5 Conclusion

The structure of land ownership arrangements in Australia since colonisation resulted from the clash of two startlingly different historical approaches to land use and possession.

Put simply, the indigenous people experienced the landscape as having been created by their ancestors, and as an intrinsic part of the life and spirituality of the community. The people belonged to the land, and the land belonged to each community in sacred and accepted ways, according to Law.

The colonists were prepared to use the land as an agricultural resource, but in the early decades many could not view it without expressions of despair, alienation, or even horror. The colony belonged to the King of England, and the land in turn belonged to the military, the settlers, and later the great squatter and selector movements. It most certainly was not seen as belonging to the Aborigines.

These two ways of relating and belonging to the land have given rise to vastly different approaches to landscape, which in turn can be traced throughout the development of Australian literature (including poetry) and art (including film, music and visual arts).

In relation to poetry, the ways in which poets experience their connection to the landscape informs the ways in which they are able to describe it. This in turn has had an impact on the cultural identity of their communities. The process is circular, as the cultural context is a key element in the formation of those connections to the land which many Australians see as intrinsic to their “Australian-ness”.

The work of Aboriginal poets is informed by the imperatives of their communities, and by their own responses to racism, poverty, cultural dislocation, separation of families, and dispossession. Thus, the politics of race is intrinsic to the work of most Aboriginal writers, and Aboriginal poets have focused on work which has practical applications through education or advocacy, and which is aimed at preservation and encouragement of Aboriginal identity.

For many non-Aboriginal writers, the process of coming to terms with the landscape has been seen as a crucial step in the development of a post-colonial cultural identity.

This thematic concern has been played out in many contexts since colonisation: in the syntax which evolved to give voice to that developing identity; in the focus on frontier and the outback; in its rejection by those who sought to retain a European-based identity; in changes to the landscape itself; and in the development of Aboriginalism and other attempts to come to terms with the land and its indigenous people.

But while the adaptation of the colonial mind to the landscape has been a central theme in the literature of the country, this thesis argues that this thematic preoccupation is in great part due to the concern of many key poets with the politics of land and land ownership.

From the Free Selection beliefs of Charles Harpur, to the environmentalism of Judith Wright; from the small-holder conservatism of Les Murray to the radical voice of Lionel Fogarty: the responses of many poets to the landscape is informed by their political framework, or vice versa.

One of the clearly-emerging themes in the work of most poets discussed herein, is that the love of the land which is so obvious in their work has led to a growing, and publicly voiced, environmentalism, regardless of the poets' other ideological positions. A concern about natural heritage and an identification with conservation issues is clear in the poetry and public statements, for example, of both the left-leaning Judith Wright and the staunchly conservative Les Murray, although their relationships with the organised conservation movement differ wildly.

Furthermore, the issue of land rights, and the legacy of dispossession, has been central to Aboriginal poetry and writing in English since the landmark publication of We Are Going in 1964.

Again, regardless of how their personal politics influences their approach, the work of many non-Aboriginal poets is concerned with the displacement of the Aboriginal people and reconciliation between the coloniser and the dispossessed.

On one hand, some have sought to deal with both dispossession and the vision of the land itself, by assimilating or incorporating elements of Aboriginal belief or culture into the non-Aboriginal poetic tradition, through Aboriginalism.

On the other hand, a few poets have consciously sought to reconcile the dialectic of colonisation through their work, and it is these poets whose work most clearly engenders in the reader an authentic sense of the land, and its people.

Therefore, through its focus on the landscape, Australian poetry has contributed to the development of diverse cultural identities in this country. Similarly, through the focus of many landscape poets on the politics of land and the arrangements which govern land ownership, poetry, and the poets themselves, have become a crucial part of the discourse over land rights and environmental issues since the 1960s.

This thesis acknowledges the role of the poet in contemporary Australia as a political actor, regardless of each poet's personal ideology, and as a witness to, and voice of, the processes of the community.

It is through the synthesis and acknowledgement of these roles, which Judith Wright envisioned in 1965, that the poet is able to finally become the creator of an authentic and lasting poetic vision of the Australian landscape.

Before one’s country can become an accepted background against which the poet’s and novelist’s imagination can move unhindered, it must first be observed, understood, described, and as it were observed. The writer must be at peace with his landscape before he can turn confidently to the human figures ... We are beginning to write, no longer as transplanted Europeans, nor as rootless men who reject the past and put their hopes only in the future, but as men with a present to be lived in and a past to nourish us. (Wright, 1965: xxii)