The monstrous continent

Another Australian poem today, though the ardour for our national day has slipped back into its place beneath quotidian quarrels over tax and the price of vegetables.

This is “South Country” by Kenneth Slessor, who's more famous for “Five Bells” or “Beach Burial,” which you might, if you were lucky, have studied at school. I like the mingled sense of menace and awe, the feeling of being exposed to immensities, walking on the sky's beach.

After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country

As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.

And over the flat earth of empty farms
The monstrous continent of air floats back
Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black,
Bruised flesh of thunderstorms:

Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,
Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,
So huge, from such infinities of height,
You walk on the sky's beach

While even the dwindled hills are small and bare,
As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,
Something below pushed up a knob of skull,
Feeling its way to air.

Last sea thing

I always have mixed feelings on Australia Day.  My love for this country was learned late, after England cured my anglophilia, but it also involves a violent distate for what usually passes here as patriotic. I love the concatenations of air, water and rock that make this continent. I love the variety and strangeness of it, utterly unique on this planet, adrift in this southern sea. I love the layers and sediments of human life here: the toughness of it, the sweetness. What I hate is the back-patting chest-slapping fair dinkum Aussie blokey bushy true blue outbackery that seems to me contrived, blinkered, and ersatz; so outdoors it’s almost camp. When on Australia Day our leaders and icons trot out the tired old cliches about mateship or the fair go (and many would be angered if they didn’t), we expose not our strengths but our greatest weakness as a nation, which is a poverty of imagination, a failure of poetry. For a nation girt by sea, we seem curiously shy of depth. We have ceased from exploration. We think we know the place.  This is only the official line, however, the line declared safe for politicians, the line marketed in t-shirts and souvenirs. Beneath it, there is poetry. There is subtlety. There is, as Bernard O’Dowd’s “Australia” hints, enduring mystery.  

Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?

The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,
Mix omens with the auguries that dare
To plant the Cross upon your forehead sky,
A virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees.

Riparian purloining

Reading about looters and other riverine lowlife emerging from the floods made me think of the opening scene of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, which introduces Gaffer Hexam, a man who makes his living from the river’s dead.

A boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in. […] The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.

Back in Queensland, it’s hard to stomach the truly Dickensian villainy of these marshy scavengers, but I think John Birmingham summed it up admirably in his blog post: ‘The bad stay bad, but floods make good people great.’ The kind of thief who sees his chance in disaster will see it anywhere, but ordinary decent folk find in disaster the chance to become something better.

Historical Friction

Whenever I try to read historical fiction, the little man in my hair starts screaming “Wrong! Wrong! It’s all wrong! They wouldn’t have said that! They didn’t talk like that! That wouldn’t have happened!”

My sister-in-law, a historian, gave me Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall for Christmas. Reading this novel about Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, I’m managing to keep the little man subdued while I enjoy, if not the language – which hardly tries for verisimilitude - at least the texture, the habits of thought, the smell and feel of Tudor London, which are admirably contrived. While their speech has to be read as rough translation (if only to placate the little man), you do feel as though you were bumping up against the real bodies of Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry, Anne Boleyn, their immense personalities. You feel the rich crackle and sizzle of the court, the ever-present threat of betrayal, arrest, horrible death. You also feel the certainties of church, prayer-book, rosary, relic; you feel them crumbling against the tidal push of protest coming from abroad. Sixteenth-century life and custom, rather than being simply documented, are woven dexterously into the fabric of the story. There is an immediacy about it which is more pleasing than accuracy. No doubt this is the point, pace little man, of historical fiction.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

The blog site was in and out - or rather up and down - last week, and not working at all when I wanted to post this on Friday.  

This is from Hamlet: Gertrude's speech on Ophelia's death. Not exactly a poem but beautiful, quite beautiful. Obviously many artists have thought so. Ophelia only has 58 lines but she's inspired dozens of paintings, most of them embodying the picture Gertrude paints in these lovely words.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.