AustLit

'The Jindyworobak poetry movement, founded by Rex Ingamells in 1938, emerged in the context of a literary-cultural milieu split between those concerned with developing a uniquely ‘indigenous’ Australian tradition on the one hand, and those primarily concerned with defending and maintaining continuity with Australia’s European inheritance on the other. While the Jindyworobaks have typically been associated with the former tradition, this essay argues that they in fact sought to chart a new path that rejected both the straightforward traditions of anti-colonial nationalism and the ‘alien’ influence of imported European culture; that they rejected both extremes and sought instead to achieve a synthesis of the two. With this aim in mind, they turned towards Aboriginal Australians, as bearers of the spirit of the place, in an attempt to appropriate an imagined environmental essence and to thereby construct the conditions for an unmediated encounter between the settler and the land.' (Introduction)