AustLit

Margaret Scott’s Collected Poems were published in 2000 with a ‘Foreword’ by Philip Mead, which draws attention to the way in which her poems register the shock of emigration from the northern hemisphere, and the role of memory in her poetry. George Mackay Brown’s assertion, about Orcadian poetry, seems also to apply to Scott’s island perspectives, haunted as they are by time. Scott also feels powerfully the ambivalence of Tasmania, for her ‘a place of weird contrasts and fierce polarities.’ Her ‘Walking to Cape Raoul,’ for example, from her 1988 collection The Black Swans is a powerful instance of the Gothic theme in Tasmanian landscape writing, in sharp contrast to poems like James McAuley’s ‘Spider on the Snow’ or Vivian Smith’s ‘watercolour country’ (from ‘Tasmania,’ Tide Country 1982):

Then the track falters in reeds and pocked mud,

And the forest steps close.

Darkness peeps through the legs

Of its towering guard as we flounder and point.

There’s a faded plastic pennant nailed to a tree:

‘To Cape Raoul.’ It has the malicious look

of a bad joke, pointing away from the cleared land

and familiar beasts.

In their landmark anthology, Effects of Light : The Poetry of Tasmania (1985) Vivian Smith and Margaret Scott consciously defined the phylogenetics of the island’s poetry for the first time. If islands are worlds, they are ambivalent worlds because they’re also home to endemic species. Smith and Scott identified what they called a ‘quintessential’ quality to Tasmania, noting also its ambivalence at the same time:

Movements and events which in Australia at large have been broad, diffuse or partial have become in Tasmania extreme, concentrated or bizarre. The impact of white invaders upon the indigenous people has been more devastating here than in other states. The southernmost peninsula of this southernmost state became not simply a convict settlement but the gaol of an empire. The feuding over wilderness areas, has taken on an extra edge in the clear light of this place of paradox and contrast which Maxwell Miller [?-1867] celebrated as ‘the blooming Eden of the Southern Sea’ and Hal Porter damned as ‘an ugly trinket hanging at the world’s discredited rump. (i-ii)

‘Similarly,’ they write, ‘Tasmanian poetry can be seen as a kind of simplified replica, a sharper more highly-coloured version, of mainland complexity’ (ii). This is the identical point to Peter Conrad’s: ‘here was Australia in little: a society gobbled up by an allocation of earth too large for it, clinging in trepidation to the shore’ (Down Home 34). By contrast, in a poem like Les Murray’s ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’ (from The People's Otherworld, 1983), included by Smith and Scott in their anthology, Tasmania seems rather to have provided the occasion and setting for island complexity of linguistic representation:

Flashy wrists out of buttoned grass cuffs, feral whisky burning gravels,

Jazzy knuckles ajitter on soakages, peaty cupfulls, soft pots overflowing,

Setting out along the great curve, migrating mouse-quivering water,

Mountain-driven winter water, in the high tweed, stripping off its mountains

To run faster in its skin, it swallows the above, it feeds where it is fed on …

Effects of Light includes selections from earliest settler times, including convict and colonial poets, like Louisa Anne Meredith, Edward Kemp, Caroline W. Leakey, and James Hebblethwaite. Their selection of 20th-century poetry from Marie E. J. Pitt, A. D. Hope, Hal Porter, James McAuley, Gwen Harwood, Vivian Smith, Margaret Scott, Vicki Raymond, Andrew Sant, Stephen Edgar, Sarah Day and others is framed in terms of the ‘mark’ that Tasmania, as a place, has left on their writing: ‘the isolation of the place has compelled the island’s poets to turn inwards to explore their own identities and at the same time to search after an understanding of their place as human beings in nature and in time’ (iii). Nothing unusual here, in terms of artistic pursuit, rather it’s the intensity of aesthetic expression that is endemic to the island: ‘a peculiar concentration to the fashioning of images which can reconcile their own humanity with the paradoxical qualities of an enduring yet changeful landscape and a remote yet ever-present past’ (iii). The ‘tone’ of Tasmanian poetry, Smith and Scott argue, is customarily ‘muted, pensive, or intimate; its forms are often elegiac, meditative or lyrical, above all, its concern in many instances is with an outer world that is emblematic of an inner one, with the private colloquy and what Gwen Harwood has called “parables of fate”’ (iii). In other words Tasmanian poetry, like Gwen Harwood’s work, has no radical, anti-pastoral or formally innovative traditions, its ambivalences are all internal and intellectual.

After Effects of Light, poets like Gwen Harwood, Andrew Sant, Vicki Raymond, Sarah Day and Stephen Edgar (who has edited poetry for Island magazine and whose work has received multiple prizes), in particular, went on to establish national and international reputations as poets where their formal and thematic concerns no longer seem bounded by the critical matrix established in Smith and Scott’s anthology. And Smith and Scott’s framing of Tasmanian poetry tends to discount the work and themes of one of the most interesting figures in Australian poetry, Marie E. J. Pitt (1869-1948). Born near Bairnsdale, Pitt went to live in Queenstown with her miner husband in 1893, shortly after their marriage. A socialist and a feminist Pitt wrote about her twelve-year experience of living in West coast mining towns like Mount Read, Mount Bischoff and Mathinna. As Roslynn Haynes notes Pitt’s labor journalism and poetry ‘written from the perspective of a young wife and mother, daily fearing for the safety of her husband […] evoke a Gothic landscape, remote, harsh and dramatic but full of haunting power and energy’ (142). There are deep ambivalences everywhere in Pitt’s poetry, about land clearance and mineral extraction. ‘West Coast Silhouette’ juxtaposes nature in the form of the sea and a songbird with land-clearing and mining:

Once more I stand –

Stand and look west from an open door,

With the world beneath me stretching away

Far and far as the eye can see

To Heemskirk out on the dim sea marge:

And hear, now muffled, now rising clear,

The jangling note of a single bell

And the beat of hoofs, on the corded track,

Of the pack-team toiling up from “the Lead”;

Yea, hear again

Through the hollow hush of the afternoon

The brown thrush fluting her madrigal,

The axe-strokes ringing o’er ridge and spur,

And the clang of “steel”

At the change of shifts on the “number four”. (Burke 110-11)

Pitt’s poetry can read alongside such contemporary capturing of workplaces and working people’s voices as Pete Hay and Tony Thorne’s Last Days of the Mill(2012) about the closing down of ‘The Pulp’ (Associated Pulp & Paper Mills Limited). Another writer whose work doesn’t easily fit Smith and Scott’s frame is Tim Thorne, a poet who has engaged with broader social and political issues since his Generation of ’68 days. His A Letter to Egon Kisch (2007 – addressed to the Jewish Communist writer who made a dramatic visit to Australia in 1934) is a neo-Byronic swipe at contemporary Australian society and politics:

Dear Egon, since you leapt aboard our land

A life’s time allocation has slipped by

And every grain of all that trickling sand

Has held a world, as most of us well knew

From Billy Blake, who also showed us why

The lamb is purer than the jackeroo.

(As well he told of tygers, I believe,

but ours chose your arrival time to leave.

Since Smith and Scott’s anthology there have been other collections of Tasmanian poetry, like Helen Gee’s River of Verse : A Tasmanian Journey (2004), a collection with a conservationist focus, the web-based showcase of Tasmanian poets ‘The Write Stuff,’ and C.A. Cranston’s anthology of Tasmanian writing Along These Lines : From Trowenna to Tasmania : At Least Two Centuries of Peripatetic Perspectives in Poetry and Prose (Launceston: Cornford, 2000).