It’s more than 1000 pages long and weighs 2kg, but Australian Poetry Since 1788 still isn’t comprehensive enough for everyone.
Writing in the Australian newspaper in October, Peter Pierce reported that Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray’s 1090-page anthology Australian Poetry Since 1788 weighed 
in at 2kg on his kitchen scales. I read it in bed and have a bruised concavity below my sternum. Pierce describes the editors’ achievement as “exhilarating and masterful”. He also suggests that future anthologies may be “daring”, too, but are unlikely to be as “comprehensive”.
A less enthusiastic response was Peter Minter’s at the Australian National Poetry Symposium in Newcastle, also in October. Minter argues the anthology “whitewashes the rich tapestry of Aboriginal poetry from its so-called ‘landmark’ vision”. He further argues it has editorially sanitised “many other non-Anglo poetries from its pages” and “will undoubtedly be viewed historically as one of the last gasps of white-Australian conservatism”.
“Comprehensive” national anthologies attract polarised responses and there’s seldom much point in looking for a mediated middle position – what’s interesting is the tensions between positions and how they contribute to the dynamics of the book itself.
My reading of Australian poetry over the years has been stretched between fondness for the balladry of Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson and my own (very) distant relative Will Ogilvie (1869-1963), Breaker Morant’s mate, and the close-ish contemporaries I’ve read, some of whom I’ve occasionally hung out with: Nigel Roberts, Robert Adamson, John Tranter, πO, Gig Ryan, and quite a few others who aren’t included in this anthology, among them Amanda Stewart, Richard Tipping, Chris Mansell, Pam Brown and Barry Hill. My stretch has been between the bush ballads and poems that often repeated the mantra of my generation across the Tasman, the “generation of ’68” American-influenced internationalists.
Many Australian ’68-ers who joined the “poetry wars” of the 1970s and 80s didn’t like Les Murray’s rural heartland nationalism, but The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle has long been one of my favourite poems, and it comes close to demonstrating why the tension between bush-balladry and the ’68-ers is central to this anthology.
In To the Bobbydazzlers, John Forbes (1950-98) wrote of being saved by “American poets!” in 1970:
when I first
breathed freely
in Ted Berrigan’s
Sonnets, escaping
the talented earache of Modern
Poetry.
Murray “escaped” that earache in his own way, by lacing his pastoralism with what the editors of this anthology describe cautiously as “brilliantly baroque, often witty polemic”. Forbes’s close contemporary, Philip Neilsen (b1949), imagined a face-off between Murray and the ’68-ers champion John Tranter in Les A Murray versus John Tranter at the Sydney Cricket Ground:
Les won the toss, so he occupies the crease
and Tranter runs in with some nasty
non-referential similies:
“She has a smile like Sydney Harbour. Her
new boyfriend
is like a swimming pool with a headache,
or adultery in Borneo”.
[…]
[Murray] cuts savagely past point
for the big one: it’s five hundred milk cows,
their eyelashes catching the golden twilight
that trickles down gullies. They call softly
to each other
with the simple wisdom of their race.
A liking for smart-arse larrikinism was what brought “the talented earache of Modern/[Australian] Poetry” to the attention of an international audience. The infamous “Ern Malley” (1918-43) scam cooked up by poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart produced poems that were, in the opinion of many, including Tranter’s mentor, American poet John Ashbery, good precisely because they freed the poetry from the undertow of authorial sincerity.
The editors have included a substantial number of poems by “Malley” (they are good), and perhaps in the same spirit have included both Henry Lawson’s The Captain of the Push and the much better known version – probably also by Lawson but attributed to “Anonymous” – The Bastard from the Bush. Its final stanza emphatically endorses the vernacular twang that so often links the bush and the city in Australian poetry (“Then when you’re down and outed, to a hopeless bloody wreck,/May you slip back through your arsehole, and break your f—ing neck”).
The editors have also been generous to a bracing tradition of political poetry, noting that Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) had “sympathy with outcasts and the inarticulate”. Gilmore’s best-known poem, Swans at Night, tells the story of a “new-chum” or “green-horn” shooting one of the swan flock’s flight leaders, known as trumpeters. Her disgust at this is linked to her respect for Aboriginal knowledge of the trumpeter’s significance, and also to the appalling history of the extermination of Aboriginal people by pastoralists who employed “sharp-shooters” – one of whom is remembered in her poem The Hunter of the Black.
I find the editors’ approach to specifically Aboriginal content evasive. They begin with Two Aboriginal Songs, which are untranslated, include some of TGH Strehlow’s controversial translations of Songs of Central Australia, a couple of Ronald M Berndt’s translations of Aboriginal Song Cycles and 14 Translations of Twentieth-Century Aboriginal Songs, some of which also owe their inclusion to professional ethnography. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (aka Kath Walker – 1920-93) wrote in English. That said, Murray’s The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle is only one of many poems in the anthology that are informed by Aboriginal presence.
It’s great to find Gig Ryan’s If I Had a Gun included, as well as her sharp, fractured phrases in poems such as Heroic Money:
Drive behind the Big Events numberplate
where cars jam to the crash or street
demonstration
and we wave from our democracy
Among the recent poets I hadn’t come across (many, given the size of this book), Tricia Dearborn (b1963) is one I’ll keep an eye out for. She does for biochemistry what Robert Adamson did for the Hawkesbury River: makes redundant the metaphor or allegory it (biochemistry or the river) might easily default to.
Another is Emma Lew (b1962), whose combination of formal skill and bricolage in a poem such as Detail for a Lily Scheme makes redundant the angsty cravings for individual freedom of expression that characterised the “poetry wars” I used to overhear back in the day.
What don’t I get? Why John Kinsella is given such short shrift, and why various poets I like are absent, notably Barry Hill. But then no anthology is going to silence all potential grizzles, even one as “comprehensive” as this is.
AUSTRALIAN POETRY SINCE 1788, edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray (University of New South Wales Press, $94.95).