Kendall's pointed references to dreaming and sleep are part of a concept which has continued to be evident through the Jindyworobak school and into modern white Australian poetry. This ‘Dreaming’ theme is based on a perception of a homogeneous Aboriginal culture (which is a mistaken and simplistic view of myriad cultures, languages and traditions).
It is also derived from a misunderstanding of an imagined Dreamtime. Some poets, such as Ingamells, writers (including Eleanor Dark and her Timeless Land), and artists (notably populists such as sculptor William Ricketts and painter Ainslie Roberts) have worked towards a concept of a Dreaming which is seen as a state of higher consciousness and which allows the artist, they believe, to more fully understand the land and its people.
This perception enables the white poet (and his or her white reader) to continue to see Aboriginal people as unconscious, and of the past, not of the present. Apart from presenting an over-romantic view of traditional Aboriginal life, this idea also denies the contemporary existence of Aboriginal cultures and continues the myth that the Aboriginal communities belong only to an ancient mythical past (and, therefore, have no place, for example, in current land ownership arrangements).
It is also a part of what Edward Said (1985) calls “Orientalism”, that is, an obsession with the Other, the colonised, the dispossessed, which both misrepresents them and stifles the development of their own voice. Said sees this as part of the process of colonisation, which does not end with the initial invasion, but continues to influence both the coloniser and the colonised for generations.
A generation after Kendall, Bernard O'Dowd's ‘The Bush’ , written in 1912 (3), continued this theme, informed by a growing anthropological interest in traditional Aboriginal communities evidenced in books such as Spencer and Gillen's The Native Tribes of Central Australia, first published in 1899, and published again under the title of The Arunta in 1927.
O'Dowd writes of Alcheringa or the “Golden Age”, and the “Australian mystery” (Elliott, 1979: xxii):
She is the scroll on which we are to write
Mythologies our own ...
Interestingly, ‘The Bush’ is also one of the more romantic attempts at description of an Australian landscape written in the early part of this century. O’Dowd's mystification of Aboriginal cultural understandings of the land fits in with his attempts to create his own understanding of the bush and to convey its difference to European readers:
To other eyes and ears you are a great
Pillared cathedral tremulously green,
An odorous and hospitable gate
To genial mystery, the happy screen
Of truants or of lovers rambling there
Neath sun-shot boughs o'er miles of maidenhair.
Wee rubies dot the leaflets of the cherries,
The wooing wagtails hop from log to bough,
The bronzewing comes from Queensland for the berries,
The bellbird by the creek is calling now.
O’Dowd, like many earlier poets, is trying to describe an environment that, to him, is beyond the limits of his language. The images he uses (such as those of the cathedral, the “happy screen”, lover’s lanes, and verdant boughs) are the images of an English landscape, the green and lovely land that contrasts so markedly with the vista O’Dowd found before him. He inserts as many references to exotic creatures and plants as possible, using the romance of the names (“bronzewing”) to evoke the images which the poet’s language cannot fully convey. O’Dowd’s struggle with the language, and his keen interest in seeing the land through the eyes of the Aboriginal people, was to profoundly influence a whole generation of poets—the Jindyworobaks.