Very few modern poets have successfully endeavoured to follow Wright’s lead and pursue poetry about landscape which clearly recognises both the realities of the land and the contemporary impact of the colonisation of that land. I would argue that one of the more authentic voices is that of Lee Cataldi, whose evident ideological framework, and experiences of living and working with the Warlpiri people in Central Australia, have enabled her to find ways of writing about both country and inhabitants without resort to the discourse of Aboriginalism.
Cataldi’s work, with its clean lines and simple but compelling imagery, adapts readily to different landscapes, from the dry interior to inner Sydney (and indeed even China). She also engages with and conveys the communal life of the Warlpiri (and specifically the women), while being quite clear about her own status as watcher, poet, teacher and, above all, outsider.
Cataldi has made explicit her understandings of the dialectic nature of Australia’s history since colonisation, and the impact it has had on language and writing in this country, and writers’ approaches to landscape:
The mode of signification of any writing is a product of the relationship of that writing to its language and to its history, not only up to the point of production but beyond. The colonist writer in Australia writes, generally, in English, but our history is not English ... What we have in Australia and have had since 1788 is one history, although always seen from one of two estranged positions. From the position of the indigenous person the principal feature of this history is genocide; from the position of the colonist, the principal feature is terra nullius. The two are intimately related. We whites desired an empty land. Some of us tried to create this emptiness literally by wiping out those who were living in that land. The Aboriginal presence we have denied in this country returns in that empty landscape which haunts us. The colonist is surrounded by a deafening silence. (1994)
By clearly rejecting the concept of terra nullius, and placing colonisation in a context which traces its literary and political adaptation to the landscape of the country, Cataldi firmly aligns herself, like Wright, with a political framework which recognises the importance of land ownership and reconciliation with the Aboriginal people. In her poetry, she attempts to establish her own connection with the country as an observer, and reiterates her position as an (albeit supportive) outsider in relation to the Aboriginal community and people of which she writes.
In the short poem ‘Escape’ (27), she writes:
with my bag of linguistic texts
and the teachers’ manual I will
step off the plane at Lajamanu
onto another planet
There is no wish for initiation, no hopeful squirrelling away of knowledge or privilege. Cataldi’s poems recognise the power structures of the relationships between poet and those she observes, between teacher and student/subject, and between “the women who live on the ground” (28) and the white women who work with or around them:
femmocrat
black and gold dress gold
handbag fat
as a bank account
meanwhile
in the draughty hall
the Warlpiri women wait
their painted breasts
delicate as earth
and into
the mismanaged white festival
miraculous and powerful
quavering
fine harmonies the certain
feathery presences
the artists stop
discuss a point of style the song
continues it is
a continuum sometimes
they sing it aloud
the women move lightly brown
skin black skirts in a ring
like a windbreak
at dawn blue
smoke from cooking fires bodies
stirring in blankets a warm
outcrop of earth
The poet claims no special knowledge of the song, but recognises its impact on her as a listener, as an outsider. She places herself quite clearly in the draughty hall, watching with other women in the audience. She does, however, recognise and state real differences in connection with the country between the “women who live on the ground” and the women who, presumably, trip over their heels while getting into the car.
The women in Cataldi's poem ‘Goanna’ (29) are equally at home as those in Oodgeroo’s community (see 3.5.1), but seen in more forceful motion. This, again, is written from the perspective of a non-Aboriginal poet and outsider, watching the women of a local community hunt goanna. They, too, are skilled and tireless, and know precisely their role in the hunt.
The descriptions are brief but vivid:
the large women
the dry grass
the goanna runs swiftly the yellow goanna with long legs.
We can see the chase, hear the chants, and wonder, with the poet:
how do they know which way it runs.
The poem is like a brightly-lit, active sketch, which, without fully describing the landscape is able to construct it with hints of “a thousand bushes” of “dry grass” that “rustles like a forgotten sea”. She indirectly describes other aspects of the land, particularly the animal/reptile in its “yellow” element.
The landscape is also acting here as scenery, as the background to the action, so it does not need to be directly portrayed. It is, however, skillfully suggested and therefore plays its part in increasing our understanding of the lives of these women and the nature of their environment.
A more direct description of this country can be found in ‘Rain’ (30):
in the desert
rain
falls on the dust on the ground
baked and rebaked dry as old tiles.
This is a more conventional view of the desert; parched, dusty, harsh country. The description of the country’s rebirth after heavy rain is richly evocative:
bushes explode their smells into the soft air
promising
that in the morning we will wake to a different universe.
It begins with short, harsh sentences which, like the earth, begin to swell and become vivid with the rains. Even the hot air becomes soft. As the dust and water turn to mud, so the images blur to “just a smear”. The neat rhyme which closes the poem completes the sequence of the experience and reinforces the magic of the scene:
the view become invisible just a smear
if we could step into the rain’s embrace
and disappear.
This is the voice of a poet who enjoys and respects the land in all its aspects. She does not despair at the dryness (as have many European voices), but appreciates it, however great the relief of the rains might be.
She is simply describing the patterns and the changes which are so obvious in country where extreme elements dominate our experience. There is no sense in this poem of feeling threatened by either drought or flood—both extremes are accepted, described, and enjoyed.
‘The Dressing Shed’ (31) describes a very different environment: Neilsen Park, high on the Sydney Harbour foreshore. Again, her descriptions of both the landscape (part urban and part seascape) and the people who fill it (past and present) are brought, quite literally, to light:
Neilsen Park
the evening sun
bursts like a bomb over Centrepoint
illegal dogs and bicycles come out
afterwork swimmers thrash by
the buzz of outboard motors in their ears
all day
old people drift with the tide
along a line of sand
their eyes absorbing more and more of the green
and dim qualities of water
In the midst of all this activity is the dressing shed, a symbol of old-fashioned British mores and the breaking down of traditional European resistance to the Australian land. The dressing shed, now irrelevant to most of the visitors to the beach, is falling apart:
warm sheltered deserted
where a hundred women once
with perfect modesty
donned bathing suits
now one lone englishwoman
in a bathrobe and wedgies
does ballet school exercises.
Cataldi questions the general relevance of these strangely ritual English traditions, the fragile connection still nurtured with a “home” many have never even visited.
The warmth, the exotic smells, the plants, the way of life which centres on the water and has no need of dressing sheds, are all now distant from the northern European sources of the original white Australian culture. However, the sense of dislocation and alienation that has influenced non-Aboriginal Australian cultures (and become a cliché) is still evident here:
at night
through alien trees
their unnaturally shiny leaves
still holding the sun
the soft sea breeze
with its acrid foreign smell
breaks through curtain and mosquito net
dissolving illusions of gable and stone
illusions of home.
The dressing shed, then, has become, a “jumbled memorial” to these fading allegiances which are breaking down as quickly, and as slowly, as the concrete and rotted wood of the shed.
In recognising these themes of the distant home and the cultural and political processes of colonisation, Cataldi is clearly aligning herself and her work with the political stance on land ownership taken firstly by Aboriginal writers such as Oodgeroo, and also by Wright.
Amongst non-Aboriginal writers, Wright and Cataldi stand out as those whose understandings of the issues surrounding land and landscape are more closely aligned with the positions taken by the Aboriginal community and the writers who work to express its politics. Importantly, Wright and Cataldi, in their poetry and in their public statements, are not so susceptible to the liberalism which lends itself so readily to Aboriginalism.
They also recognise, as many others do not, that the act of holding such positions on land and colonisation is political of itself, and brings with it a powerful and authentic poetry about the country.