“There is a poem in every form of tree or flower, but the poetry which lives in the trees and flowers of Australia differs from those of other countries… In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write.”
— Marcus Clarke (1894)
Strangely enough, it was Barron Field, for all his disapproval of the “cold olive green” trees, who in 1819 published the first book of poetry to be printed in the colony, First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Despite Field’s chronological claim to the title, it is Charles Harpur who is generally recognised as Australia’s first colonial poet.
Australian-born, but inspired by Wordsworth and his own love of the land, Harpur (1813-1868) set out to convey its unique nature with the narrative and descriptive tools available to him. He was one of the first to write to a local readership, rather than in the hope of conveying to Britons the realities or romance of Australian life, and one of the few colonial writers to shrug off Clarke’s warning of melancholy and embrace the weird.
Judith Wright, in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, identified in Harpur the beginning of what she called the radical tradition in Australian poetry, that is, poets who expressed “the sense of liberty, of a new chance” rather than the conservatives’ “sense of exile”. (1965: xii) She also claimed that our understanding of Harpur is sullied by the incomplete and badly-edited posthumous Collected, “that Harpur’s claim to be regarded as the first poet of his country is better founded than has yet been allowed, and that he is also a better poet than many of those who followed him”. (1965: 1)
Philip Mead rejects Wright’s own assertions about the centrality of landscape in the literary traditions she traces from Harpur, while supporting her stance on Harpur’s claim to be acknowledged as the colony’s premier poet:
Harpur himself, to be sure, would have felt profoundly uncomfortable with the unthinking idea that it is only when we feel at home in our landscape that our art becomes authentic. Harpur would have understood, better than any of the critics of his own poetry, that other Romantic poet Wallace Stevens:
From this poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves.
(Mead, 1989: 22)
Similarly, A.D. Hope has claimed Harpur not as our first great landscape poet, but rather as the country’s first satirist, and places him firmly, with Kendall, in the romantic tradition of Byron and Shelley.
Like Hope, Mead calls for Harpur’s allegorical works to be acclaimed as his most important, albeit less considered, while his landscape poetry is seen as less crucial in the development of Australian literary traditions. Hope claimed that it was a spurious argument to dismiss as “derivative” any poems by Harpur which were not about landscape. Mead suggests that Harpur’s explorations of allegory and dream visions were much more important to the unravelling of the colonial sub-conscious than his poems about the land. However, the allegorical and real landscapes in the poems run parallel for the poet who is consciously beginning a new literature in a new country:
Because in the first place there is only nothing, followed by anxiety over the presence of that nothing, Harpur is forced to marshal what symbols, tropes and genres he can to represent what seems unrepresentable.
(Mead, 1989: 21)
Harpur was one of the first to grapple with the task of using a language created in another environment to describe a different world; one in which its words and concepts often needed to be rethought and rephrased, just as the landscape painters had to find new ways of addressing matters such as light and shadow. His tone, allusion, phrasing and dramatic diction were often traditional and very English, so unlike the world he described:
But when the sun had wholly disappeared
Behind those mountains — O what words, what hues
Might paint the wild magnificence of view
That opened westward! Out extending, lo!
The heights rose crowding, with their summits all
Dissolving as it seemed, and partly lost
In the exceeding radiancy aloft;
And thus transfigured, for awhile they stood
Like a great company of archaeons, crowned
With burning diadems, and tented o’er
With canopies of purple and of gold.
(‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, 1853)
Like a verse version of von Guerard’s dramatic visual vistas, Harpur’s romantic vision was dated even by the time it was published. The literary tastes of the colony lagged several years behind England, and few colonists were able to keep up with the latest aesthetic trends, had they been so inclined (and few were). More importantly, Harpur’s admiration for Shelley and Wordsworth is evident in his language and imagery (yet both poets had produced their best works decades earlier: Shelley was dead by 1822).
It might be further suggested that the influence of his contemporary Browning is evident in some of his more down-to-earth monologues, such as in ‘Lost in The Bush’: at any rate, Hope remarks of this poem that Harpur is at his best when most relaxed and not attempting to achieve the “poetic elevation” to which ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ so clearly aspires. (1974: 114)
That said, Harpur’s vision of a landscape bathed in gold and of freedom for its settlers gave an inspiring and eloquent voice to the aspirations of the colony. “The landscape that pleased him did so, usually,” wrote Elliott, who totally dismissed Harpur’s work on matters other than landscape, “because he accepted it not merely as formally beautiful, but also as atypical and representative. Each glimpse was an epitome of the whole”. (1967: 66)
Yet there are hints in his poem A Coast View of the theme that was later to echo through the bush ballads, most famously in ‘Clancy of the Overflow’: the spiritual light of Nature and the bush, creeping through the starless night of the city.
Dead city walls may pen us in, but still
Her influence seeks, to find us—even there,
Through many a simple means. A vagrant mass
Of sunshine, falling into some void place,
Shall warm us to the heart ...
Harpur, argues Elliott, was in the process of establishing what became known as Impressionism in Australian poetry, as it was being developed in painting in Europe, as an obvious response to the problems of describing the Australian landscape.
Indeed, it was with Impressionism that landscape painting in this country finally found its fit (see 4.1.3), and it is just as evident earlier in the purple and gold of Harpur’s mountains, the “coolest shadows”, bright light, and “glassy cool recess” of ‘Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest’, and the bush “roaring like a world on fire”.
For Harpur, this vision was not just aesthetic: he was politically aligned with the Free Selection movement, and his works reflect his world view of a landscape seen not just as romantic scenery, but as an important spiritual and political metaphor informing and supporting the development of an agriculturally-based colony.
Initially, it may not seem easy to make the connection between Harpur’s effusions about echoes and his political support of free selection and land reform. But each is in its way a kind of claim to the land, an appropriation of its essence, with the poetry no less insistent in its pretensions to ownership.
(Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 150)
Here, the politics of land ownership were intrinsically connected to the poetry of the landscape, even in the first works produced within the colony. This thesis argues that this tradition, traced through significantly different ideological frameworks, has been consciously and unconsciously developed by poets, from Harpur onwards, who choose to write on landscape.
Charles Harpur was born the same year that an Aboriginal guide led Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth to a pass across the Blue Mountains, which had for decades hemmed in the colony. Wentworth went on to write disparagingly of these mountains (“How mute, how desolate thy stunted woods/How dread thy chasms”) in ‘Australasia’, his famous entry for the Chancellor’s gold medal at Cambridge, ten years after the crossing. However, his priority in 1813 was not scenery, but agriculture: the view from the top of the peaks was of “an invaluable acquisition to persons possessing large herds of cattle” which could be safely driven “through a country so strong as to be easily defended by a few against the efforts of Thousands”. (Day, 1996: 81)
Wentworth’s essential vision was not of the mountain vista that so delighted Governor Macquarie (see above), but rather across the mountains and to the other side, to the plains which held so much agricultural promise for those who were confined along a drought-stricken coastline. Bernard Smith argues that Wentworth’s response to the Blue Mountains (like Field’s) was partly aesthetic in nature, as “neo-classical taste ... never enthused greatly over mountain scenery”, but he too pinpoints one of the central causes of Wentworth’s response to the country, both in his 1813 reports, and in his later poetry:
... men like Field and Wentworth were able to react with genuine enthusiasm to the gentle curves and blue distances of the savannah lands beyond the mountains, for they brought to mind pastoral imagery deeply woven into the texture of European poetry and painting — and they represented pastoral wealth.
(Smith, 1960: 242)
It was this pastoral wealth and the politics of the colony which most preoccupied Wentworth in his post-Cambridge career, and the words of ‘Australasia’, his only well-known poem, reflect his passionate patriotism, and act as a public and outspoken cry for celebration and support of the newly-founded colony. A.D. Hope calls the poem “plain, vigorous, passionate and vivid and eloquent ... It suggests how much easier the assimilation of the Australian scene and life to the language of poetry might have been had the country been settled half a century earlier”. (1974: 107) Primarily, this single poem is important in the development of an Australian sense of place: regardless of Wentworth’s gloomy descriptions of the Blue Mountains, ‘Australasia’ is firmly of the belief that the country has its own value, its own aesthetic, and its own vibrant and fascinating life.
Further, the poem brings together in verse those two frameworks from within which Wentworth was able to perceive the view from the Blue Mountains, and his beloved colony: the aesthetic, and the political and economic. Both those essential views related to the landscape, and the ways in which it could be seen and later utilised. For Wentworth, the two were inseparable; from each other, and from his life’s work as a pastoralist, patriot and politician.
For Wentworth, as for later currency lads, what constitutes Australian verse is to be judged by its matter rather than its manner. The crucial factor is a genuine concern with the land and its people; a preoccupation with the environment not as a place of exile but as an independent homeland in the southern hemisphere.
(Ackland, in Eaden and Mares, 1986: 75)
Wentworth’s view, though, was also framed by his economic standing as a member of the new aristocracy, as a son of one of the leading families of the colony, and subsequently as a founder of one of the great political dynasties in the country.
Many later poets found themselves grappling with the issues of the aesthetics and the economics of the land, but from a totally different political point of view — and the opposite end of the socio-economic scale. Henry Lawson, for example, writing thirty years after Harpur, sought to convey a vision of the bush and its people which was sympathetic to the poverty and isolation experienced by many small farmers and agricultural labourers, to whom the Bush was often a frightening and harsh presence. Lawson, Rudd, and others used humour and a newly-developed vernacular to portray the world of the drought-stricken or illness-ridden or unemployed battler, the monotony of bush lives reflecting a perceived monotony of the bush itself. Other writers, such as Barbara Baynton, used realism tinged with tragedy: her stories were rejected by the fiercely nationalistic editors of the Bulletin as being too negative.
For the economic situation of those on the land in the late 19th century was vastly different to that enjoyed by Wentworth earlier that century, or even Elizabeth Macarthur in the early decades of the colony. The radical politics of poets such as Lawson reflected the fears, heroism and tribulation of those attempting to establish profitable, or even self-sufficient, agriculture without the resources of a Wentworth or a Macarthur at their disposal. Lawson’s characters such as Andy or Joe Wilson are no longer the glorious conquerors of the newly-discovered land: they are working people embroiled in what often seems a life and death, love and hate, relationship with the country.
Just as the colonists had fought, and continued to fight, with the Aboriginal people over access to the land and its resources, disputes over land ownership and access rights to water or stock routes constantly arose between the new economic class of the selectors, and the traditional colonial power, the squatters. The gold rush had brought money to the cities, which were by now large and noisy enough to shock Clancy of the Overflow, and new classes of people had become either detached from the country by city life, or conversely tied to struggling small-holdings.
So, a new politics grew out of the land ownership reforms, and never more clearly was the relationship between politics and poetry more evident than in the work, and indeed the popularity, of the Bush Poets.
Lawson’s and Paterson’s popularisation of the Bush as a place, as a spatial experience which helped to mould a uniquely Australian identity, was not just about nationalist fervour and a bid for an identifiable culture. It was also inextricably tied to the economics of the Bush, and the results of the land reforms with which Harpur had been associated decades earlier.
In spite of the struggles documented by Lawson, Baynton, and others, the land had become much more settled (and the landscape much “improved”), along much of the eastern and southern seaboards, and a new vision of the landscape had been revealed by the contemporaneous Heidelberg school of Impressionist landscape painters. Freshly-perceived images of the country were beginning to gain popular acceptance, and as the Impressionist painters and the Bush Poets sharpened their focus on the lives of ordinary rural towns and farms, so too those lives became more central to the nation’s understanding of how the country was developing, and how the landscape was impacting upon its people.
The Bush Poets were, like Harpur, consciously establishing the beginning of a literary tradition, and it is their work which is most often associated with defining the centrality of the landscape in the Australian identity they strove to create (artificial thought it may have been, see 2.2), and, importantly, in reaffirming the preoccupation with landscape which is so apparent in Australian poetry since colonisation.