The 1930s saw the development of the Jindyworobaks, a nationalist school of poetry centred on Rex Ingamells and Flexmore Hudson. The Jindyworobaks developed themes of the Dreamtime and the imaginative power of the land, using images borrowed from real or imagined Aboriginal tradition (particularly from anthropological works such as those of Strehlow).
Their work was an attempt to blend their own cultural understandings of both land and poetry with a created spiritual framework and language which they believed paid tribute to the Aboriginal cultures from which they borrowed inspiration. Their aim was not only to develop a spiritual framework for their own work, but also to redefine Australian poetry, and, as a consequence, the national identity they believed was yet to emerge. At last, Australia possessed the elusive spiritual mystery.
Elliott claims this as an aim “of noble proportions” developed by a group of young poets-in-training, which re-created Australian perceptions of culture, poetry, and of the landscape. His version of the Jindyworobak creed is: “We enter a mythological world, but it is our own. We take possession of the magic that is our own. We are initiated men”. (1979: xvi)
F.H. Mares described the philosophy and impact of the Jindyworobaks in the following terms:
Recognising the rootlessness of Australian culture, hooked uneasily to the heels of a Europe and America widely different in their attitudes and requirements, their social and political organisation and — not least important — their climate and scenery, the leaders of the movement determined to find roots at home, and set out to look for them in the by-that-time (1938) very scattered fragments of Aboriginal myth and ritual. The cure was as romantic as the diagnosis was acute, but it did oblige other writers to face a real problem, the significance of the Aborigines in ‘White Australia’s’ past present, and future. (1960: 26)
This creed is evident, in part, in Ian Mudie's ‘This is Australia’ (4):
This is Australia, this is each one's earth
that is Australian, this soil is sacred
now and forever for each one for whom
the vision of this land resurgent ever stirs
in every landscape ... .
for each that sees
as his own body and as mighty all this land.
At the time, critical acceptance of work by Jindyworobak poets was mixed, although many poems were happily adopted as nationalist anthems by an eager reading public. Poets such as Judith Wright struggled to keep their work distinct from what she dubbed “Jindy jingle” (1965, xi), while others such as James McAuley were openly hostile. The Jindyworobak movement, he wrote years later in A Map of Australian Verse, “was a symptom not a substantive poetic event”. (1975: 125) Other critics were scathing, and A.D. Hope famously likened the movement’s zealous approach to the “fanaticism of the Hitler Youth movement”:
The Jindyworobaks might be described as the Boy Scout School of Poetry… Here is a sample of the flat-foot verbiage which makes one wonder whether the Jindyworobaks are really competent to speak for poetry in Australia [he quotes from Rex Ingamells’ poem ‘The Gangrened People’ and goes on to comment] There are five whole pages of this. Believe it or not! If troop-leader Rex can mistake it for poetry it is high time the Jindyworobaks deposed him and took away his bushcraft badge.
(Hope, 1941, but re-published with a qualifying comment and apology to Ian Mudie in 1974: 44)
The Jindyworobak movement’s relationship with Aboriginal cultures is complex. The poets selected words and symbols that indicated a connection to traditional cultures, and yet the symbols were often constructed, and the words used in an inappropriate context, or simply wrong. They called for recognition that the indigenous people belonged to the land, and yet never strongly acknowledged the violence of the dispossession. They glorified the landscape, and yet still found difficulty in finding the words (English or ‘Aboriginal’) to describe it. They were part of the discourse of Orientalism, part of the continuing process of colonisation, and were unknowingly extending the impact of Social Darwinism from one century into the next.
Andrew Lattas has attempted to explain the links between many writers’ responses to the landscape, and their eagerness to incorporate or appropriate Aboriginal cultural symbols into their aesthetic framework, and the aspiration towards a national cultural identity:
Many authors emphasis the haunting emptiness of the Australian landscape as a fear which whites must overcome. It is almost as though the landscape was seen as reminding them of themselves, for Australians are also often constructed as lacking in meaning, as being empty. In this discourse Australians are instructed that they can overcome their inner nothingness by overcoming the hauntingness of the landscape; and that this is most likely to be attained through discovering the unique spiritual meanings which Aborigines read into the land, and by making these the basis of interiority.
(in Attwood and Arnold, 1992: 52)
Yet, as Brian Elliott explains, the Jindyworobaks’ fascination with Aborigines was mostly academic:
In the first instance, the Jindyworobak initiative could not be described as anything but bookish. It was an idea before it became an ideal. We all listened avidly when Rex Ingamells expounded the Dreamtime; we all dipped, albeit lightly, in The Arunta ... I had at that time scarcely ever seen an Aborigine, let alone had any acquaintance with one, and never heard one speak until later in that same year… There were no Aborigines to be seen in Adelaide or other southern cities. (There are many now, but there were none then.) (1979: xiv)
‘This Is Australia’ is a perfect example of this duplicity. It is a nationalistic affirmation. But it must be recognised that Mudie is using images from Aboriginal traditions to forge the national identity for which his generation was constantly calling: this is a separate Australian (non-Aboriginal) cultural identity.
The indirect consequence of Mudie’s declaration is to assert the presence and power of the European cultures in this country. The Jindyworobak vision uses borrowed terminology and images, but the dream of the national identity does not necessarily include the Aboriginal people.
This assertion is reinforced by poems such as Ingamells’ ‘Forgotten People’ and ‘Black Children’ which mourn the loss of traditional Aboriginal cultures and acknowledge that “The white man’s city has, in spreading, slain/Nature and hardly left a memory”. The “passing” of the Aboriginal people (who are perceived as a part of Nature) is seen as an inevitable consequence of white settlement. Indeed, during the early 1940s, the Aboriginal population had been decimated to its lowest levels, and many white Australians held this view, particularly after the 1938 publication of Daisy Bates’ book, The Passing of the Aborigines.
Mudie's ‘Underground’ (5) is more clearly a statement of the Jindyworobaks’ public aim of striving for spiritual acceptance of, and by, the land. It is also indicative of the movement's symbolic use of imagery drawn from a perceived Aboriginal spirituality.
Deep flows the flood,
deep under the land.
Dark is it, and blood
and eucalypt colour and scent it.
Deep flows the stream,
feeding through the totem-roots,
deep through the time of dream
in Alcheringa.
Deep flows the river,
deep as our roots reach for it;
feeding us, angry and striving
against the blindness
ship-fed seas bring us
from colder waters.
It is a poem that yearns for a past Golden Age, for acceptance in a rootless culture, for a place in the land. It is also a rejection of the “colder waters” of European-centred art and language, and a statement of the anger and “striving” that result from displacement and the wish for acceptance.
The poem marks a shift in consciousness towards the land, a claim that some more profound cultural and creative understanding is required before European poets can render the landscape meaningful to their readers.
Much of the poetry produced by the Jindyworobaks may now seem naive and out-dated (and, in some cases such as Ingamells’ ‘Black Mary’, overtly racist), and their voices seem now those of a small wistful group within a generally conservative generation. However, their aim is still echoed, although perhaps in less-grandiose terms, by many modern non-Aboriginal poets.
Some are more successful than others. Those who are least successful are those who continue to wish they were “initiated men”, whose relationship to the Aboriginal cultures upon which they draw is still based on the remnants of colonial attitudes and the wish for a non-Aboriginal national identity.
Those who are most successful in coming to terms with the landscape, and the realities of colonisation and its impact on the indigenous communities, are those such as Judith Wright and Lee Cataldi. I would argue that these two writers, discussed in greater length later in this chapter, have created a place for the poet as a witness to differing Aboriginal histories or communities, and have developed a political understanding of the issues around land and land ownership which directly affect Aboriginal people.