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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

From a Sunburnt Land

From a Sunburnt Land

So often one picks up a book of Australian verse with misgivings, expecting either a trite homily on life and art and the talking bones under the gum- tree, or else ‘social verse’ as humourless as the laugh of the kookaburra. It is pleasant to be proved wrong. At least half the poems in this new selection are about real occasions; and the strident note of the boy or girl scout leader is almost entirely absent. Judith Wright, David Campbell, John Manifold – these veterans fight a strong rearguard action though traces of tiredness show. James McAuley, writing of New Guinea and the death of a Catholic Bishop, justifies his theme completely. Elizabeth Riddel, Rosemary Dobson, Nan McDonald – each one moves out of lotus-land toward intellectual honesty. Australian poets seem to be returning also to a conservative use of form. But the strongest and loveliest poem, the war-boomerang tall as a man, is A.D. Hope’s ‘Chorale’, a love-lyric which knocks the high nut from the tree. It is very pleasant to be proved wrong.

Douglas Stewart, represented in the year’s anthology by two of his softer poems, does not quite come clean in the first twenty-six pages of his new book. Do birds, frogs, crabs, cicadas, foxes, orchids, wombats, magpies, gum-trees, moths, grasshoppers, really mean as much to him as the poems would like to say? The large pale statements of Elegy for an Airman have long ago hardened to exact rhetoric. His nursery-rhyme technique explodes ideas into images. But the second half of the book, a sequence of poems about the Lake Eyre basin in Central Australia, takes us from nature study to the more difficult study of man. The best Australian poems are generally poems of spiritual extremity – in David Campbell, this side of despair, in John Manifold, entering the eroded badlands beyond – and now Douglas Stewart also finds the gold that will not buy water, under the man-eating sun of Central Australia. Thus, as a Lutheran missionary –

Old man, old man
Converts the sun,
He is stealing the lakes
And the sheep and the wool
And the roof and the wall:
Strike down the sun
At Koperamanna
And Kilalpannina.

page 283

It could not have been written here. Douglas Stewart’s maturity is Australian in method and origin.

1956 (133)