One of the questions that arise in an examination of modern Australian landscape poetry is that of the difference in creative representations of the land by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal poets. It is a debate which can be undertaken, not from an essentialist position, but from a position which questions how poets from divergent cultures relate to the landscape they see around them, and the ways in which they convey their experience of the land.
Vastly different cultural relationships are reflected in poems about the land, and these also reflect the broader political, economic and social relationships between people and the land they inhabit.
Cultural relationships with the landscape are often identifiably different for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. This is then obvious in the ways in which poets describe their notions of landscape.
It should be noted that I am not arguing that there are traits inherent in particular peoples that enable, for example, Aboriginal people to intrinsically experience the land in a more complete way. Nor am I arguing that no European can ever deeply understand the Australian landscape (although others may have made both arguments).
I am, however, suggesting that the ways in which landscape is firstly seen, and then written about, may be drastically different. This is due to the contrasting relationships with the land that are possible in the two, often divergent, general cultural traditions, as well as the political and economic conditions in which the poets exist.
Our cultural existence (in its widest sense) influences what we see when we look at the landscape around us. What we can see, or what we are looking for limits what we can then describe.
If there is a fundamental difference in approaches between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal poets it is in part based on this diversity of understandings about what the land means.
If you are Wentworth looking at the Blue Mountains, you may see a barrier that must be crossed. If you are Harpur looking towards the Blue Mountains, you may see a poetic grandeur, and also a resource; something that should be owned by you and your peers and made agriculturally viable.
On the other hand, if you are a member of one of the local Aboriginal groups, a contemporary of Wentworth or Harpur, you may look in the same direction and see your life-stories and family and culture and past and present and future.
The ways in which people, or communities, or the poets who represent them, describe what and how they see, are likely to be different.
Although obviously the ways in which the Australian landscape can be seen have changed (both physically and culturally) since the time of Harpur and his contemporaries, these opposing ways of seeing and describing can still be read in modern poetry about the landscape.
Landscape plays a number of roles in modern Australian non-Aboriginal poetry: as a background for action; as a metaphor for a national identity; as a character in the action of the poem (representing, for example, woman or the body); as an image to be photographed or documented; as a way in which ownership or possession can be claimed; as a metaphor for the unconscious, or the human spirit; as a symbol of Nature; as a force to be overcome; or as a threatening non-human presence.
The most basic language used, the use of the words ‘land’ and ‘landscape’, can indicate those differing relationships and perceptions. As Professor Stanner claimed in his landmark Boyer Lecture:
No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. (1969: 44)
It could be argued that much of the non-Aboriginal poetry about the land is a result of the poets’ personal relationship with the land as landscape. That is, as something external; something to be looked upon and used, either physically or metaphorically; something which has to do with identity, but does not necessarily define identity. This relationship can be deeply personal, and may include intense emotional attachment, and historical or familial significance.
For both Judith Wright and Les Murray, poetry conveys a relationship with the land that they feel goes much deeper than that experienced by their non-Aboriginal predecessors. As Shoemaker (1989) points out, however, in spite of Murray's claims, this relationship is still something different to that experienced by his Aboriginal contemporaries (see 4.2.5).
Modern Aboriginal poetry about the land, though, has sought to do much more than either Wright or Murray. Many poems not only reflect the poet’s personal relationship with the land, but also map the complex nature of his or her community's cultural and spiritual relationship with the land generally, or with a particular area. The mapping process is one which performs a number of profound functions, and which holds implications for the development of the future society of Australia.
People like Peter Skipper [acclaimed visual artist from Papunya in the Western Desert] are moving in different directions from different starting points but along the same map, whose function is nothing less than to guide the survival of Aboriginal culture and society. This map no longer claims exclusive rights for Aborigines over Australia, in spite of the paranoiac claims of anti-land rights propagandists. On the contrary it uses maps of physical space as the controlling metaphor in a semiotic system whose aim is to find and assure a place in Australia for Aboriginals: a place that recognises older rights to specific parts of the country, and newer rights to live and work and find a meaningful identity in contemporary Australian society. (Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 101)
I would further suggest that this map be still in the process of creation. Rather than having any existing map to follow, modern Aboriginal poets have had to create their own cultural and political maps, and also a renewed sense of the country itself and the language with which it can be described.
For many Aboriginal poets, there are extremely compelling and important motivations for this process of mapping. Many rituals, languages and traditions are in danger of extinction, and many have already gone out of living memory. Many places and landscapes can no longer be claimed by the people who relate most closely to them, or are the subject of complicated legal battles that may involve discussion of the community’s intangible relationship to the landscape. Many urban Aboriginal people, removed or dislocated from their communities over the decades, are attempting to reconstruct shattered cultural and social identities and networks.
In the midst of these issues of survival and integrity, and widespread debates and movements, there are poets, giving voice to the aspirations of these communities and seeking their own ways of relating to their country.