I would like to take this ritual of identifying steps in the unfolding of Australian poetry since colonisation a little further again, and suggest processes identifiable as:
1 Rejection
2 Assimilation
3 Acknowledgement
4 Reconciliation
Rejection
What Wright called the “literature of exile” (1965: xix) was the product of the colonists’ initial response to the country in which they were struggling to establish themselves. Reactions, as we will see (in 4.1) ranged from horror to fascination to disregard to romanticism.
The same can be said of the colonists’ attitudes to the inhabitants of the country; attitudes which still persist in the minds of some white Australians. However, given that the success of the colony was seen to be dependent on the dispossession of its original inhabitants, emotional responses such as horror, fear and hatred fitted in more neatly with the economic imperatives.
Assimilation
In literary terms, this process includes the incorporation of the frontier mentality, and the development of the cult of the Bush during the late part of the nineteenth century, in which a picture of an Australia (albeit somewhat distorted) became clearer and more identifiable. The hostile country became assimilated into national consciousness as the Bush.
In terms of the assimilation of indigenous cultures, a literary process was running alongside the social process of the separation of Aboriginal children from their families and the conscious destruction of myriad Aboriginal cultures.
The literary process of assimilation is most clearly identifiable in the work of the Jindyworobak school of poetry of the 1930s, and is still evident in the Aboriginalist tendency in a number of modern poets, including Les Murray, and Billy Marshall-Stoneking. (see 4.2)
While critics such as A.D. Hope and James McAuley dismissed the Jindyworobak school out of hand (McAuley wrote, “The idea of basing a modern literary culture on the utterly alien Aboriginal culture was too absurd to be taken seriously”, 1975: 125), the work of the Jindyworobak poets had a cultural impact, for better or worse, on generations of Australian children. More than one primary school curriculum has been based around a Jindyworobak-influenced volume such as Land Of The Rainbow Gold. For this reason, at least, their role in the assimilation process must be recognised, and is discussed at length later.
Acknowledgment
Acknowledgement of the reality of the Australian landscape and its presence in our literature developed from two different directions during the 1950s and early 1960s, best represented by the work of Aboriginal poet Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and her contemporary, Judith Wright.
Their work also contained some of the first genuine literary references to the dispossession of Aboriginal people during colonisation, and the poverty-stricken and culturally dislocated conditions in which many Aboriginal people were living in 1960s Australia (and indeed theirs were amongst the first popularly accepted public statements on the issue).
In 1965, Wright wrote:
We have not yet, perhaps, reached that point of equilibrium at which we can feel that this country is truly ours by right of understanding and acceptance, and from which we can begin to grow again. (1965: xviii)
The years since the publication of Walker’s We Are Going in 1964 have seen a marked shift in public, literary and academic approaches to the country and its indigenous people. It has included a growing awareness of the impact of social development on the environment. This has been a process of social and political change, but it is not inseparable from the changes in the cultural and imaginative life of the country wrought by the publication of such works as Oodgeroo’s poetry or Kevin Gilbert’s prose.
The past three decades have seen a growth of multiculturalism, a flurry of publishing, new understandings engendered by post-modern and post-colonial theories, shifting attitudes towards nationalism, the revival and renewal of Aboriginal cultural activity, and a marked increase in study focused on Aboriginal cultures (by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers and academics). All of these factors contributed to a movement towards an acceptance of the realities of Australian cultural and political life and the landscape in which it dwells, as well as an acknowledgement of the vitality and importance of its indigenous cultures.
Reconciliation
Although the term has taken on specific macro political meanings in the 1990s, I would suggest that several key modern poets, such as Gwen Harwood, Lee Cataldi, Robert Adamson, and Billy Marshall-Stoneking, have consciously involved themselves through their poetry in a process of reconciliation with the indigenous people (past or present) of areas in which they have chosen to live, and that it is these poets who are able to describe the landscapes in ways which are relevant to both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal readers.
They have rejected the overt nationalist search for the Australian identity, choosing instead to map and explore their own emotional and geographical terrain, and accept that myriad identities ought to be possible in a modern society. In doing so, they have defined new and various ways of belonging to the land, expressing that very belonging for which the nationalists fruitlessly searched for decades.
Poets who are unable to come to such a realisation continue the emotional attachments to both a distant European (or indeed any other) home as well as being stuck in the Assimilation step of the process.
Aboriginal poets, such as Lionel Fogarty, are in the process of reconstructing and redefining the alien language and poetic forms in which they have chosen to write in the past, and in doing so have redefined the place of contemporary indigenous poets within Australian poetry. Again, there are new and varied ways of belonging: aiming solely at Aboriginal readers and listeners; aiming at a general readership through publication in the mainstream press; or as part of the flourishing Aboriginal publishing industry which caters to both general and specific readerships.