowly, the Cross hung low to the sea,
And down the shadowy reaches, the tide came swirling free,
The lustrous purple blackness of the soft Australian night
Waned in the grey awakening that heralded the light;
Then the fiery scorpion vanished, the magpies’ note was heard,
And the wind in the she-oak wavered, and the honey-suckle stirred,
‘The Australian Sunrise’
The ubiquitous bush not only surrounded the invaders, but itself ‘invaded’ the poetic expression of 19thCentury poets – seen in Oz’s favorite son – writer of the libretto for Waltzing Matilda, creator of the ultimate ‘bronzed Aussie’, the Man from Snowy River – Andrew (Banjo) Paterson.
This remarkable rhyme smith, of Scottish descent, honed the Australian stereotype to a razor edge, which to a degree we still feel obliged to live up to today. Male, humorous, stoic, touch – larrikin and laconic – tall and with pale eyes that squint into the heat haze – consummate horseman. Alas, how few of us are even close!
Banjo Paterson, like Kendall, learned much about Australia from the outside. Due to his considerable literary abilities (or in spite of them!), he was a newspaper correspondent in the Boer War; and spent some time in China as well. Australia can only be truly understood in relation to its neighbors; in this case the people over the fence to the west and north. This familiarity gave his writing a strength of objectivity, and established a Pride-in-Place element in the soul of its people. Paterson’s most endearing contribution was his humor – sometimes irreverent, often satirical, always funny – in a word, Australian –
There were some gilded youths that sat, along the barber’s wall.
Their eyes were dull, their head were flat, they had no brains at all
To them the barber passed a wink, his dexter eyelid shut,
“I’ll make this bloomin’ yokel think his bloomin’ throat is cut.”
‘The Man from Ironbark’
That colossus of causes, that matriarch of meter, the daughter of a Highlander, Dame Mary Gilmore, was born in 1965 near Goulburn N.S.W. – she was educated, and later taught, in public schools. The Great Dame was an irrepressible Utopian.
This drew her into the New Australia Movement, which, paradoxically, set up a ‘new age’ center in, of all places, Paraguay! In this way Dame Mary introduced Australia to its trans-Pacific eastern neighbor.
How strange then that this 19th Century literary doyenne was so strongly yet again drawn to the ‘bush’ ethos – in spite of being so vocal and well-informed on social and welfare issues. When it comes to Women’s Lib, Dame Mary Gilmore could have written the textbook. But one is constantly led back, via the seduction of her poetic images, to feel even more deeply the pulse of the Being of Australia –
While overhead the back duck’s wing
Cuts like a flash upon
The startled air, that scarcely shrinks
Ere he afar is gone.
________
And curlews wake, and wailing cry
Cur-lew! – cur-lew! Cur-lew!
Till all the bush with nameless dread
Is pulsing through and through.
‘A Little Ghost’
Dame Mary’s own ‘little ghost’ may make silent visits at night to her portrait in the Art Gallery of N.S.W. – William Dobell has, with great insight, caught the enduring contradiction of stern mein and inner warmth. The quizzical old eyes still sparkle down at our admiration.
A sad but heartwarming member of our Poet’s Seven is Henry Lawson, born, not of Scottish origin, but close. Henry’s father, Peter Larsen, was Norwegian.
Lawson, the ‘poor man’s poet’ – stricken with deafness, poverty, alcoholism and metal fragility, was born, not with a silver spoon in his mouth like his friend Banjo, but with a silver thread in his hand. One reaching right up to Erato, the Muse of Poetry herself. Through an output both inspired and voluminous, Henry Lawson brought dignity to the working classes; especially in his vivid and moving descriptions of bullock teams, shearers and stockmen. He also attracted recognition to forgotten towns over the ranges, busily providing the wealth upon which the prosperity of the cities was built. Who we are is so dependent upon the words of our past poets – visionaries of who we might become. Lawson further shapes the Australian image, adding elements of character, like humility and compassion – in short, humanity –
The colors of the setting sun
Withdraw across the Western land –
He raised the sliprails, one by one,
And shot them home with trembling hand;
Her brown hands clung – her face grew pale –
Ah! Quivering chin and eyes that brim! –
One quick, fierce kiss across the rail,
And “Good-bye, Mary!” “Good-bye, Jim”
‘The Sliprails and the Spur’
How ironic that a man who symbolizes so much that is ‘human’ in the nature of the typical Australian – the very antitheses of the materialist – today adorns the $10 note!
The bush provides a desiccated backdrop for the theatre of his vision; but social issues perform at the proscenium. Lawson’s mother, Louisa, even made it into the Australian Encyclopedia on the strength of her reformist politics. Perhaps the poet’s intimacy with Terra Australis was intensified by an unhappy sojourn in England. Then there was his preoccupation with death – playing its sinister but ever-present support role in the real-life drama which is rural Australia –
But long ere the Station was seen ahead,
His pain was o’er, for Rover was dead’
And the folks all knew by our looks of gloom
‘Twas a comrade’s corpse that e carried home.
‘Death of a Cattle Dog’
Dread Drought is a hollow specter, a furtive presence, one whom Australians know will yet again creep over the horizon – soon. Dorothea Mackellar (right, Scottish again) showed us how to love ‘a sunburnt country’. Born into comfort in 1885, she was educated in private schools and traveled widely – especially in southern South America. Here she must have looked westward from some lofty, unsmiling cordillera, imagining the flatness, the dryness, yet great beauty of the Awakening Giant; to which she in time returned. This longing permeates her poems – expressing as a passion for the sharp-edged details which make up the big picture –
From cores already furnace hot –
The logs are well alight!
We fling more wood where the flameless heart
Is throbbing red and white.
_________
The fire bites deep in that beating heart,
The creamy smoke wreaths ooze
From cracks and knot-holes along the trunk
To melt in greys and blues.
‘Burning Off’
Fire! So much a part of the living tissue of this dry land, rarely seen by city people today; yet its mythical power has been at the center of Australia’s spiritual heart for 40,000 years. Some call it the ‘Fire Continent’ – the Aborigines, Fire People. Many plants won’t even germinate without fire; animals depend on its cycles. Especially in the sandstone bush at Pittwater near Sydney – where Dorothea Mackellar lived and wrote.
The house was empty when we walked around the wide, so vey Australian, verandahs. Was ours a silent pilgrimage to the end-of-the-beginning of a richly creative word-art era had ended. An era famed for the crafting of legends few of us represent – legends however that insinuate themselves into the hidden recesses of the national psyche.
20th Century poetry has a different mission, as yet undefined; but certainly concerned with dragging us protesting onto the brightly lit stage of Internationalism. With luminaries like Douglas Stewart, Judith Wright and Noonuccal dipping into the well-spring of Australia’s spiritual inspiration, the future looks… perhaps you’ll have to find out.
A butcher Bird caroled from the verandah rail, melting the silence with honeyed song – but the song had words. Were they familiar? Words of Adam Lindsay Gordon perhaps? No, it’s just our imagination … yes, that’s it, Imagination!
Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.
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