Yes, sad to hear of A.D. Hope's death. It's not so long ago that he, James
McAuley and Judith Wright 'towered' over the Aust. poetry scene, with an
incredible influence all-round. Hope was a bit of a late-starter in the
poetry-stakes. His poems had been printed in magazines and anthologies for
about ten years, but his first book,' The Wandering Islands', didn't appear
until 1955 when he was forty-eight.
Sometime in the eighties, 1988 I think, I saw him read to a meagre audience
at the Poetry Society (Earls Court). In those days, people in the U.K. had
hardly heard of him. A few days later at a London Australian Studies Centre
reading, he was asked to read 'Australia, one of his best-known pieces - a
grand satirical swipe at the homeland but ultimately resonant and hopeful.
He said, 'That poem's been following me like a bad smell for thirty years.
. .' However, he did read it.
Here it is, for list-members who don't know it.
AUSTRALIA
A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and supersititions of younger lands.
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: 'we live' but 'we survive',
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
>From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
A.D. Hope (1907-2000)
Of course, he wrote better and more. But this poem represents a powerful
landmark in many ways.
Katherine
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