As one of the rural “5%”, I feel I ought to speak up, though softly, regarding recent discussions on landscape, romanticism and rural poets/poetry in Australia.

As far as definitions go, Cuddon writes that “In the Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) F L Lucas counted 11,396 definitions of Romanticism”. To add my own seems like throwing a small twig onto an extremely large pyre – so I’ll be brief J

Cunamulla is a small country town in outback Australia which is currently the centre of some controversy. A filmmaker recently spent two years documenting the lives of the people of Cunamulla, living with them, sharing their lives, their stories, entrusted with their truths. The recent release of the film however, has turned the people of the town against him. Quite simply, they feel betrayed.

In my current experience, living in a rural community is to share in a very real, honest and direct sense, the lives and stories of others, which become intrinsically, crucially part of your writing. The difficulty lies in the public telling of that experience.

I struggle in my writing, with the sense that Tasmania, my home, is often portrayed as a green and lush island, promoted through evocative and beautiful images of wilderness and water. Yet the landscape in which I live is drought stricken, dry, barren and dying.

I also struggle with the telling of truths which I feel form part of my poetic responsibility – (a responsibility to respond to experience honestly.) The truths of the hardships of other people’s lives, which they have shared with you and which you observe and live with daily, are precious and it is sometimes difficult to know where observation and interpretation end and betrayal begins.

As poets, how do we resolve the real, ethical struggle with the responsibility we have in telling the stories of the people who share our living, breathing time?

Perhaps in this century, we still carry with us remnants of the romantic ideal that poetry has to have a sense of the prophetic, or at least reflect our aspirations - which makes it difficult to express the pure truth of our experience. I’m not sure.

Maria Fletcher