Ali wrote:

> Australia is a bastard mechanism of
>imperialism, struggling forever for some kind of legitimacy. cinging.

Which doesn't, thankfully, define Australian poetry, although anyone who
can remember that Round the Boree Log anthology can there see the
mechanisms of imperialism singing loud and clear - anyone who wants to
look at Australian poetry _has_ to deal with nationalism, because it's
been such a constructing factor - one reason for say the almost complete
disappearance of women like Lesbia Harford and Anna Wickham from the
poetic canon until the Penguin book of Australian Women Poets came out.
That fine writer Barbara Baynton is practically invisible in the
tradition; her de Maupaussant-inspired short stories portray a hellish,
brutalised rural Australia at odds with the desired Man of Snowy River
type heroism. Even with the poets acknowledged have been hoisted into
the nationalist cause - think of Judith Wright's objections to the very
partial presentation of her as the writer of Bullocky, ignoring her later
environmentally-led or philosophically-driven work - poems which fitted
the unreal machismo of the rural idealisations which so suited this urban
society - if you think this doesn't still apply, look at the tv beer
advertisements, or 4WDs.

I see here I'm aligning nationalism with a certain masculinist myth;
perhaps it's inevitable. Australian social history in the 20C is such a
contradictory mixture of social justice (women's vote, union activism,
the arbitration system, 8 hour day, etc) and shocking unacknowledged
injustice - not just the question of indigenous people, but the "lower
classes". There are some excellent oral histories for anyone interested
in looking at this: most especially Wendy Lowenstein's Weevils in the
Flour (about the Depression) and Under the Hook (about waterside
workers). And anyone doubting there is a Ruling Class in Australia
should have a look at Michael Cathcart's Defending the National Tuckshop
and then reflect on what happened to Whitlam - and then on what is
happening now.

Now the cultural imperialism is coming from the US rather than the UK, as
anyone who works in the film industry could amply confirm if they wished
to admit it. All Australian actors these days have to audition with
American accents if they want work; they used not to, even ten years ago
that was unusual. Now it's standard. Most uneasily, I'm watching the
increasing corporatisation of Australian society, esp, since it's my
field, in the arts; if that's not a tool of a new-fashioned imperialism,
I don't know what it is (imperialism is the wrong word here, but there
are of course continuities). The present disembowelling of the ABC under
the banner of corporatism is only one example; one thing that affects us,
poets, is that what is being cut in ABC Radio Arts, which makes a lot of
programs about poetry, is the part of the budget which goes to artists
(not the administration, say). So apparently it's ok to buy programs
from the BBC, but not to make them ourselves...

There is a thing which might be usefully called "Australian". Kinsella
is suggesting "regionalism" as a way of thinking which sidesteps the
mythos which collects itself around nationalism, but which nevertheless
acknowledges the specifics of place: we are not English, we are not
American, we are not Irish or French or South American or Vietnamese or
African, although many of us come from all these places. The assumptions
in the beer ads, the Downunder mythos, make the archetypal Australian a
badly shaved male in an outback pub. The diversity of Australian poetry
(perhaps I should say "poetry written in Australia"?) presents another
picture altogether, some of it reacting quite directly to these ideas of
Australia. JK's own work is fairly exemplary here. Other poets have
other obsessions.

I don't know how, if you desire to look at these things, you can avoid
dealing with the idea of nationalism. How else can it be destabilised,
redefined, shown for the myth it is? One thing's for sure: if the
question isn't argued with, we'll be left with the bloke in the pub and
Slim Dusty by default.

Best

Alison