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THE POEM AS HISTORY – The Ash Range by Laurie Duggan (Picador, 1987), 270pp.

THE POEM AS HISTORY The Ash Range by Laurie Duggan (Picador, 1987), 270pp. Published in The Phoenix Review No3. 1988.

My first introduction to Laurie Duggan’s work occurred during my final year of high school in 1977 when I read a poem called ‘Marijuana Christmas’ in an issue of New Poetry which I found in the local library. Duggan’s broken verse narrative was one of the few poems I came across during my final two years of schooling which suggested that there might be more to poetry than the generally insignificant British poets which were still being force fed to my generation in the class room.

Looking back eleven years later it is interesting to note the sense of continuity from Duggan’s early work to his recent book length poem/history The Ash Range. In ‘Marijuana Christmas’, for example, Duggan is already effortlessly combing basic scientific observation with vivid poetic images:

igneous and metamorphic rock

overlaid by sedimentaries

granite, shale, chalk

quartz on the bottom of the pool

like an Italian ice cream

light veins with white across

In fact many of Duggan’s poems are essentially poetic collages — images, descriptions, historical records and snippets of conversation become essential parts of the poem, cemented together by Duggan’s own, often wonderful, verse.

Another poem worth taking a look at in terms of Duggan’s poetic development is ‘Crawling From the Wreckage’ from his 1985 collection The Great Divide. In this poem Duggan has pulled together isolated quotations from sources as diverse as ABC broadcasts of parliament, Jack Lindsay’s The Roaring Twenties, Nelson Eddy and historical accounts of Black Thursday. While the result is a sometimes jarring, lurching poem which promises much more than it actually delivers, it is, in many ways, a direct predecessor to The Ash Range and shows that Duggan has been experimenting for some time with the structures he has eventually used in his book poem.

A major feature of The Ash Range is its concentration on place and history. It is a poem about the area of Eastern Victoria known as Gippsland. Duggan has always been an excellent nature poet. He has the ability to ‘draw in’ pieces of the landscape he is writing about so that the poem becomes a collage of words, rocks and trees. In The Ash Range he has gone a step further. Here the landscape becomes part of a far greater picture, is interwoven with the history (both pre and post European) of Gippsland. In fact, one of the poem’s greatest achievements is the way in which Duggan has linked the sometimes subtle changes in the landscape with the movement of history.

As in ‘Crawling from the Wreckage’ Duggan makes extensive use of original source material in The Ash Range. In a note at the end of the poem Duggan refers to The Ash Range as a ‘poem including history’, adding that it has many sources and that overall it should be read as the product of a ‘shared consciousness.’ Duggan’s role in the creation of The Ash Range at times appears to be almost that of an editor rather than poet. Once again in his notes he tells us ‘I have not hesitated to meddle with texts: editing them down, altering the grammer, restructuring sentences in the interests of clarity’; Indeed, throughout the book it is possible to see Duggan’s touch on almost every piece of source material so that while it may be possible to say that The Ash Range has many sources, overall it is, very definitely, Duggan’s own achievement. If, however, it is possible to voice one criticism about the structure of the poem, it is that it has not allowed Duggan to use more of his own very fine poetry.

Duggan’s account of the history of Gippsland is often at odds with the official version. Throughout The Ash Range he tends to concentrate on the tragic and the everyday. His account, for example, of the first contact between Europeans and the Aboriginal people of Gippsland, which while not by any means unique, is still, none the less, extremely moving and tragic:

On one of the arms of the Lake

there were a few blacks,

and one of the old men

proposed to take mullet to the white-fellows,

started, accompanied by a little boy.

Within sight of the hut the boy

noticed the white man signalling them off.

The old man took no notice.

The boy heard a gun fire:

saw the old man fall.

He dropped his fish

and ran to tell the tribe.

The history also includes an account of the rapid annihilation of the Aboriginal people of Gippsland by the European ‘settlers’. In the first years of white settlement Duggan can write of ‘500 to 700 Aborigines/assembled for feasting’. But by 1864 the Reverend Hagenauer could only assemble 130 at his mission station at Boney Point, Lake Wellington. The sections of The Ash Range dealing with Aboriginal/white contact puts the more recent history of Gippsland into context. The attitude of Aboriginal people towards this history is summed up by a quote from Philip Pepper at the beginning of the section ‘White Palings’: The bad times really started when that fella Batman came to Melbourne’.

Throughout that greater part of The Ash Range which deals with the purely European history of Gippsland, Duggan is concerned with the insignificant and the ordinary. We hear, for example, of how Robert Robertson, ‘a well known Bairnsdale painter, and George Johnston, ‘a carpenter’, were arrested in 1916 for ‘illegally killing fish’ with a tomato sauce bottle loaded with gelignite.

Duggan devotes a whole section to the rise and fall of a small gold mining town called Stirling. The town was founded shortly after 1882 and effectively ceased to exist around 1920 after the Post Office was closed and the hall moved to another town. The high point for Stirling would appear to have been in July 1899 with the Stirling Ladies invitation dance:

songs sung at interval

by Mrs Butcher. Mrs Tait;

and some of the gentlemen

studying ‘federation’.

But the rapid decline of Stirling after the gold ran out was not an isolated event

So, Glen Wills:

a sign in a clearing:

at Sunnyside there’s nothing:

Grant a graveyard

if you can find it.

And Stirling?

The base of a chimney,

overgrown,

in a small clearing;

dark water,

a wild fruit tree.

Given the impressive achievement of The Ash Range it is difficult to see why it has failed to pick up any of the major awards. Although its publication comes at a time when there is, perhaps, an unprecedented number of book length Australian poems or poetic sequences in the book shops, Duggan’s achievement in The Ash Range is at least equal to that of Alan Wearne in The Nightmarkets. Both these works are impressive reminders of the current maturity of Australian poetry and both have broken out of the ghetto to be read by people who generally would not read poetry. While The Nightmarkets literally exploded onto the literary stage in a blaze of publicity (and sales), it is tempting to suggest that The Ash Range’s reputation (and sales figures) will steadily grow over time. One thing, however, is certain: in The Ash Range Laurie Duggan has written what is destined to become one of the major Australian poems of the eighties.

February 2, 2012
Determing our Culture – ‘Arguing the Arts: The Funding of the Arts in Australia’ Tim Rowse

Arguing the Arts: The Funding of the Arts in Australia by Tim Rowse, Penguin, 1985. Review Published in Tribune – Summer Reading Issue (no 2406), 11 December 1985.

Tim Rowse’s new book, Arguing the Arts: The Funding of the Arts in Australia, is a long overdue study of the role funding bodies play in determining the future development of culture in Australia.

Rowse traces the development of government patronage showing how the changes reflected changing attitudes and expectations about the role of culture in Australian society. Although commonwealth patronage of the arts had begun before the First World War, the major funding bodies, such as the Australia Council and the Australian Film Corporation (AFC), are legacies of the Whitlam government.

Rowse identifies three distinct stages of government patronage. The first of these he calls “voluntary entrepreneurship”. This period can perhaps be seen as a time of “cultural missionaries”. The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s touring policy, according to Rowse, reflected the cultural assumptions of the time. It was assumed that Australian society was “characterised” by a “good natured but resourceful philistinism which could be challenged by the presentation of the best of European culture”.

The next stage of patronage Rowse calls “statutory patronage”. This period saw the creation of the Australia Council and the AFC. These organisations made grants to “cultural activities” which they deemed to be worthy.

The concept of “worthiness” or “excellence’ took on new importance during the Fraser years when the real income of the Australia Council fell by over 30%. Because of its adherence to the notion of “excellence”, the Council continued to support only those activities it saw as the ‘best’. As Rowse points out, “The more acclaimed you already were, the more you got”.

The third level of patronage, and the one which is causing the ‘flagship’ companies so many nightmares, is what Rowse calls “decentralised patronage”. This sees alternatives to existing concepts of “culture” and seeks to demonstrate or cultivate community support for a wide range of cultural activities.

This concept is perhaps best reflected in the growth of community theatre and writing, the Art and Working Life programs and the success of the Community Arts Board, the Craft Board and the Aboriginal Arts Boards of the Australia Council.

Rowse goes onto examine a number of issues which he sees as central to the current debate on arts subsidy and support. These issues include the thorny problem of excellence, notions of “popular culture’ versus “high culture”, the distribution of cultural products and the new technologies and the increasing emphasis on the arts as an “industry”.

Returning to the notion of “excellence”, Rowse makes a strong case for the elimination of the word “excellence” from the vocabulary of public cultural policy. He argues, for example, that the term has always been available to those who could lay claim to it under the prevailing cultural ideology.

Towards the end of Arguing the Arts, Rowse looks more concretely towards the future. In attempting to find a “new rationale” for commonwealth cultural policy, he examines the dichotomy between “popular”, commercial entertainment and “high” subsidised culture.

He argues that, in many ways, these distinctions are false. They tend to be supported at one end by the commercial broadcasters who have a financial interest in what is regarded as “popular”, and, at the other, by the subsidised arts who seek continued protection from what they perceive to be the vulgarity of popular taste.

One of the major points which emerges from Rowse’s study is his belief that the arts should make greater use of recording and electronic media in general. He points out that the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal already has the power to ensure that independent films and videos are shown on commercial television. He is also concerned with the minor role the ABC plays in the distrution of culture.

A refreshing aspect of his brief look at the role the domestic satellite could play in future cultural policy is his sympathetic examination of the cultural needs of Aboriginal people. He points out that “some outback people are Aborigines with an interest in the survival of their languages. They need the same choices as white city dwellers much less than they need the choice of not receiving English language broadcasting”.

Overall, Arguing the Arts is an impressive study of the cultural policy of successive Australian governments and highlights the conservative thinking which has held back creative development in many art forms in Australia. It contains a wealth of information which I have only been able to touch upon. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how government policy can shape the future cultural development of Austral

January 9, 2012
The Ultimate Commitment – Michael Dransfield: Collected Poems

Michael Dransfield Collected Poems Edited by Rodney Hall. University of Queensland Press 1987. Southerly Volume 48. No 4. 1988.

When Michael Dransfiled died on Good Friday, 1973 at the age of 24 he had already published three collections of poetry and established a reputation as one of the most successful and popular of the new wave of young Australian poets who had emerged in the late 1960s. Since his death a further four collections have appeared, culminating in the Collected Poems (UQP 1987). When one considers Dransfield’s rapid rise to prominence, together with the attention focused on his lifestyle and the tragedy of his early death, it was almost inevitable that, to some extent, his life would come to overshadow his poetry. In fact, in the fifteen years since his death, the ‘Dransfield myth’, together with the decline in fashionably of the romanticism at the heart of much of his poetic imagery, has meant that his reputation as a poet has been attacked by a number of critics. In such a context, the publication in one volume of all of Dransfield’s published work, provides us with the opportunity to review his overall achievement and, hopefully, to reach a more realistic assessment of his work.

One cannot begin to examine Dransfield’s career, however, without noting the important role Rodney Hall has played over the last twenty years in bringing Dransfield’s work to the poetry reading public. It was Hall, then poetry editor of The Australian, who first ‘discovered’ Dransfield’ in 1967. It was Hall who passed Dransfield’s work onto Tom Shapcott who was then putting together an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry for Sun Books which would eventually become Australian Poetry Now. Shapcott and Hall also helped Dransfield prepare his first two published collections, Streets of the Long Voyage (UQP 1970) and Inspector of Tides (UQP, 1972). While Hall encouraged Dransfield during his life, Dransfield’s death revealed the extent of Hall’s devotion to the younger poet. Hall took on the task of collecting all of Dransfield’s unpublished poems and prepared a selection for publication. The result were the two posthumous collections, Voyage into Solitude (UQP 1978) and The Second Month of Spring (UQP, 1980).

Hall has organised the Collected Poems so that the volumes in which the poems first appeared are mostly kept intact. As a result the poems appear in rough chronological order beginning with Streets of the Long Voyage (containing poems written between 1964 and 1969), The Inspector of Tides (1968 to 1971), Drug Poems (1967 to 1971), Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (poems from mid 1971), Voyage into Solitude (a posthumous collection of unpublished poems from 1967 to 1971) and The Second Month of Spring (poems from 1972). Not all these volumes, however, have been left intact. In the introduction Hall argues that where a poem has been published in more than one collection, he has chosen to leave it in the ‘large book’. As Hall believes that Drug Poems was an anthology of “pieces addressing a particular subject”, a number of poems that had previously appeared in Streets of the Long Voyage and Inspector of Tides, and others that would later appear in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, have been left out of the Drug Poems section in the Collect Poems. While Hall’s argument for this exclusion is, of course, perfectly reasonable, it means that the overall effect of the Drug Poems section in the Collected Poems is reduced.

Reading through the poems from streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides I was once again struck by the balance Dransfield is able to find between the apparent simplicity of his individual images and the overall complexity of his most successful poems. This can be clearly seen in one of his best known poems, ‘Pas de deux for lovers’, which begins

Morning ought not

to be complex

The sun is a seed

cast at dawn into the long

furrow of history

A seed is, of course, a simple object. But it contains the potential to be something far more complex. So Dransfield’s morning sun becomes a planted seed and, as it sprouts, the day suddenly becomes far more complicated until we reach the final line:

…………Day

is so deep already with involvement

This overall richness of imagery, achieved by selective use of language and a careful juxtaposition of individual images, is one of Dransfield’s great strength in these first two books. One can recall numerous poems where he achieves it – ‘Chris’, “Surreptitious as Desdemona’, ‘Linear B’, ‘Death of Salvatore Quasimodo’, ‘Bum’s Rush’, ‘Ground Zero’, ‘Geography’, ‘Loft’ and ‘Inspector of Tides’ among others. While Dransfield, of course, was not the only one of his contemporaries to achieve this, the ease with which he achieved it again and again in these first two books, both of which were published before he was 22, is an indication of just how early he matured as a poet.

Dransfield was a self-declared romantic and the richness and delicacy of his imagery was an important part of his romanticism. The poems in his first two books are filled with what might be called clichéd romantic symbols – magic carpets, crystal wine glasses, Greek mythology, Vincent van Gough, ruined mansions , fallen aristocrats, candles and dukes. But Dransfield’s romanticism was not confined to his poetry. He increasingly attempted to live the romantic image of the ‘suffering’ artist cut off from mainstream society because of his/her sensitivity. This can, perhaps, be best seen in his drug poetry. Streets of the Long Voyage, The Inspector of Tides and Drug Poems contain some very powerful and moving drug poetry. ‘Bum’s Rush’, for example, is one of Dransfield’s best poems. But as his addiction deepened, drug related imagery began to dominate his poetry more and more.

In his earlier poetry drugs became a vehicle for his romanticism:

                                                 Becalmed now

on Coleridge’s painted sea in Rimbaud’s

drunken boat. High like de Quincey or Vasco

I set a course

for the Pillars of Hercules, meaning to sail

over the edge of the world

                                                          ‘Overdose’

Even death, if it was surrounded by drug imagery, took its place in Dransfield’s iconography of romanticism:

last week, I think on Tuesday,

she died

just gave up breathing

toppled over

a big smashed doll

with the needle still in her arm

I made a funeral of leaves

and sang the Book of Questions

to her face as white as hailstones

to her eyes as closed as heaven

                                   ‘For Ann so still and dreamy’

Dransfield, in fact, clothed the life of the poet and the junkie in the same romantic imagery;

Once you have become a drug addict

you never want to be anything else

                                        ‘Fix’

to be a poet in Australia

is the ultimate commitment

                                    ‘Like this for years’

The inference here is clear, poets and junkies are really two sides of the same coin. This sense of the suffering individual artist/drug user, while clearly growing out of the milieu of the late 1960’s, has come, in time, to represent the less successful aspects of Dransfield’s romanticism.

On the acknowledgement page of the original Sun Books edition of Drug Poems, Dransfield states that a number of the poems “will appear in Memories of a Velvet Urinal to be published in the USA in 1972.” This was an overly optimistic note. According to Hall, Geoffrey Dutton had promised to take the manuscript with him to the US but, as it turned out, it was not accepted for publication. Memories of a Velvet Urinal was, in fact, to remain in a number of different manuscript forms until Maximus Books in a Adelaide published a version in 1975.

Shortly before his death, Dransfield gave Hall one of the manuscripts of Memories of a Velvet Urinal which Hall then sent to a British publisher. As this was clearly a later version of the manuscript than the one eventually published by Maximus Books, Hall has used it in the Collected Poems. The differences between the two versions are quite important. Dransfield had actually discarded a number of poems which appeared in the Maximus edition – “madness systems parts one, two, three, four and the last”, “Making it legal 1 &2”, “Flametree” and “To the great presidents” appear only as appendices to the Collected Poems. The situation is complicated by the appearance in the Collected Poems of another poem with the title “To the great presidents”. In the Maximus edition this poem appeared under the title

were                  no

           mar

no   more   war

Hall argues, and the evidence would appear to support him, that this actually represents a separate concrete poem and not a title. At this point I would have appreciated a further note of explanation from Hall concerning the transfer of the title “To the great presidents” from one poem to another.

The Collected Poems version also rearranges the order of the poems so that the book is now divided into four sections. This is, in fact, the most important change as it brings Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal into line with both Streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides, both of which were divided into sections. The Maximus edition has the feeling of almost being thrown together. It begins with ‘Epitaph with two quotations’, a poem which is physically difficult to read and one of the weaker poems in the book. The Collected Poems version, on the other hand, opens with the title poem, ‘Memoirs of a velvet urinal’, a striking poem about a homosexual encounter. Dransfield, by regrouping the collection, and rejecting a number of poems, has tightened the book considerably. Whereas it was quite easy to believe after reading the Maximus edition that all the poems had been written in the four-month period between May and August 1971 (which, in fact they had), the Collected Poems version has a much more crafted and professional feel to it.

There is also a tendency in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal for Dransfield to move away from the heady romanticism of his earlier work. In a poem like ‘Play something Spanish’, lines like:

planes of light. yes. they were effective. yes. you

are lost in them, their obvious coast

led you away to a place you cannot identify. spain?

never. play something metaphysical…..

suggest that contemporary American poetry was beginning to have a greater influence on his work. Unfortunately, there are also poem, such as ‘Poem started in a bus’, which depends upon a heavily clichéd, moralist ending:

                                                              …..Its easy

to forget violence while violence

forgets you

It’s difficult to escape the feeling that Dransfield could still have done more to the manuscript of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal. The evidence suggests that, in the face of a number of publishers’ rejections, this editorial process was well underway at the time of his death. If he had lived, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, in time, may have been shaped into a volume which surpassed the achievement of his first two books.

Voyage into Solitude is the first of two collections of unpublished work which Rodney Hall edited after Dransfield’s death. In this first collection Hall assembled his selection from the period 1967 to 1971. In effect this represents the material that Dransfield, and those who helped him, rejected when editing material for those books he did publish during his life.

Overall it is probably fair to say that Voyage into Solitude is a tribute to the editorial process which went into the first four books. There are only a few poems in this collection which I would have been prepared to argue for. These would include ‘Sonnet’, ‘The sun but not our children’ and the wonderfully descriptive ‘Pioneer Lane’. For the most part, however, it is easy to see why these poems were left out. Many seem incomplete, an image doesn’t work properly or, as is more common, is too clichéd to be effective. Though it was obviously important for Hall to collect and publish these “rejected” poems, in the context of the Collected Poems, Voyage into Solitude remains a book primarily for the Dransfield scholar or enthusiast.

While Dransfield seemed to be developing, almost organically, away from the lush romanticism of his earlier work in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, the poems in Hall’s second posthumous collection, The Second Month of Spring (UQP 1980), marks a dramatic change in both style and content. All the poems in this collection were written during the last year of Dransfield’s life. In April 1972 Dransfiield, while riding his motorcycle, was run off the road south of Sydney by an off-duty policeman. Besides some serious injuries to his head and leg, the pethadine he was given in hospital undid months of effort put into overcoming his addiction. As might be expected, the accident figures prominently in these last poems:

used   to get through

three five six

books a day

now can’t read

much more than

one short poem

or an article

blame it on

medication

happens to all who happen here

it was the same

in darlo

months ago

since my last

accident

april

in fact

i write

cannot revise

they also serve

                                 ‘October elegy for Litt’

Dransfield stopped referring to his work as poems during this final period, preferring to call them raves. In effect the work in The Second Month of Spring can be likened to the final explosion of light a star gives off as it starts to collapse in upon itself. These last poems are, in fact, intensely personal, almost to the point of being a diary in verse.

As far as style goes they are poems cut back to the bare essentials:

even an

ugly joint

will get you high

as afghan

hills

                                ‘imports’

Word plays often become an end in themselves, and even his earlier work is not safe:

look ahead

straits of the long

voyeur

                          ‘cadlike’

While this is not great poetry, it is difficult not to be moved by the extremes of emotion – anger, hope, resignation – and, at times, the intense physical pain, which these poems highlight.

Rodney Hall, in his introduction to Voyage into Solitude, made the point that Dransfield is one of the few Australian poets to ever have “a genuine popular following….among people who do not otherwise read poetry”. The sheer size and scope of the Collected Poems, I believe, illustrates why Dransfield was able to build up this following.

Dransfield may have felt that being a poet in Australia was “the ultimate committment”, but there is no doubt that the late 60s were an exciting time to be a young poet in Australia. While most of his contemporaries saw themselves as “modern” poets, breaking the hold of the conservatives on Australian poetry, Dransfield was reading the romantics as well as contemporary American and European poetry. Though critics may disapprove of Dransfield’s romanticism, there is little doubt that, during the late 60s, it tapped a feeling among young people and, as a result, can be said to lie behind much of Dransfield’s initial popularity.

Perhaps, in the final instance, Dransfield’s greatest strength can be seen in the development we can trace in the Collected Poems from the early, richly romantic poems, through to the more hard-edged poems of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal. Sadly, his tragic death in 1973 cut short this development. We should be grateful to Rodney Hall for editing this collection because, if nothing else, it has helped focus attention back towards the poems and away from the “Dransfield myth” which has come to dominate his reputation since his death.

December 22, 2011
Breaking Through the Silence: NO REGRETS 3

No Regrets 3: An Anthology of the Sydney Women Writing Workshop. Published by the No Regrets Group. 1985. Review Published in Tribune – Summer Reading Issue (no 2406) 11 December 1985.

“Literary history and the past are dark with silences”, declared Tillie Olsen in Silences. These silences, she argues, were due to a number of factors ‘including class, colour, sex and the times and climate into which one is born.”

Over the last decade, women writers in Australia have been attempting to make themselves heard above that silence. A measure of their success has been the number of contemporary women writers being published and the growth of women’s publishing ventures such as Sybylla, Sea Cruise Books and Redress Press.

Another result of the revival of women’s writing has been the ‘rescuing’ of women’s writing from literary oblivion. The republishing of works by authors such as M. Barnard Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead among others, has created an alternative to the conservative, male dominated, traditional literary history of Australia.

The creation of an alternative structure to the existing literary hierarchy has been one of the most important long-term results of the women’s writing movement. It is probably this aspect that the literary establishment finds the most threatening.

There are many reasons behind the growth of women’s’ writing which, of course, parallels the growth of the women’s movement in general. However, in part it can also be seen as a reaction against the writers of the so-called ‘generation of ’68’.

The generation of ’68 is a term used loosely to describe a number of young writers who first came to prominence in the late sixties. They saw themselves as ‘poetic revolutionaries’ attacking the bastions of traditional Australian literature. With a few exceptions, however, they were male. The vast majority of women in ‘the scene’ were there as girlfriends or wives.

In time, a number of women only writing workshops were formed, one of which was the Sydney Women Writers Workshop (also known as the No Regrets Group) in 1978. For over seven years the No Regrets Group has met at member’s houses to read and discuss their work, as well as discussing practical and theoretical issues. Their influence, however, has extended beyond the actual group members through the compilation of three anthologies. Their most recent publication, No Regrets 3, was recently launched at the Performance Space in Sydney. It contains work by sixteen women from the group, together with statements by each on their writing.

Although it is an often repeated assertion that all writing is political, it remains a concept which the literary establishment has difficulty coming to terms with. The women in No Regrets 3, however, repeat this assertion with a convincing directness which comes from personal experience. Barbara Brooks, for example, says “You can hardly put pen to paper, or even open your mouth, as a woman writer, before you have to confront your experience as a woman, your power, or lack of it.” Anne Lawrence is a little more positive: “being a writer is just my way and I know that there are more women finding and owning their voices, power and creativity with honesty , integrity and great responsibility.” Uyen Loewald sees her writing in terms of her position as a migrant in a society where people refuse to try and understand her: “I began writing….when I realised that there was no other way to establish justice for myself and other people like me.”

The writing itself is varied and refreshing in its scope. It is particularly exciting to come across work by writers I hadn’t heard of before, such as Chitra Fernando, Marion Consandine, Coren Caplan, Anna Valerio, Loretta Re and Jo Garolis.

The influence of the first two No Regrets anthologies has extended beyond the women’s writing movement. As the Adelaide based writer, Moya Costello, pointed out on a recent Crystal Set program (2SER-FM Sydney), a number of male writers have obviously been influenced, not just by the way women write, but by the supportive networks set up by women writers and the concerns which motivate many women to write.

No Regrets 3, together with the first two anthologies, provide useful models, not only for women writers, but all writers who feel surrounded by ‘silences’.

December 14, 2011
Lines of Flight – Marion Campbell

Lines of Flight, Marion Campbell. Freemantle Arts Centre Press 1985. From The Good Reading: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Fiction compiled by Helen Daniel McPhee Gribble 1989.

An intellectually playful novel which follows the career of Rita Finnerty, an Australian artist struggling to create a career for herself in France. Campbell’s impressive use of language skillfully followers her narrative so that, as the novel opens, Rita’s artistic and emotional freedom is echoed in the expansiveness of the language which draws in elements of art, literature and contemporary French theory. As Rita finds herself increasingly drawn into a small social circle headed by Raymond, a gay French semiotician, and his two students, Sebastien and Gerard, the novel’s language begins to close in on itself. Pressure builds up until Rita finally attempts to crash through the domestic barriers that have been gradually imposed upon her. At the same time as this narrative explosion, Campbell’s language also explodes violently, creating an unnerving and subtly unsettling conclusion.

December 5, 2011
Susan Hampton COSTUMES – P76 Magazine Issue 1 1983

Susan Hampton COSTUMES Transit Poetry 1981

Over a number of years now Susan Hampton’s reputation as a poet of a consistently high standard has been steadily increasing, largely as a result of the considerable body of her work which has appeared in various literary magazines and journals. It comes as a surprise, then, to realise that Costumes, her first complete volume, has been greeted with almost two years of critical neglect.

If we turn to the book itself in an attempt to find reasons for this neglect, we quickly find ourselves disappointed for Costumes is, in many ways, a virtuoso debut, as Hampton shows herself to be in control of many different styles and techniques. One has only to compare the surrealist prose piece ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’ with the apparent autobiographical detail of ‘In the Kitchens’, to be aware of the range and scope of her work.

Throughout the volume, Hampton is always conscious of being a poet, both in the way she observes what is happening around her, and how she relates it to her own emotions. We become aware of the importance she attaches to individual words in a ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’; here Hampton describes a method of memorising single words which she has taken into the country:

We begin at the Angel Islington in a pub, looking at ourselves in the mirror. As we looked, she told me the first word. We walked from then pub to a phone-box, to the supermarket then to the tube station, the flowerseller with his red blooms, past a hoarding, then along Upper Street to the doorknocker on her house. At each of these stops she gave me a new word, and I was to recall them by walking this journey until I could do it in my mind, associating each word with an object on the way. It proved successful, and I wondered whether this was how Mandelstam’s wife memorised his poems to bring them out.

Words are obviously important here, and a close relationship exists between the individual words and the associated objects. It is no co-incidence that ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’ opens Costumes, for through it we are introduced to the poetry that will follow. The idea of a “Museum of Words” recalls the various museums in Murry Bail’s Homesickness, but Hampton sees little point in museums themselves:

The Museum of Words. I think this is a bad idea. Leave

these in the gallery for a while, and then give them

to people walking by.

The poems that follow are definitely not intended to hang in a gallery. Although our first reaction may be that Costumes consists of a number of very good, but also very different poems, as we progress further we become aware of a number of subtle but important ways in which poems of opposing techniques and styles are, in fact, related to each other. This can perhaps be best seen if we look at the way a number of Hampton’s best poems grow directly from everyday incidents. Early in the title poem ‘Costumes’, for example, we read:

Waiting for a bus, I rock gently on the edge

of the footpath, all manner of people coming past me

the ones in green dresses the ones with very short hair

In ‘Costumes’, and other poems such as ‘Jubilate Sydney’, ‘Ode to the Car Radio’ and ‘Waiting for Rain’, we see emerging a particular way of looking at the city, and, more importantly, the poet’s relationship to that city. The concluding lines of ‘Jubilate Sydney’ reflects one manifestation of that relationship:

For tenthly there’s a cloud accompanying me

my windscreen is better than the latest Italian movie

The same sentiment appears in ‘Waiting for rain’:

& yes, life’s an Australian movie just now, no plot

but some very taking shots

Although part of the attraction of these poems lies in the way the actual incidents are described, their real strength is Hampton’s ability to suggest an inter-relationship between many apparently trival observations. In a comparatively simple poem, such as ‘Waiting for rain’, this is achieved by the way the richness of the first section, where the poet is riding a bike across the campus of Sydney University, is contrasted with the sterile second section, when she has arrived at work. The poem works towards its final statement in the same way that a skillful scientist might support her/his theory, for when the poem concludes:

I want to go out into the rain.

there seems to be no other possible conclusion.

‘Costumes’ can be seen as an extension of ‘Waiting for Rain’. It is a far more ambitious poem, and structurally more complex, but again it relies upon the poet’s observation of her surroundings. This time, however, she is still and watches the city move around her. Her passiveness, though, is only physical, for the way people “narcissistically half-watch” themselves in the numerous mirrors of the MLC Centre becomes a metaphor for the shallow nature of the glamorous image they seek to buy:

And the mirors say, you have bought something from us,

look at us and see how you shine as you move, buy more

look more, shine more, buy yourself from us we have

a big range of styles.

The poem becomes increasingly ironical so that when the people leave the mirrors and walk into the street past

                                                                         cripples with badges

fat girls from out of town, warehouse clerks with sore legs

and white noses, past all the losers.

the glamour and shine has all disappeared.

The five poems grouped together in ‘In the Kitchen’ also appear to be largely autobiographical, describing the poet’s childhood in Inverall and Newcastle. There is a gentle feeling of progression about the sequence. Each poem seems immediate and important, perhaps because with the exception of ‘Invererell’, they are all written in the present tense. They reflect a child’s growth, from early memories of an insurance sales and amateur magician, to bars in Newcastle and writing poetry imitating Eliot. The sequence appears almost crafted, for while it has at its centre, the memories of different kitchens, each poem expresses a mood unique to a particular period of growing up.

On e feature, then which runs through an unites Costumes is the way in which the majority of the poems have, as their centre, the poet herself. The best poems in the collection, however, use this as a starting point to make statements which transcend the personal. This is true not only of those poems which deal with the external world, but also those which concentrate on the personal or physical subjects. ‘It’, for example, begins by describing the feelings, both physical and emotional, associated with menstruation:

      It grabs from behind &

whomp! you’ve gone mad again tonight, despite Vitamin B

& the gynaecologist’s plan for sanity.

As the description continues, the poet’s anger grows until, in the final lines, it overflows into violence:

                                                   Now the world’s

a different place, malign for sure, & we’re crying

(big girls do) about nothing, we know its nothing,

but we really want to kick the shit out of something

tonight, we’re violent, & we’re tired of making

little parcels & putting them in the cupboard.

In the final instance Costumes is true to the criteria that Hampton herself stated at the beginning of the collection in ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’. The majority of the poems refuse to be “hung” for an length of time on the gallery wall. Rather we find ourselves recalling the way we have felt in a particular situation,or perhaps see elements of ourselves in the poetry, so that seemingly personal statements suddenly take on a much wider significance. Costumes confirms Hampton’s standing as a poet of exceptional ability, and establishes he position as one of the best writers to emerge over the last few years. The fact that this collection has passed almost unnoticed by the majority of critics (there have been a few exceptions) is a sad comment on the quality of contemporary criticism.

Mark Roberts

1983

Photograph of Susan Hampton in 1981 by John Tranter. Thanks to http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/

December 1, 2011
POETRY REVIEW. Scarp 23 October 1993. Craig Powell, Gary Catalano, Jill Jones and Martin Harrison.

Minga Street: New and Selected Poems, Craig Powell. Hale & Iremonger 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/minga-street-0075000

Selected Poems: 1973-1992, Gary Catalano UQP. 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/selected-poems-1973-1992-0054000

Flagging Down Time, Jill Jones, Five Islands Press 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/flagging-down-time-0135000

The Distribution of Voice, Martin Harrison, UQP 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/the-distribution-of-voice-0648000

(As these books are out of print I have provide links back to the Australia Poetry Library were the books reviewed are now online).

In the closing scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are battling the forces of evil on top of the Mount Rushmore monument. Saint falls and Grant scrambles down to save her. He is holding her with one hand while the other hand grips the cliff top. Just as the bad guy is about to crush Grant’s fingers under his boot, a shot rings out the bad guy falls dead. The camera then zooms onto Grant’s arm as he strains to pull Saint to safety. As the camera tracks back the scene has suddenly changed to the interior of a railway sleeping car. Rather than pulling Saint to safety, Grant is helping her up to the top bunk. Suddenly the scene changes again and we see the last shot of the film which shows an express train plunging into a tunnel.

Such symbolism, while very obvious and heavy handed, works because Hitchcock had his tongue very firmly in his check. In Craig Powell’s poetry very similar symbolism appears again and again, but there is no undercurrent of humour to relieve the ever thickening emotions. In fact the very image of a train plunging into a tunnel appears in one of the newer poems in Minga Street: New and Selected Poems, a volume which combines a number of new poems with a selection from his previous four collections of poetry:

miners or fetlers

With calcium grins and sooty jowls

A child knows they are cheering for him

Coalcliff now the deepest tunnel starts

And, just in case the symbolism of the tunnel escapes you, the poem concludes

And a cello sings in his throat

Of the shadow immense womb of rock

Where he sleeps with his eyes white and wide

‘In the Presence of Paul Tortielier’

Powell’s professional background as a psychoanalyst has obviously been one of the major influences on his writing. In ‘Visitors’, another recent poem, he writes of the fragile nature of a family’s perceived history:

whose mother’s lover fumbled at her at nine?

She is easily wiped out you being her only

witness and I don’t always want to hear you

And your mother’s friend plucks another scone and simpers

‘You must be very proud of your mother’

You smile you ask politely ‘How long have you known her?’

‘Visitors’

Throughout his work Powell continually attempts to break through the mental barriers to explore what David Brooks has called ‘the psychic depths’. Unfortunately, far too often, these depths are populated by the overused imagery of Freudian psychology. This is not to say that Powell has not written some very fine poetry. Rereading some of the Canadian poems which were written during the mid to late seventies, I was impressed by the intense lyricism of the best of Powell’s poetry. In ‘Canada Geese’, for example, Powell uses the image of geese flying south to suggest absence and renewal:

Some evening    when we are

Unaware      they will beat southward

invisible by the windy

stars    and frost will affect

our teeth

‘Canada Geese’

As a record of Powell’s work over the last twenty-five years Minga Street is, in the final instance, a frustrating collection. I was continually drawn towards Powell’s gentle lyricism which creates some memorable images. At the same time I found it difficult to accept the overuse of psychoanalytic imagery where, for example, old mens bodies “glimmer with the sperm/of sorrows” (‘Spoken to Women’), and where

the pure horses half-sleeping rise

from the earth so high

and so quiet their eyes gentle

upon us    searching towards

a distance emptied of images

where they sway our seed in their thighs

‘in Spruce Woods’

or where trees are:

like women

sheathed in bark to their navels but

their eyes and breasts fervent and lovely

‘Lessons at Collaroy Plateau’

Gary Catalano’s Selected Poems 1972-1992, like Powell’s collection, also contains some previously uncollected poems. But while Powell delights in a poetry dense with imagery, Catalano, for the most part, is a far more subtle poet. At times, particularly in his early work, the simplicity of his imagery suggest the influence of haiku, Poems such as ‘Tree’, ‘The Blizzard’, ‘Against the Thunder’ and ‘The Exploration of a Continent’ from the 1973 collection ‘Remembering the Rural Life’, are short, simple poems whose impact is much greater than one would expect at first glance:

A horse

Shaking the dust

From his coat

flies

Noon heat.

In the clear

blue sky

no cloud to

expunge our defeat.

‘The Exploration of a Continent’

Complementing these short poems in the selection from his from his earliest work is a long poem ‘Remembering the Rural Life’. In this impressive poem Catalano recreates the landscape of his youth, a landscape lost to him both by time and the spread of suburbia. In the Parramatta of the late fifties and early sixties Catalano draws together the threads of his background – his family’s Italian heritage, his adolescent bravado and the growing conflict between a father’s vision of his son’s future and the son’s interest in art and poetry. The strength of the this poem is that it avoids slipping into sentimentality; instead Catalano has utilised an economy of image which is apparent in his shorter poems to create a narrative about memory and growth which effectively sets the tone for much of the other work in the collection.

Catalano is one of the few Australian poets to work extensively with the prose poem. Selected Poems brings together a handful of prose poems from Heaven of Rags (1982) (http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/heaven-of-rags-0359000) and a selection from his book of prose poems Fresh Linen (1988) (http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/fresh-linen-0360000). Catalano’s style is ideally suited to the prose poem as he is easily able to avoid the poetry being subsumed by the structure of the prose. In one of his best prose poems ‘At the Source’, Catalano uses water flowing from the source of a creek to the ocean as a metaphor for speech:

It is here that we find our clearest

image of speech. They taste so clean,

these syllables of the dark, and they

make us realise that all our words

should be pitched at a whisper.

But, once speech, “these shy waters’ flow into the ocean, their nature changes:

Here it bends

itself on the ear like a sheet of fresh,

unscored linen…and here it offers an

escape from the inchoate music of

the world.

‘At the Source’

There are also a number of prose poems among his new work including the very brief poem ‘Silver and Gold’ which once again highlights the beautiful simplicity which Catalano can achieve at his best:

The waves look like silver-foil. But

when they break on the shore, I hear

the sound of a hand sifting through a

bag of grain.

‘Silver and Gold’

While Jill Jones has not yet reached that point in her career which would justify the publication of a volume of selected poems, at her current rate of production she could very soon reach the milestone which Powell and Catalano have just achieved. In fact, the success of her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star (1992) http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/the-mask-and-the-jagged-star-0062000 has ensured that her second collection, Flagging Down Time, will attract more than its share of critical attention.

As the title would suggest, Jones’ book is concerned with the concepts of time and change. For Jones, time represents the potential for both growth and decay, and among the images that recur throughout the book is that of the garden. Grass seeds in the desert, for example, lie dormant until rain falls:

She’s like plants at ground level

surviving as seeds through dry periods –

tough outside while inside

she’ll grow the grasslands of dreams.

This poem concludes with one of the most striking images in the book:

that road where past and future meet

only at the horizon

and there’s all that walking between

‘The Desert’

The idea of time running from the past through the present to the future is reflected in the title poem where time is a taxi that can be flagged down:

the meter is silent now

but just as inexorable

as the ticking of my plastic watch

‘Flagging Down Time’

Flagging Down Time concludes with the impressive longer poem ‘Eleven fifteen’. While time can be a road which runs from horizon to horizon, one has to remember that the horizon also runs in an arc which joins the two ends of the road. This sense of the cyclic nature of time is picked up in ‘Eleven Fifteen’ where the final line of each stanza becomes the first line of the next. Such a structure reflects the repeated rituals which seem to merge days together while, in fact, weeks, months and years may pass:

……fantasies

which take on a stranger syntax as I travel

through the midnight hour that has always stood

like a dark faery nought, round zero of change

‘Eleven fifteen’

Flagging Down Time should confirm Jones’ reputation as a major new voice in Australian poetry. It will be interesting to see how much longer we have to wait for her third collection.

Martin Harrison’s poetry can appear difficult to come to terms with on a first reading. It is a dense poetry with rich images overlapping and merging, driven by an often sensuous use of language which at times seems almost ready to rebel being restricted to the page. Indeed, to appreciate Harrison’s work, the reader must realise that often the sound of the language is as important as the meaning of the word.

As well as being a poet, Harrison has a background in sound/text performance and is a teacher of sound composition. While his poetry may not be performance pieces in the way Amanda Stewart’s work is, the influence of sound and film in his work is obvious. At times, for example, Harrison’s descriptions are so intense they are almost filmic:

You want it all to come back –

April’s sharper lights,

Light-grids, networks, windows off

A shady green

‘Beauty Line’

But it is a film with a distinctive sound track. The best poems in this book seem to invoke an image which is aural as well as visual. In ‘Meeting’, a poem within the long sequence of poems called ‘Films’, Harrison captures the sound of the wind rustling through the grass:

Wind jiggles the shell-grass

Making itself visible

Like someone brushing a mobile

‘4. Meeting (from Films)’

In another poem, ‘Marriage and Soundscape’, Harrison takes great care in describing a sound:

Then a shag took off from these waters, making an interval, a year,

My wife has just seen it – calling it ‘hair on a lens’ and ‘shadow noise’.

(There is green, there is a clapping-Sound, there is wind.)

‘Marriage and Soundscape’

Harrison’s imagery often flows together in the same way that a sound can gradually be transformed into a completely different sound without a casual listener being aware of the change. In ‘Then and Now’, for example, a description of the wind blowing leaves in a tree becomes, within the space of four lines, a lion and the entire poem moves off in a completely different direction:

Late wind arrives, shakes the leaves

in a porridge of shimmers, like a mane-

A lion gets up, wlks about

Caged. foetid, in a fitful mind

‘7. Then and Now (from Films)’

Mark Roberts 1993

(Note: the layout of the quoted in poems in this review in Scarp was a little problematic. We possible I have gone back to originals poems to try and ensure the layout is correct in this version. From memory I also beliee there was a final paragraph to this review. But as I no longer have the original copy I have left the last section as it appeared in SCARP)

November 22, 2011
Peter Carey’s First Novel

Review of Bliss, By Peter Carey, University of Queensland Press, 1981. Going Down Swinging Issue 5 Spring 1982.

Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss, must have been one of the most eagerly awaited books of last year. Its publication was preceded bu profiles of Carey in both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, both of which later gave the book good reviews. But even before the literary establishment began its fanfare I was suspicious of Carey’s novel. I have never been able to fully reconcile his role in advertising with his reputation as one of Australia’s leading younger writers. Despite this I enjoyed his first two books of short stories, though at times I doubted his motives. As a result I approached Bliss in a critical frame of mind. It lasted twenty pages. Once again Carey won me over in spite of myself.

The novel is basically the story of Harry Joy who, like Carey, is in is late thirties and involved in the running of a moderately successful advertising company. Harry, however, suffers a heart attack and lies in his backyard, clinically dead for nine minutes. During his ‘first death’ he discovers:

“That there were many worlds, layer upon layer, as thin as filo pastry.”

For a time he is completely at peace, but the possibility that a corresponding world of terror may exist sends him fleeing back to his body as it is being carried out the front gate. The rest of the novel is concerned, min the main, with Harry’s response to his new found insights into the evil and hypocrisy which everyone else takes for granted. To add to his confusion Harry actually believes that he has died and the new world which he is discovering is, in reality, hell.

Bliss adopts a far more rigid moral and political stance than any of the earlier stories. Of course Carey’s work has always been political in a sense, one only has to look at the title stories from The fat man in History and War Crimes for evidence of this. What I am suggesting, however, is that in Bliss Carey is being more directly political than before, and, particularly in his portrayal of the advertising industry, manages to make quite strong moral judgments.

One of Harry’s most disturbing discoveries in Hell is the fact that many of the products he has been involved in advertising are strongly carcinogenic. Worse still, he realizes that he was perhaps the only person who wasn’t aware of it. Carey also hints at a cancer epidemic which, we are told, will sweep through the West and most of the industrialised East within a few years.

It is interesting, while still on the political aspects of Bliss, to look at a comment Carey made in an interview with Kate Ahearne, Stephen Williams and Kevin Brophy (Going Down Swinging No. 1 1980). When questioned about Craig Munro’s doubts about his role in advertising, Carey answered that it had given him a chance to work with other people, and also that it had given him a solid political education. It is possible to apply this statement to Harry Joy, though perhaps his ‘political education’ is a little sudden. For most of the novel Harry has to struggle with his political consciousness, his desire to produce a ‘good ad’. The conflict is only finally resolved when Bettina, his wife, finally gets the chance to fulfill a lifelong ambition of designing and producing her own ads. She is blind to everything but the beauty of her ads and her desire to break into the big New York ad houses. Her dreams though, are shattered by her discovery that she is suffering from incurable cancer, probably as a result of long term exposure to petrol vapours. Bettina turns against the petrol company for which she has been designing ads, destroying both herself, and the entire Board of the company with a petrol bomb.

Despite the ‘political realism’ of Bliss it is, in the final instance, far more optimistic than most of the stories. Carey himself admits (GDS, No1, 1980, p.46) that his early stories are, essentially, fatalistic. In the second collection, War Crimes, stories such as “He Found Her in Summer”, and “The Puzzling Nature of Blue”, are at least moving towards a position where the possibility of optimism is admitted. Bliss, however, concludes on a note of ecstasy. Carey refers to the unqualified happy ending to Bliss in the interview by commenting on Harry’s development from total innocence to a point where he confronts “the shit out of the world and comes to some real positive conclusions about it.” I agree with Carey when he says that this represents a big development (movement is probably a better word) on his earlier work.

Bliss, both in its language and content, is a very crafted novel. Although primarily the story of Harry Joy, all the other major characters dominate sections of the novel. This I had a feeling that hidden within the novel were a number of individual stories, cut up and distributed carefully throughout the book. Or perhaps this is coincidental, a result of the method of narration that Carey has employed. We learn, in the last lines, that the narrator’s voice in fact belongs to Harry and Honey’s children, who have obviously grown in a up in a tradition of storytelling, a profession that Harry adopted after his arrival at Bog Onion Road. So finally the novel turns a complete circle. Harry finds that the Bliss that was suggested in his ‘first’ death finally in his third death, after he has returned to the childhood memories of a guru-like father. The ending maybe, as some critics have noted, simplistic and contrived; nevertheless it still managed to move me on the two occasions I read it.

Of the many diverse influences on the novel, perhaps the most surprising, as far as I was concerned, was the apparent debt Carey owed to Tom Robbins of Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues fame. The major areas where this becomes obvious is in the method and style of narration and the character of Honey Barbara. In both of Robbins’ early books one of the minor characters later identifies himself as the narrator, explaining both the insights and the asides which characterize the narrative style. In Bliss, the revelation of Harry and Harry’s children as narrators can perhaps help to explain a similarity between Carey’s and Robbins’ narrative voice. The character of Honey Barbara also appears to owe much to Robbins. The similarity between Honey and many of Robbins’ female characters is particularly noticeable in small details such as the way she walks and her often impulsive, but enlightened dialogue. This became for me the weakest aspect of the novel, perhaps because the flaw was so unexpected and because Honey Barbara is the bridge between the cancerous city world and peace of the alternative life-style at Bog Onion Road. This Honey, who eventually becomes the most important character after Harry Joy, becomes, at times, almost contrived, and disrupts the smoothness which characterizes the rest of the novel.

The publication of Bliss came at a time when Carey’s earlier stories were being published overseas in a variety of different forms. It remains to be seen how many readers in America and England will react to the Carey novel. For me, despite a few flaws, the hype that surrounded its publication and my own doubts about Carey’s 9decreasing) role in advertising, Bliss was one of the more impressive novels I read during 1981.

Mark Roberts 1982

November 17, 2011
‘A Plethora of Women’. David Ireland – City of Women Allen Lane 1981.

‘A Plethora of Women’. David Ireland – City of Women Allen Lane 1981. Originally published in Issue 8 Island Magazine November 1981

David Ireland’s recent obsessions, women and leopards, appear once again as central themes in his latest novel City of Women. Though very much a self contained novel, there are a number of features which are directly related to his previous novel, A Woman of the Future, the most obvious being his thematic concentration on women. In A Woman of the Future he traced, in the first person, the life of a girl, Alethea Hunt, from her earliest recollections, until she finishes high school and begins a transformation into a leopard. Ireland attempted to withdraw from the novel by claiming that his role was that of an editor, organising notebooks, papers and diaries into publishable form. City of Women, on the other hand, focuses on the life of a retired woman, Bille Shockley, who appears to live in a Sydney from which all men have been banned.

Another apparently important connection between the two novels is the presence of a leopard. Alethena Hunt eventually flees to the country to seek freedom as a leopard, Billie Shockley has a pet leopard, Bobbie, who she takes for walks through East Sydney, the Domain and the Botanical Gardens, Billie sees in her leopard a possible replacement for her “first Bobbie”, who appears at first to have been her lover, but who, we eventually realise, was her daughter.
City of Women even more than A Woman of the Future , is a novel by a man about women. The life Billie leads in the ‘City of Women’ is a very masculine one. Her life revolves around a hotel, ‘The Lover’s Arms’, where the woman are presented in what would otherwise be stereotypical male roles. Society, in fact, seems to be same as when it was dominated by men. There are still football teams, pub brawls, stag nights (now called ‘doe nights’), pack rape and so on. The only difference is that now women drink in the pubs, play football and rape the male hitchhiker and leave him in a coma at the side of the road on their way to the races at Newcastle.

On at least one occasion the narrative is disrupted by an inconsistency in the text. We are told, early in the novel, that Sydney is now a city completely (or almost completely) free of men. But on page 19 Billie relates a story about a woman called Victoria, who steals a large white timber packing case from the tractor warehouse where she works as a guardperson. It seems strange that in a city where the only men are captured or hired to perform in orgies, or who sneak in to symbolically ‘rape’ a lone female by cutting her open and masturbating into the wound, that the yard manager of Victoria’s warehouse should be male. Perhaps it is an oversight on Ireland’s part which somehow managed to sneak past the proof readers. Or perhaps the warehouse is supposed to be outside the city where men are still in control. If so, it is the only occasion in the novel when the fact that a woman is able to seek employment outside the city is not emphasised. Although such an incident may seem minor, it is one of the ways in which the reader is always aware of the male writer behind his female characters.

The novel’s main strength lies in it’s portrayal of Sydney. Billie spends most of the book walking her leopard through the Domain, the Gardens, and to her favourite pub in Cathedral street. Sydney is used as a foundation for Billie’s despair at being “Sixty two and afraid of solitude. Deathly afraid.” To those readers familiar with Sydney, the streets Billie wanders are crisp and real; and for those who aren’t. a detailed map of the area appears on the inside cover. Although it maybe going too far to compare Ireland’s Sydney with Joyce’s Dublin, Ireland creates his Sydney with an instance on realistic detail approaching the Joycian ideal.
City of Women, like most of Ireland’s previous novels, can be seen to operate on three levels of reality. The first level is the ‘absolute’ reality of the physical city of Sydney; the second is the ‘constructed’ reality of the City of Women; and the third is the obviously surrealist world, such as the valley of leopards, which takes place in Billie’s dreams. The problem with this novel is that each level of realism is in conflict with the others. The successfully evoked image of Sydney is in conflict with the male dominated view of female society, while the surrealism is so typical Ireland that it has become predictable. This has the result of making the entire novel appear uneven, the successful aspects being destroyed by its weaknesses.

City of Women concludes with an attempt to place the novel in a conventional framework. Billie’s daughter arrives outside her flat with her new husband, trying to get her mother to open the door. Billie hears their pleading, and the explanations of the landlord, but does not associate them with herself. We realise, however, that the ‘City of Women’ exists only in Billy’s head, and learn that her pet leopard was, in reality, a large yellow cat. Since the death of the cat she has not left her flat, relying on her landlord to buy her food and post her letters to her daughter who she believes to be living on the North Coast. Billie has created a fantasy world for herself and her daughter, and when her daughter rebels against it and leaves her to get married, she refuses to recognise reality and becomes overwhelmed by her fantasy.
While such an ending was obviously designed to conclude the novel with a strong dose of pathos, it has the effect of leaving the reader with an uneasy feeling of having been ‘let down’. In the context of the novel, the ending can be likened to a primary school composition, where, when the bell goes and the story has to be finished quickly, the student writes: “and then I woke up.”

It is easy to understand the reasons why the majority of critics have approached City or Women with caution, for, while in parts the novel is enjoyable, overall there are too many problems for a reader to be left in any state other than frustration. In the final instance, City of Women appears to be a powerful argument for leaving the writing of women’s books to women, whole we can only hope that in this novel Ireland has worked out the obsessions which has dominated his last two books.

Mark Roberts 1981

November 15, 2011