Hi Komninos - some stray thoughts -
>why do we continue to use imagery which is not part of our everyday
>experience?
>
There are a number of people who _do_ live in the country, and it is part
of their everyday experience; are you speaking of them as well? What
about poets like Lionel Fogarty? However, there have been some peculiar
things in the bush - those centaurs that Hugh McCrae put there, for
instance - which suggest that for Europeans and other immigrants it's a
representation that's always been full of tension and contradictions.
It's fair to say that the strain of Australian writing which might be
called urban - starting with Jonah, and through poems by Furnleigh
Maurice, Kenneth Slessor etc - has tended to be undervalued and
unrepresented in the general glaze of the tv bushman: but it is there,
and has been very visible in the past couple of decades, I would say
especially in poetry. Same as Rick Amor's urban landscapes are there, in
dialogue with Fred Williams.
As JK pointed out, alot of contemporary "landscape" poetry tends to the
dystopian - environments destroyed and lost - and look rather at the
violent and brutal, pace Barbara Baynton (Coral Hull is another one I
forgot to mention: violence looms large in her work).
>is it a need to establish that we, white australians who have appropriated
>this country, actually belong here, so we try to write ourselves into the
>landscape. and this may not be conscious in individual writers but
>underlying in all of us who have come to live in australia and are not
>indiginous?
The landscape thing is or has been I think an expression of alienation -
think of the first European paintings of Australia, which made it all
look like English parks. Part of the problem for the non-indigenous
population has been "seeing" it - it has often struck me as a good joke
that one of the first Europeans to write about the Australian landscape
was called Barron Field, which sort of sums up European perceptions of
the time. Landscape has by far more often been presented as hostile and
threatening, and there is that thing about cutting down trees, which I
have never understood except as a desire to "conquer" a resistant and
frightening environment (which leads to that heroicisation of the
"battler" - but you know, Steele Rudd is rather more sardonic and harsh
than the kitsch representations of On Our Selection etc suggest).
But there are many people who have thought about all this much more than
me. I have my own problems with all that, a sort of linguistic
alienation due to my own background, which means I _don't_ write poems
about the Australian landscape, although I was brought up in the country;
which is perhaps another kind of response to those issues.
And there are many takes on all this - John Anderson's poems for example
attempt none of these things, but rather seek to linguistically inhabit
the landscape, as a European Australian. A patient and gentle
attentiveness, owing much to Ponge, Bonnefoy and others. Anderson might
well be called a romantic, but in the proper sense, descending from
Wordsworth.
>why is so much australian poetry which appears in international anthologies
>tied to rural landscape?
That might have been true once. I'm not so sure it is now. But I don't
know if it's an exclusively Australian thing.
Best
Alison
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