Australian literature

Australian literature in English began soon after the establishment of the country by Europeans. Early popular works tended to be of the 'ripping yarn' variety, telling tales of derring-do against the new frontier of the Australian outback. Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood, Marcus Clarke and Joseph Furphy embodied these stirring ideals in their tales and, particularly the latter, tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common Australian. These novelists also give valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements. The transportation of prisoners, emigration to this once remote nation and the persecution and prejudice suffered by its indigenous peoples all contribute to a sense of alienation and exile which can be seen to run through at least the early writings of Australia.

Poetry

Despite perhaps seeming out of the typical Australian character, poetry played an important part in the founding of Australian literature. Two poets who vie for the position of greatest Australian poet are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon. Gordon was not born in Australia but the Azores, to Scottish parents. Despite this he is often called the "national poet of Australia" and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England.

Both Gordon’s but particularly Brennan’s works are made up of traditional styles of poetry with many classical allusions, which can be thought of as high culture, but there was also a competing, vibrant tradition of folk songs and ballads. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were two of the chief exponents of these popular ballads and ‘Banjo’ himself was responsible for creating what is probably the most famous Australian verse Waltzing Matilda.

Performance Poetry

Performance poetry is not a recent phenomenon in English-speaking Australia. It would not be beyond credibility to identify Henry Lawson as Australia's first professional performance poet, but there had been many performance poets in Australia prior to Lawson (real name Larsen, Norwegian father) from the First Fleet onwards. In fact prior to 1890 most poetry in Australia was received aurally. The Sydney Bulletin began a campaign of publishing Australian poetry in the 1890s,

"The 'nationalistic' element fostered overtly at times by Stephens and the Bulletin is indicated in Stephen's review on 15th February 1896, in which he joined Lawson with Paterson as two writers who, 'with all their imperfections' mark 'something like the beginnings of a national school of poetry. In them, for the first time, Australia has found audible voice and characteristic expression'." (Perkins in Bennett and Strauss, 1998)

It is generally acknowledged in most of the histories of Australian literature from HM Green's in 1962, to the most recent The Oxford literary history of Australia, 1998, that the Bulletin Bush poetry, in its nationalist mission to be Australian, over-zealously mythologised the nature of the Australian identity and that it promoted that ideal long after Federation (1901) and even long after Lawson and Paterson. A B Paterson's Waltzing Matilda is probably the most performed Australian poem ever, and has become somewhat of an unofficial anthem of Australia (in sports particularly). The words of Dorothea Mackellar's My Country, 1908, are probably present in the minds of every Australian, even if they have never seen it written down.
"I love a sunburnt country,
a land of sweeping plains,
of rugged mountain ranges,
of floods and droughts and rains."
The sound of that early Australian bush poetry is firmly embedded in the national psyche. The largest selling poetry volume in Australia,. C J Dennis's Sentimental Bloke in 1915 was poetry to be performed, and was performed. But the voices in that poem and others by CJ Dennis are character voices, often over exaggerated, of stereotyped Australian voices comically represented. Maybe something akin to Paul Hogan's stereotyping of Italians with his 'luigi' or Mark Mitchell's comic representation of the Greek Australian 'Con the fruiterer', CJ Dennis was also humorously reflecting changes in the Australian voice and cultural identity. The ill-fated Jindyworobak poetry movement of South Australia was very much into sounds and introducing Australian sounds into Australian poetry, the sound of the land and the people that had been dispossessed. But this was an unnatural appropriation of aboriginal culture and plagued by dubious political associations. Kenneth Slessor in the 1940s , and Bruce Dawe and Thomas Shapcott, in the 1950s, introduced the sound of everyday Australian voices, incorporating the vernacular and the colloquial language of Australia as part of their poetry. Their voices as heard on the Audio anthology "Australian Poetry : Live (Page, 1995)" are devoid of the BBC British radio announcers accent often used by Australian poets like RD Fitzgerald, AD Hope and James McAuley when reading verse (even Dylan Thomas discarded his Welsh accent for the BBC British radio voice.) They speak in the Australian vernacular, the common language of the street. The Commonwealth Literary Fund, which in the 1950s toured Australian poets on reading tours of their works, eg Roland Robinson, provided another way in which sounded poetry was promoted by that organisation. Cath Walker (Oodgeroo Nunuccal) also emerged as an Aboriginal-Australian voice in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In the 1960s poetry readings were associated with the great poetry explosion that was happening globally but also particularly in Australia due partly to the challenging of the self proclaimed establishment of university poet-professors led by A D Hope. A D Hope strangely enough, due to strict censorship laws and due to sexually explicit nature of his poetry, was more likely to have been heard than read as he didn't publish his poetry until the early 1960s. I t seems public readings were not the preference of academia at the time, as Tasmanian poet Tim Thorne writes in his personal memoirs,
"I remember my first public reading, as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. It was organised by James McAuley and it consisted of him and me reading our own poems and those of Vivian Smith and Gwen Harwood. Gwen and Vivian were allegedly too shy to read their own. Both, however, were in the audience, and I was acutely aware of their presence as I hoped I did their poems justice. Having got to know Gwen much better in later years, I am amazed that she could have offered such an excuse." (Thorne, 2003)

International poets like Evgeni Yevtushenko, Ted Hughes, Adrian Mitchell from the UK, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlingetti from the USA, came to Adelaide Arts Festival Writers' Week in the late 1960s and early 1970s and gave great, as reported in the newspapers, public performances to town hall's full of people.

Geoffrey Dutton wrote in the Bulletin;
"'Maybe Yevtushenko is the man who will give the relation between poet and public in Australia the tremendous lift it badly needs and so easily might achieve'. Bruce Dawe believed that Yevtushenko's visit would 'help to establish in people's minds that poetry is not necessarily and forbiddingly long-hair or academic'. (Starke, 1998)
By the 1970s there was a great push in Australia for the voices to be heard that were other to the Anglo-centric male dominated majority, ie women, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, indigenous Australians, differently abled and gendered persons. For many the poetry reading was the place to be heard. There were many poetry groups and much performance activity in the 1970s. Andrew Taylor, a foundation member of the Friendly Street poetry readings in Adelaide wrote in the Number Ten Friendly Street poetry reader; acknowledging the cultural as well as literary value of poetry readings;
"In 1975 we had all (Richard Tipping, Ian Reid and Andrew Taylor) recently returned to Adelaide from various extended periods overseas, including time in the United States where small, public poetry readings were very popular and frequent. Many of these were held in bookshops or bars – unelaborate, even casual occasions whose value was to be found as much in the opportunity they gave people to get together with a purpose as in the poetry that was read. Why we asked was nothing of this kind happening in Adelaide?" (Harris and Josephi, 1986)

Very early in the 1970s University of Queensland Press released a series of 12 poets on vinyl 45 rpm 7" records, featuring older and newer Australian poets reading their work. This was a milestone publication in Australian poetic culture, the first commercially available sound recording of twelve of Australia's most prominent poets of the time.

As early as 1973 eric beach had started to work as a full-time, grossly under-paid poet, conducting workshops at schools and performing and was a recipient of a grant from the newly formed Australia Council for the Arts. Ania Walwicz, Vicki Viidikas, thalia, Sylvia Kantazaris, Anna Couanni, and PiO emerged as strong non-anglo voices in performance poetry, and Kate Jennings's anthology of women writers Mother i'm rooted, 1975, highlighted the lack of women in Australian poetry anthologies. Most of the new women writers had engaged with poetry through the activity of poetry readings and not the formal anglo-centric male dominated academic poetry of the universities. In 1976 the Poets Union was formed, identifying that poetry was indeed work and workers needed to be represented by a union to negotiate their demands. New readings, often centred around performance were held in Sydney by the 'militant' Poets Union there and were the genesis of the later pub poetry in that city. Chris Mansell and Les Wicks, among others, were prime movers in this new movement, organising readings and publishing Compass and Meuse respectively. The Poets Union pushed for better conditions for performance poets at the Sydney Festival, which then included writers, and successfully gained recognition and payment.
Dorothy Porter and Robert Adamson, Sydney poets, refused to attend the 1976 Writers' Week of Adelaide Festival because they were not going to be paid for their invited readings. (Starke, 1998) In 1978 a contingent of poets' union members attended the Writers' Week in Adelaide and PiO claims in his anthology of performance poetry (PiO, 1985) that the term 'performance poetry' was coined at a seminar where David Malouf was speaking. This event definitely marked the beginning of the use of the term 'performance poets' as Ruth Starke notes in Writers, readers and rebels, 1998. However it was not the first instance of the call for performance of poetry.
"'If poets are going to perform in front of large audiences, then they ought to learn how to project their voices, or how to use a microphone; otherwise they should introduce the poem and let someone else read it,' wrote Geoffrey Dutton(ABR, April, 1970), after the 1970 Writers' Week." (Starke, 1998)
The performance poets, in 1978,were recognised as a group, or movement, or new cultural formation, separate from published poets for the first time. Jenny Boult in Adelaide had also attained professional status as a performance poet by the end of the 1970s. There were many other semi-professionals, like Ken Smeaton, Geoffrey Eggleston and Shelton Lea in Victoria, but the majority held full-time jobs and did their performing as a secondary activity.

The 1980s saw a greater development in performance poetry, with more professional poets earning their living by poeting, Geoff Goodfellow joined Jenny Boult in South Australia, komninos, Myron Lysenko, Liz Hall,Billy Marshall Stoneking, Lauren Williams, Kerry Scuffins, Kerry Loughrey, Carmel Bird, in Melbourne, Grant Caldwell, Chris Mansell and Steven Herrick in Sydney and others in other states. The mid 1980s also saw major literary events enter the public sphere. Literary readings were usually restricted to academics, publishers, writers and readers and Writers' Week programs, although in Sydney there were readings in Balmain, notably in the Cafe L'Absurd where poets such as Nigel Roberts, Chris Mansell, Cornelius Vleeskens and Rae Desmond Jones often performed and were joined by interstate and international readers on occasions. Later Cafe L'Absurd moved to Newtown and became known as New Partz where it became the centre of Sydney performance poetry and attracted performance and so-called page poets. In Melbourne Readings Bookshop and Mietta's Hotel held a regular Sunday afternoon reading that attracted 200-300 people. Later, in Sydney Writers In The Park, had weekly events at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe, supported by local book-seller Glebebooks, the writing programs of UTS and UNSW, the feminist performance poetry groups of Newtown, Paddington and Surry Hills, attracting up to 400 people a night (Christie and O'Brien, 1986). In Brisbane, Talk it down, at the Storey Bridge Hotel at Kangaroo Point had weekly readings that drew large mixed crowds of poetry lovers and public bar drinkers alike. Readings had a renewed boom in the mid-1980s and regular readings have since been held in all capital cities and many towns.
A notable manifestation of Australian performance poetry occurred in Sydney in early 1991, when ten poets, including Pi, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Amanda Stewart, Jas H Duke, and Lauren Williams teamed up with jazz musician Jenny Sheard, to create, direct and produce the first ever, poet-performed, dramatic verse play ever to be presented. Entitled CALL IT POETRY/TONIGHT, the show made up entirely of the poems of the poets who were performing and involved unusual presentations of their work, including a kind of cinema noir voice-over rendition of a Grant Caldwell poem and several poems broken up into dialogues between the poets themselves. Rehearsals as well as the actual show were archived on broadcast-quality video, which was later edited and screened - as CALL IT POETRY - round the world. In the television production, several of the performances were presented as concrete poems, with video graphic overlays, including Jas H Duke's legendary DADA Poem. Copies of the program as well as all the rushes is available through the Library of the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT.
"There are now poets who write primarily for performance rather than the page and, whereas good readers were once more scarce than good poets, these people are very much 'performers' rather than just 'readers'." (Haskell, 1998:275)

Until the mid 1980s poetry readings in public places had been the domain of well paid international poets from the USA, Russia and the UK. Les Murray wrote in Quadrant in April 1977, that he would never be asked to read in the Town Hall during Writers' Week,
"when the overseas heavies come around, we are shown our true place in the estimation of our cultural establishments. We are just about good enough to sleep on friends' floors and read our work in a tent." (Starke, 1998)
But the performance poets had been having small readings in public places, hotels and coffee lounges, since the early 1970s. By the mid 1980s Les Murray and the performance poets were sharing large public stages in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The sounding of poetry in Australia has always been present but in most historical accounts it has not been emphasised as an activity, always assumed to be a supplementary activity to the industry of print publishing. Even when the oral transmission and aural appreciation of poetry dominated the aesthetics and poetics of Australian poetry and in the absence of sound recording devices, our record of these works remain as printed texts. The texts contained the 'sound' of the poems in their metre and rhyming patterns. Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, published in 1998 was the first attempt to present a collection of essays from American sound poets and performance poets that treated the field as a worthy topic of research.
"Since the I950s, the poetry reading has become one of the most important sites for the dissemination of poetic works in North America, yet studies of the distinctive features of the poem-in-performance have been rare (even full-length studies of a poet's work routinely ignore the audiotext), and readings no matter how well attended are rarely reviewed by newspapers or magazines." (Bernstein, 1998)

As in the USA, Australia lacks any real academic discourse in the field of performance poetry or poets; there are no prizes, no courses of study at universities, no peer-reviewed journals, no histories, no national anthologies, nothing that could be considered a body of information for the study and analysis of performance poetry. All there is are reports that have appeared in the daily presses and on radio and television, and the memories of readings attended.

Since the 1960s, when regular rhyme and rhythm in poetry became replaced by a more freestyle expression, and the public soundings of these works relied less on familiar rhythms and more on the political, social and psychological interpretation of the words, sounded poetry, has been appreciated for many other qualities. The sound of words and word combinations, fragments of sentences, repetitions, mirrorings within the text, alliteration and assonance and even internal rhyming became devices in the writing, and the line the basic unit of the poem, the breath determining the rhythm. The performance poets in 1978 drew attention to themselves as a new cultural formation and to the fact that there were poets dedicated to the sounding of poetry as their primary poetic activity and that poetry could be written not only for print, but exclusively or primarily for sounding. Obviously the print poets who were being asked to present their work to public audiences at State Writers' Festivals in the 1980s, must have felt intimidated by the performance poets that they shared the stages with, but history tells us they also had much to learn from them as well.
"Indeed, the value of the poetry reading (sounding) as a social and cultural form can be partly measured by its resistance, up to this point, to reification or commodification. It is a measure of its significance that it is ignored. That is, the (cultural) invisibility of the poetry reading is what makes its audibility so audacious. Its relative absence as an institution makes the poetry reading the ideal site for the presence of language for listening and being heard, for hearing and for being listened to." (Bernstein, 1998)

Attendance at any Writers Festival in any State these days will confirm the quality of sounded works, and the emphasis placed on the importance of soundings by authors of their work in public. The new Australian poetry made poetry readings central to poetic culture: at Friendly Street (Adelaide), La Mama (Melbourne) at New Partz and later at Harold Park (Sydney).
"Readings have now become ubiquitous for Australian poets." (McCooey in Webby, 2000, pg169)

As well as sounded poetry that explores the phonic qualities of words and lines and stanzas, there is also Sound Poetry, a small but world-wide movement of the late 1960s that experimented with the sonic quality of the sounds that make up spoken language. Sound poetry with practitioners in the UK, the Filkingen group in Sweden, the Fluxus and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the second wave Beats of the USA, the French sound poets Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidseik, etc. was represented in Australia by some exceptional sound poets that received international recognition in this field. Jas H Duke and Ania Walwicz, in Melbourne and Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann in Sydney, were influential, great performers and unique in style and content. Sound poetry remained very much a fringe activity of Australian poetry until the mid 1980s. But an international festival of Sound Poetry, SOUNDWORKS curated by Nicholas Zurbrugg and Nick Tsoutas at Performance Space as part of the Sydney Biennale in 1986 highlighted the intensity of the activity in Australia over the previous 15 years. (Zurbrugg and Tsoutas, 1986)
"One way or another, all of the artists performing at the SOUNDWORKS festival splice cut, heighten, release and more or less transform the creative potential of words, sounds and gestures, be these live, recorded, filmed, projected, or various combinations of all these possibilities." (Zurbrugg, 1986)

20th century

In sharp contrast to these early frontier writers most of the white inhabitants of Australia were city dwellers. Even Banjo Paterson, who wrote of the archetypal swagman was a city lawyer. Nevertheless their romanticised views of the outback and the rugged characters that inhabited it played an important part in shaping the Australian nation’s psyche, just as the American Old West influenced America’s ideas of itself.

Henry Handel Richardson (the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) was, aside from being one of the first female Australian authors, one of the first to write about urban, middle-class life. The 1920s bought two of the most important proponents of Australian literature, Vance and Nettie Palmer, to the fore. The husband and wife team, Vance working on novels and Nettie on non-fiction, did much to promote their own writings but also to chronicle earlier authors.

Prominent Australian poets of the twentieth century included A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, Kenneth Slessor, Gwen Harwood, David Rowbotham, Les Murray, Jennifer Maiden, Will Ogilvie and Kevin Hart.

• Australian poets

Immigrants and expatriates

One of the most internationally famous Australian novelists Nevil Shute was, like many people in a nation formed on immigration, not native born. Shute moved to Australia and settled there after World War II, portraying world events such as the war and nuclear warfare from an Australian point of view. Some years earlier in the early 1920s D. H. Lawrence visited and in his novel Kangaroo was one of the first foreign writers to depict Australia and its people as something more than a penal colony.

Other writers have felt that the remoteness of Australia needed to be escaped. Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her career in England and has in the past been a fierce critic of her native land but she now regularly lives some of the year in New South Wales. Although Greer is considered a pioneering feminist writer, Louisa Lawson, mother of the poet Henry Lawson, was a suffragist and editor of The Dawn Journal a campaigning publication. Along with Nettie Palmer and Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, Louisa Lawson is Greer’s distinguished forerunner.

Later developments

Australian literature can be thought of as coming of age in 1973 when Patrick White became the first and so far only Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature although he was born and spent a large part of his life overseas. Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include dual Booker Prize winner Peter Carey and David Malouf.

Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers; in 1944 the Ern Malley affair led to an obscenity trial; in the 1990s, a writer called Helen Darville masqueraded as Helen "Demidenko", winning major literary prizes for her Hand that Signed the Paper before being discovered, sparking a controversy over the content of her novel, which dealt with Nazis in the Ukraine.

James Clavell in his collection of works called The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature: its portrayal of far eastern culture from the admittedly even further east, but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint, just as Nevil Shute had done. Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark (the book Schindler's List is based on), has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country. Other novelists to use international themes are Gerald Murnane and Brenda Walker. To even greater distances, Greg Egan, Joel Shepherd and Traci Harding are just some of the currently popular Australian science fiction and fantasy novelists.

The crime genre is currently thriving in Australia, most notably through books written by Kerry Greenwood, Shane Maloney and Peter Temple.

Australian born business man Rupert Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in media worldwide. His influence on Australian literature includes the ownership of numerous newspapers and the publishing firm HarperCollins.

The voice of aboriginal Australians has begun to be noticed and includes the playwright Jack Davis although he is still little known. Writer Sally Morgan's My Place was considered a breakthrough novel in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice.

Another important milestone is the historian Manning Clark's seven volume History of Australia which is usually regarded as the definitive account of the nation.

Major Australian literary journals include Meanjin, Overland, Island, Heat and Southerly magazines, and the annual publications Verandah, Sleepers Almanac and Going Down Swinging

See also

• Australian novelists
• Australian poets