The relationship between Aboriginal poets and the (largely) non-Aboriginal literary mainstream has been difficult, and may have limited the extent to which Aboriginal poets have been published and read. This not only has an obvious impact upon the poets, and upon the visibility of the Aboriginal community, it has also prevented the development of a widespread consciousness of Aboriginal understandings of land and belonging.
An example of the often-fraught relationship between mainstream and Aboriginal poetry is that of the response to the first published Aboriginal poet, Oodgeroo. Although her early books of poems (published under the name of Kath Walker) received instant public acclaim and remain amongst the best-selling books by any Australian poet, white critical reception was less than warm.
It would be imagined that after many years of white poets (such as those in the Jindyworobak group, see 4.2.3) attempting to construct their own versions of Aboriginal culture, the publication of works by an Aboriginal poet would be welcomed. However, Walker's poems were not necessarily the modern form of traditional oral literature for which the Aboriginalists had hoped.
Rather, her works were structured like those of the white Australian bush balladeers, and discussed modern political issues of racism, dispossession, and discrimination. We Are Going was not a mystical retelling of the Alcheringa stories. It was a powerful and accessible statement on the treatment of Aboriginal people in the 1960s and before.
Shoemaker has examined some of the “hostile” and “disturbingly limited” critical reaction to the publication of the early works:
It is one thing to say that Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poetry varies quite markedly in atmosphere and accomplishment. It is another to denounce her as merely a ‘rhymer’ or a ‘versifier’, as Leon Cantrell did in his 1967 review of The Dawn Is At Hand:
According to my system of pigeon-holes and prejudices she is not a poet. She has absolutely no feeling for words: it’s almost as if they use her rather than she use [sic] them, with the result that one can gain no notion of the individual qualities of the person behind the verse.
So, too, Andrew Taylor commented in The Australian Book Review:
She is no poet, and her verse is not poetry in any true sense. It hasn’t the serious commitment to formal rightness, that concern for making speech true under all circumstances, which distinguishes Buckley and Wright at their best.
(Shoemaker, 1989: 185)
Interestingly, though, non-Aboriginal readers were far from dismissive, and eager to buy and read the work of Walker, and later Davis and Gilbert. The first local edition of We Are Going sold out within weeks, and the book was similarly successful in the United States.
By using the bush ballad form, Oodgeroo worked in a populist poetic structure with which she was as familiar as the reader, and ensured that her work was, and remains, accessible to the people with whom she was trying to communicate. It is therefore, a far more intelligent and lasting form of poetry, with a greater impact on the cultures of Australia, than the literary and critical establishment wished to believe.
The negative responses from critics also exhibited their lack of knowledge about the uses to which poems by Aboriginal poets are often quite consciously put. Many of Oodgeroo’s poems, for example, are designed to be sung. Their form is structured to allow them to be communicated, not just on the page, but orally.
Those Aboriginalists who wished for a new Aboriginal poetry based on traditional forms did not recognise that Oodgeroo had created just that: a poetry which could be sung; which could be therefore communicated much more widely to those who did not read English; and which performed the functions of conveying information, traditions and complex ideas.
It is not, of course, sophisticated poetry, when measured against the strict criteria of European literature or when unfairly compared to the more formal works of university-educated and established poets such as Wright and Buckley. However, it is difficult to imagine critics railing so forcefully against many other newly emerging poets.
Reviewers lamented that Oodgeroo not only failed to be innovative in the sense of adopting ‘traditional’ Aboriginal models of oral poetry, but also lagged considerably behind contemporary white models, and used metrical and rhyming patterns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. If some Aboriginal writing did not meet white expectations about form, the content did not always come up to expectations either.
(Neumann, 1992: 292)
Worse than simply not being what was expected, We Are Going and The Dawn Is At Hand were indictments of white Australian society, and, as was the case with Roberta Sykes’ Love Songs and Other Revolutionary Acts, were dismissed by critics as polemic.
Mudrooroo puts it more bluntly:
It appears that Aboriginal poetry is condemned for being trite, if not trite then boring, if not boring then not poetry. (1991: 46)
It is interesting to note that critics appeared more threatened than readers were by the use of rhetoric in poetry, or at least, by rhetoric with which they were unsympathetic. After all, polemic in poetry is nothing new. Indeed, it plays a crucial role in the Australian bush ballad tradition as exercised by Lawson and Patterson, from whom Oodgeroo had learned her poetic form, and can be seen to be part of the more subversive Nomadic syntax (see 2.6). However, this official unwillingness to accept changes or variations in form and ideas may have rendered the critical response irrelevant in the face of widespread reader enthusiasm.
In the case of Oodgeroo, her development into a well-known advocate for the Aboriginal people, and her international reputation as a poet and educator, reinforced her belief in the important role of poetry as an educative tool and a force for political and social change. This role is exactly that which the earlier critics of her poetry chose to deny, but it is one that has been consciously taken on by other, even more polemic, poets such as Davis, Gilbert and, more recently, Fogarty.
I was accused of being bitter—and that’s right, I was bitter. How dare this white race who stole my land have the cheek to say they're the superior race? They who pinched my land without paying for it, how dare they? Yes, I was bitter and I was angry. They'd all say ‘Oh Kath Walker is very bitter’. But I'm not bitter any more; I was in those days, I had every reason to be bitter.
(Oodgeroo, in Thompson, 1990: 157)
It is worth examining briefly the different attitudes of recent anthologists of Australian poetry to contemporary Aboriginal poems. Rodney Hall, in his Introduction to The Collins Book of Australian Poetry, began by writing, “Australian poetry is not two hundred years old, as it is generally presented to us, but in all probability 40,000 years old”. (1981: 1) In his selection of poems to represent, therefore, the entirety of Australian poetry, he includes a number of traditional ceremonial songs and contemporary poems and songs translated into English. These are not, as had been done previously, collected at the beginning of the anthology, as if “they represent a timeless tradition” (1981: 7) but are “arranged on the same basis as everything else; approximately in chronological order, taking into account the date they were collected and the age of the singer”. (1981: 2) This was a revolutionary concept at the time. Hall also includes works written in English by Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then Kath Walker) and Jack Davis.
Ten years later, 1991 saw the release of two important anthologies with very different stated aims in relation to their representations of contemporary Aboriginal poetry. In his selection for the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (a new and comprehensive version of the anthology originally published in 1986), Les Murray chose to include a number of translations of older and a greater number of contemporary songs and poems, including David Unaipon’s formal ‘Song of Hunarrda’, published in the 1920s, and the film commentary by Sam Woolagoodjah included as a “found poem” under the title ‘Lalai’. Murray explains his intentions in the Introduction, including his insistence that the translations be read without being “heavily swaddled in anthropological commentary” (1991: xxiii), and asserts “not merely for liberal reasons, these texts have to be present: without examples from the senior culture no picture of poetry can be complete”. (1991: xxiv) Unaipon's poem and Oodgeroo’s ‘We Are Going’ appear to be the only poems written in English by Aboriginal poets in the anthology. Radical voices such as Fogarty and Gilbert are absent (see 4.2.5).
The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry caused a storm on its release the same year, due to its inclusion of the works of the imaginary ‘Ern Malley’. However, it was also one of the first major mainstream anthologies to include a substantial number of works by Aboriginal-identified poets such as Davis, Oodgeroo, Mudrooroo, Sykes, Fogarty and Weller in its collection of what editors Tranter and Mead call the “unruly work we thought needed to be gathered into any live tradition”. (1991: xxx)
Contemporary Aboriginal voices… are some of the most controversial and politically volatile in Australia and representing these various black poetries is important. At least since Vietnam, poetry as protest has had an important life in Australian culture. The existence of Kevin Gilbert’s anthology Inside Black Australia meant that we needed to be careful in our selection; we didn’t wish to appropriate poems from what is, understandably, a separatist poetic movement in some ways. (1991: xxxi)
Tranter and Mead acknowledge that the “translation of traditional Aboriginal poetry and song cycles has … been part of an influential exchange with white Australian poetry for fifty years …[and] have broadened enormously our awareness of poetic tradition in Australia” (1991: xxxi), but do not include recently collected and translated traditional works in the anthology.