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.

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