This study investigates a wonderful quality in our Australian literature; it is that disarming and carefree spirit of larrikinism. [1]
It is a characteristic that celebrates our national character and identity. Sometimes larrikinism appears as gentle subversion or a polite irreverence in things ‘religious’. This paper then will argue that the poets surveyed here do address theological issues useful to the public audience, and strive for positive, inclusivist, socially worthwhile outcomes in their craft.
I.
The Australian identity was forged in the misery of pioneer days, crystallised at Federation, tested in the two World Wars, and challenged by the post-war immigration. Our Australian identity is democratic, carefree and egalitarian. So it follows that an Australian religious consciousness will feature respect for one another, an empirical sense of reality, be suspicious of theory and distrusting of authority. At expressions of religious faith, the ‘average Aussie’ is more likely to be tolerant but unimpressed. At the outset then, we may observe that just as in traditional theology, faith seeks understanding, so in poetry, the larrikin seeks authenticity.
Australian mainstream culture is also characterised by the strong individualism of its pioneering past. The assertive male celebrated in the bullocky and shearer is an enduring icon of Australian life. His fair go ethic has driven Australian political, social and literary life. In the 1970s, assimilationist policies gave way to détente and multiculturalism, and respect for differences, and stronger assertions of one’s freedom to choose one’s own fate. That freelance larrikin inheritance challenged covert operations, conscription and unjust structures in Australia during the Vietnam war. The fair go of the old world of Lawson and Paterson’s squatters and shearers and gold diggers was being tested in the crucible of public debate and dissent in contemporary furores. This cultural bedrock of individualism and larrikinism as a robust trait in the Australian identity continued its prophetic role through our larrikin poets.
Icons and artefacts identify a culture, so we can directly identify characteristics in the Australian culture: “Our transplanted consciousness has become more natural, robust, down-to-earth, enterprising and practical. [It is] also seen to be rough and crude, insensitive to spiritual values, materialistic, and brazenly physical” [2] . The Australian character is largely masculinist and so the feminine, migrant, foreign, ‘other’ experiences are demeaned, hidden or excluded. Its egalitarianism and democracy has always suppressed expressions of “tall-poppy” individualism but generally the Australian character is undemonstrative, unfazed, underplayed and tolerant.
In a culture of indifferentism and scepticism about religion, [3] Australian religious poetry usually takes on a secular tone. Writing at century’s end, Tacey drives a wedge firmly between social reformers and ‘otherworldly’ dreamers. [4] But in the period of this study, poets turned from Romantic preoccupations to address ideology, utopianism and politics. [5] Because of “the lack of an assured place for religion in our public life,” [6] it behoved poets writing in and to this culture to invite a conversation about ‘the deeper issues’. Inevitably, a new and positive dialectic became the refreshing and vital spirit of larrikinism and irreverence which enlivened religious verse. As prophets of the age, religious poets became seers, advocates and larrikins. Their ‘holy spirit’ kept us authentic; it is our Australian religious reality check.
Three poems from mid-century will be the artefacts to sample this holy spirit; they not sardonics but show a gentle irreverence; they speak not from an atheistic stance but strive to sift the authentic from the pompous, and to perceive spirituality in event. Our study aims to demonstrate that our poets can and do connect insightfully with others’ beliefs. In a culture that has been largely shaped by Christendom, it is possible to have religious larrikin-poets doing their divine task of holding the mirror up to ourselves. If we cannot laugh or cry or endure their tests in good humour, they show that our religious consciousness might indeed be inauthentic.
II.
Like cultural archaeologists, we now turn to consider the site in detail, with a comparison and analysis of three artefacts, Bruce Dawe’s And a Good Friday Was Had By All, Noel Rowe’s The Structure of the Real, and Judith Wright’s Eli, Eli. This selection may show real differences among poets, and even between male thinking and female knowing. The selection comes from 1949-1978, that defining era in Australia’s emerging nationhood through the post World War II era of immigration, prosperity and prospects. Counter-cultural cross-currents showed Australia reassessing its roots when every structure was open for critical inspection. Events in 1967 like the Ronald Ryan hanging, the Referendum entitling Aboriginies to the vote, and the 1972 Vietnam war moratorium movement and conscription challenged how Australians saw themselves in the world; they tested the fair-go ethic. In the new relationship with US imperialism, Australians needed to describe themselves no longer as “sun browned British” [7] but as a distinct people. All icons, sacred and secular, were “up for grabs” and so the positive dialectic of religious poetry addressed social realities.
Our first artefact is Dawe’s And a Good Friday Was Had By All [8] which, in its twenty-nine, rhyme-less free verse, plays on the paradox of its title. Cinematically, it opens with the barked orders of a centurion to control the crowd at Jesus' crucifixion. His plain command dramatises male language. Dawe's riveting realism impacts immediately and segues quickly into interior monologue as a counterpoint to the execution in progress. The speaker muses how being press-ganged into the Roman Army is just another slavery which forces him to do such ugly work.
This very realistic persona, obviously an average proletarian ‘bloke’ easy to relate to, observes that of all the crosses he has done, this Good Friday one was the most difficult. This One’s lamb-like passivity did not provoke any irrational outburst justifying violence in themselves "so you can do your block and take it out on them" (line 11). He recounts how his mate Silenus and he had to do the hammering, despite the unnerving wailing of the women and the dull crushing of His bones. Again the realism and ordinariness in the voice undercuts any pious accounts readers may bring to the text. This outsider’s perspective is just what Dawe crafts, to get to the facts without any rhetorical or pious claptrap. The worker's perspective is one very dear to Australians' hearts, with its typical complaints about duty and the hiding of sympathy necessary in this work: "orders is orders" he says in his vernacular way designate his toga-less status in Roman colonial society.
The mental narrative done, the poem borrows a theological purpose in the final verse, as its character observes that the spread arms on the cross once it is hauled up, seemingly spread over the men who "had it in for him", and indeed over the whole damned world. The ironic pun in "damned", lost on the speaker in his colloquialisms, is not lost on readers, for indeed that's why the Lamb of God died - to redeem a damned world. Christian readers will recall the centurion's similar testimony in Scripture, "Truly this man was a Son of God" (Mk 15:39). Dawe's dispassionate, sideline vignette evokes several multi-layered connotations. The title does the same: a first level reading shocks with off-hand, satirical larrikinism but in fact a second level reading proffers the theological truth that we were all saved on that Good Friday. Finally, that the Man's followers were wailing women and a blind man is not just an additional incidental detail, but in it Dawe more centrally dramatises His rejection by the Establishment, for these were His only faithful followers. The oxymoronic “blind man’s tears” clinches his irony on that day’s incongruities.
While factual still respectful of characters and persons, Dawe strikingly re-enacts the Calvary events in that off-hand, open Australian way we find in unguarded speech. Readers readily identify Dawe's persona as the familiar larrikin. His worker's point of view, with his unpretentious, blue collar origins and his unfazed reactions to the army-enforced work touch a familiar chord with Australian readers. Such familiarity fades as the voice notes how His breaking the predicability on this Day offers a revelation when the ordinary becomes a sacrament. Dawe’s poem does not just borrow from the Bible; a larrikin character dramatises an ironic truth from it.
Our second artefact is Rowe's twenty line poem, The Structure of the Real [9] , that catches one side of a conversation with one Simeon by Jesus’ mother Mary, who is renewing remembrances of "my son, born among the dung." She muses on some key, miraculous events in his life such as Cana (John 2:1-12), the man born blind (John 9), Zaccheus (Luke 19:1), Lazarus (John 11), and the bread and fish (John. 5:1-15). Rowe's theme is that "Sacred irreverence. . . is a gift to those found free in the spirit" (line 11). Thematically, it seems that what really counts in life is mercy, which is the secret for living a happy life. In other words, the structure of reality in its widest sense is mercy, that divine capacity to forgive. This is Mary's wisdom in hindsight; she regrets not having realised it much earlier despite having seen so many miracles "when he set about making contradiction" (line 2).
Rowe couches his ghazal-like [10] poem in couplets of accessible vocabulary. His striking imagery is at times irreverent, e.g., "sauntering round in his shroud" (13) and "expecting stones, a crowd got instead some bread and fish" (15). Scripture may be idealised in liturgy but in Rowe's people's poetry, its central message is directly conveyed. The relatively few couplets that use endline rhyme: "changed his mind/born blind, dazed/amazed, glorias sung/among the dung" tingle and challenge. The poem's tone and voice in Mary’s reminiscence surprises for its realism. Just as pomposity, hype, ambivalence, and prevarication were foreign to Jesus, so the poet eschews any religious props which obscure his central message of compassion. Quite rightly, the poet infers that Christianity is about how to live authentically, not how to behave religiously.
This is not a poem which trivialises the Gospel message but rather sheds new light on its central message. The poet offers a fictionalised dialogue from a privileged point of view with great impact. Rowe's genius is to reveal a very human reality in the voice of Mary. The poem’s brevity belies its gravity. While her own suffering as Our Lady of Dolours is picked out, her humour ("he would test his muscles on the stone"), sense of adventure and faithfulness come through strongly too. This is not some Gothic or Fatima statue talking; this is a feeling, suffering Mother of the Saviour dumbstruck with amazement like his fearful disciples. Thus larrikin poem inverts Sir Philip Sidney’s courtly definition of poetry as “a means of turning the reader’s mind to beauty. . . to tame the passions in a charming rhetoric . . . helping to form virtue and civility” [11] to the more contemporary essential, divesting reality of its shoddy appearances so as to elicit heightened insight about what is authentic. Thus, Rowe’s poem qualifies as an excellent example of the larrikin strain in recent Australian religious poetry.
The third artefact evidences a shift in focus from male thinking to female knowing. To an Australia predominantly Christian in character and history and presumably still aware of Gospel references, Wright's title, Eli, Eli [12] , is readily familiar. The Calvary atmosphere of pathos is immediately evoked in her title, truncated from Matthew 27:46, "Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? that is, My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken me?" The eeriness of the Aramaic language and strangeness of those final hours offers her richly nested settings: physical, allegorical and religious, in which to develop quite a dramatic meditation on the many reversals enacted there that day. From the viewpoint of Christ, Wright explores some key paradoxes of the seeming failure that His death becomes, and the more cosmic dimensions of its meaning. In nineteen lines of free verse, four stanzas of five lines each, with the last of four and with choric repetition of key ideas, Wright's character is given an interior voice of acute hurt and pain: to see them go by drowning in the river- /. . ./ that was his cross, and not the cross they gave him . . . . To hold the invisible wand and not to save them/ . . . / this was the wound, more than the wound they dealt him . . . . To hold out love . . . and faith/ and knew they dared not take it/ . . . betrayed him. This poem succeeds. It challenges readers with the central character's interior anguish, voiced in muted soliloquy. Jesus’ tragedy is presented as being to die and yet see the world both fail to take up the wand of healing and deny their own power to believe and so save themselves. The voice focuses on the central act of salvation and its seeming irrelevance to those for whom it was done: "To hold out . . . all he could give, and there was none to take it" (14). The poem's pathos and paradox rivet home the very real human and theological dimensions of His dying for the salvation of the world. Tragically, the redemption does not reach everyone, not through accident or design but through sheer ignorance, neglect, fear or apathy. The poem has the purpose of eliciting transformative insight.
Wright is a poet speaking to her generation. In Eli, Eli, she decries mindless selfishness in the increasingly secular society to dramatise that selfish disregard which brings superficiality, feigned ignorance, fear and apathy. This Zeitgeist (spirit of her age) piques Wright's finely attuned sense of justice. Her prophetic voice emanates from the naked, emotional honesty of that pre-war period. She here dramatises a Man limited to the time and place of the Cross, and as the Divine Saviour of the World, her Character "watched" powerless, and yet meek, knowing yet All Knowing of their fate. Wright challenges sinners’ dependency. Wright's anthropology suggests that twentieth century humans are masters of their own destiny, that they are not passively saved but must actively save themselves; they must give their fiat too, their appropriated response, [13] so that "they themselves could save them" (line 9).
The poem’s enthymematic argument emerges soon enough, rapidly reducing the figurative scene to the punch line, "he knew there was no river" (19). Rightly, Wright assumes that salvation is not automatic, it is not enough to float along with the current of time or the political or religious status quo but it is necessary both to share a vision and act upon it. The pathos of Eli, Eli demands a personal empathy, an emphatic response to say that any redemption already won has still to be applied in the concrete details of daily life, that that gift demands full personal assent in response. Quite challenged, readers could well feel required to make the kind of passionate, real-politic commitment to righting wrongs that Wright showed though her own life.
These three artefacts offer larrikin perspectives. Quite simply, the three poems explore regret and reminiscence effectively. Like cinematic vignettes exploring readers’ feelings, they affirm authenticity. They are religious and poetic for meeting the criterion that “the essential function of art is moral” [14] in their concern for life and enhancing the capacity to live more truthfully. They eschew religiosity, empty rhetoric, hypocrisy, cant and pomposity by valuing authentic feelings in their down-to-earth diction, striking insights and heightened affectivity. Like Lawson probing supernaturalism in the previous century, they grant a public validity to private feelings. However transcendent the God of formal religion may be portrayed, the larrikin does respect what is deeply felt: "Sacred irreverence . . . is a gift to those found free in the spirit." Dawe validates the disgruntled worker's point of view, Rowe humanises the mother of Jesus, and Wright's Christ aches over all the lost opportunities to share a hard-won Redemption. Larrikin poets venture beyond banalities to ‘have the guts’ to debunk the twaddle: Silenus's frank air of disbelief is an iconic celebration of larrikinism. Such poets respect the dinky-di Aussie reliance on shared experience and mateship as a litmus test for authenticity in public matters and find larrikinism as its test in 'spiritual' ones. They explicate the laconic in the “wordless character of mystery for which Australians . . . have a special affinity.” [15] Certainly, their irreverence is a holy spirit, for it values what is, and debunks what pretends to be.
III.
From this analysis, our discussion can now adumbrate some conclusions about what identifies a poem as ‘religious’. In other words, what is characteristic about mid-century Australian religious poetry? How well does the religious poem link, mesh or fuse the human and the divine? Is its aim entertainment or transformation? We shall suggest that any differences lie in the act of reading and in the limits broached.
Sometimes, poets are rated as ‘religious’ if they use Biblical allusions or embroider the teachings of Scripture. Poetry that offers direct references like heaven-and-earth symmetry or moral aspirations hurries to be christened as ‘religious’ in trying to touch on theological matters. It is a kind of vandal writing because the writer borrows icons, unfairly appropriating booty from one domain to set up a totem for his own agenda. This ‘borrower poet’ peers over theological fences to see what can be acquired for his own purposes; this process is relatively superficial. Reading and writing poetry in this mode is merely a search for conventionally ‘religious’ references. Such poets set themselves up as gatekeepers between art and text, [16] between insight and experience, or meaning and art, by arbitrarily selecting and rejecting, and by renaming, secularising and unfortunately trivialising experiences of otherness or mystery. Reading this poetry is too often merely flags any theological references in passing; its larrikinism is just an irritant in the mainstream.
Alternatively, the poet who like a mesher engages at the teeth of the sacred and the secular domains simultaneously, could be called a ‘religious poet’ for daring to wire together religion and experience at its interfaces with mystery. Such a poet works at sites of intersecting themes and finds significances at the margins, in the cracks between experience and meaning, and might even distil public worth from private experiences and perceptions. This approach attempts a popular metaphysics, or an epiphrastics upon the aphrastic [17] , hitching hindsights to “embarrassed silences” [18] or concepts onto unsayable realities. Such poets extol the mundane as the first domain for finding meaning; they work by scavenging through the rags of theology for fuel to light a beacon of doubtful public significance. This ‘mender poet’ is willing to mesh at the cross-overs, striving to restore some holistic integrity and achieves some degree of liminality, but plastering over disjunctions, he or she is unsure about delivering any authentic synthesis. The mender poet may even strive to repair Cartesian dualities with appeals to medieval syntheses (‘to find Mankind on the mend’), but risks his own auto-da-fé in making interim repairs to well-rusted dichotomies; indeed, this approach achieves only partial conversations. Reading this poetry is merely to unpack bundles of conventional themes with fuses that fire insights on cue; its larrikinism is to subvert by depersonalising and decontextualising authentic experiences.
Thirdly, the image of the ‘insider poet’ may provide us with a richer model of a religious poet. Like a lover, the insider knows the beloved intimately, can warm to her every mood and accommodate her within the perpetual synthesis that is a living vision. The lover poet does not stand at the gate and call but enters into the other’s domain, neither borrowing theological words as possessions nor dishonouring the worth of theological concepts. Respectful of the worth of experience and open to multiple interpretations and layers of meaning, this integrative model of a religious poet does not borrow or fuse but melds the experiences of theological and artistic imagination in procreative language that is fully self conscious and unhampered by categories. As a finished synthesis, an insider’s religious poem permeates, imbues and absorbs experiences, memories and beliefs from multiple perspectives to yield insights and meanings. “Without the modernish shrug of irony,” [19] Wright’s kind of larrikin genuinely does offer meaningful significances about life to startle and refresh readers. The insider’s poem may even risk con-fusions in its multiple ambiguities. Readers of this poetry are not jolted by alien cross-overs to unseen transcendent realities but are refreshingly hypnotised by its fusion of all perspectives, seamlessly moulded into one satisfying artistic creation.
To review our discussion, we have elaborated on three modes of religious poetry, the moral Realist who flags conventional ‘religious’ references, the ‘mender’ Idealist who translates theological themes to repair meaning gaps, and the ‘insider’ Expressionist [20] who creates authentic visions that startle and refresh. In Good Friday Dawe displays the ‘borrower poet’ model. He practises that ‘real liminality’ [21] of larrikinism; he crosses the alien shore but only to construct the moralist’s reading of the ordinary in the data of the senses. His dramatic and colloquial ironies bring a social awareness to the foreground. Then in The Structure of the Real, Rowe as the ‘mender poet’ welds meanings at risk of misrepresenting either religion or life or both. Like an impartial witness, he distils a ‘religious’ theme out of experience with some poise but only intellectually. In the snip and solder of his craft, Rowe parades many Bible references yet segues too cosily to the priestly concept he calls the “structure of the real.” Although his idealisation avoids naive sentimentality, it is not expressing at strong personal emotion either. Mender poets are safe larrikins whose theology is a construction of the mind, aiming to clinch the intellectual argument with a metaphysical concept, but their readers can be left somewhat puzzled at its emotional inconclusiveness and inapplicability. Its liminality to meaning and mystery is only tangential.
Wright shows the ‘insider poet’ model at work; insinuating spiritual perspectives not over, but through the data of experience appropriated in the heart. Her religious truth is not male thinking but a female knowing, with a “truth that strips us naked to the winter’s blow.” [22] It shows that era’s societal shift from Romantic “autonomous, [male] self consciousness to female self imaging,” [23] Her form of larrikinism does not aim to amuse or persuade but burns readers by the intensity of her awareness of life at the social margins. Her expressionism is “an outward release of an internal necessity.” [24] She speaks as a seasoned larrikin: “. . . probably [by] the fact that I had always been what the Irish call ’a quare one’.” [25] Wright’s Eli, Eli is a masterpiece of Australian religious verse, for it achieves a compelling integration of experience and meaning by exploring the mankind’s ironic refusal of potential Salvation. This kind of larrikin poet challenges and seduces ‘from inside’ by virtue of the power and integrity of her spiralling awarenesses in her multiple transformations of experience for a public at many levels of readiness.
IV.
‘Religious’ poetry’s high seriousness could be seen expected to be at odds with the Australian character. But clearly, poetry in the focus era of this study had rejected its Romantic antecedents in the ‘Australian pastoral’ with its emblematic cockatoos, and then the Gothic pastoral [26] with its themes of alienation in a timeless inland, to address the new political and social complexities of an emerging multicultural society. Australian religious poetry was not the mainstream vehicle for its larrikin strain; larrikinism is more obvious in our theatre. But at mid-century, Australian religious poetry was no rara ars either. At the margins of a cultural cringe, it would never serve its high purpose were it to indulge in a ‘carnivalisation’ [27] of itself, that is to say, any selling itself short in shallow popularism to escape any coterie-boundedness. Neither did it take up a satirical position from outside society. Furthermore, it did not emanate from male bohemianism which was usually hostile to religion. [28] Dawe, Rowe and Wright characteristically start with facts not from any self-preoccupations of a narcissistic Romanticism [29] for our culture stems from empiricism. Our religious poetry did not become esoteric either, as characterised by Yeats’ mysticism [30] and cabbalistic religions, [31] and other-worldly as in some local variants of Transcendentalism. [32] Even Henry Lawson’s superstitious supernaturalism [33] does not define its accessible character. It held few elegiacs for Eden. Australian poetry in mid-century featured a down to earth, often ironic reflection upon experience.
Religious verse of this era rejected old images of itself as “a decorative art” to present itself as socially relevant, generating “heightened sincerity” (Richards) [34] Our ‘religious’ poets were not driven by highly singular personal agenda, nor divisive denominational polemics nor the desire for public apologia, but shared a concern for enriching the inclusive commonweal. Thus, Dawe argues convincingly that poets are critics, that although the poet’s first audience is himself as a person facing a circumstance, poets respond to the “prevailing social and political concerns.” [35] Dawe comments that his aim in publishing poetry is that “it helps us to see ourselves and our world more clearly”. [36] Being this-worldly, Australia had inherited Arnold’s discovery that “poetry is a capital substitute for religion.” [37] In our tradition, the poet is not a priest [38] dispensing heavenly wisdom, nor a dentist, “a man with the definite job” [39] , but a critic. [40] Poets of this era helped readers better to come to grips with difficult realities in a volatile society. If they failed to critique the culture in toto, in refuting negation they began to startle and refresh political readers.
How did theology then interface with this culture? What happens at the interface of the poetic arts and the Biblical revelation? Was ‘finding God’ in aesthetic experience satisfying enough? Could the ars humana [41] bring any salvation? The Catholic answer is that each enriches and complements the other, that the arts and theology are in the same continuum. [42] Rahner writes that poetry schools us in preparation for the Divine Word: “Poetry is one way of training oneself to hear the word of life” [43] In fact, “the practice of perceiving the poetic word is a presupposition of hearing the word of God,” [44] and “to be a Christian one must be capable of hearing and understanding the primary words of the heart” [45] Furthermore, the Christian “needs practice to hear such words.” [46] Consequently, “the mature Christian will welcome all really great poetry openly and without embarrassment.” [47] Art and Revelation will always be connected in the continuum of a culture. The spirituality of a nation would become embodied in the political poet-prophet-larrikin: Judith Wright's images have become part of the fabric of our nation. She is the political poet dancing between the mystical experience and the demands of justice. She leads us to shed our too-European eyes to see and not despoil the strange beauty of the Australian landscape. [48] The very idea then of a vibrant, politico-religious perspective, in fact, an Australian religious voice exploring the words of the heart, had indeed been realised.
In review then, poetry’s ‘holy’ spirit offers innovative insights and surprising points of view. Whereas religion strives for personal and social transformation, a metanoia, and theology reflects upon its implications, religious poetry engenders enhanced insights and deeper sincerity and affectivity. Its ‘religiousness’ achieves more immanence than transcendence. It focuses on what Australians experience in situ, and its laconic, black humour contextualises topical dilemmas. In mid-century, Australian religious poetry's characteristic spirit was larrikin humour, sincerity, and refreshment.
This study should postscript how well this mid-century trait has survived. As an artefact of society, religious poetry will necessarily reflect its history. A tension between traditionalists and internationalists continues while Australia comes to terms with the new economic realities. The familiar larrikinism either fades into irony or is kept alive in reconstructions of the past. Les Murray’s journey in this respect is notable. The advent of The Anthology of Australian Religious Verse (1986) and his abiding interest in Aboriginal culture and writing shows that the religious spark has been successfully recontextualised. His easy humour and affinity with rural life and nature do appeal. ”A kind of natural sacramentalism is felt in his poetry’s absorption in country detail.” [49] Dawe finds in Murray’s and Hope’s work “the kind of loving vision on which the best art depends.” [50] Others may see it as head-in-the-sand neo-Romanticism, out of tune with present struggles. Nonetheless, Tulip sadly notes: “There is a disturbing sense that it is very difficult for poetry to make a real connection with Australian culture and society.“ [51] While poets work to avoid being seen as coterie-bound, Murray’s unique amalgam “expresses traditionalism in its preference for realism, meaning and reference.” [52] In him, the larrikin figure in the ocker revolution counters political correctness with traditional home truths.
V. Conclusions
Our investigation has espaliered the key characteristics of the Australian national character, chiefly the larrikin strain and how it is expressed in three artefact-poems typical of mid-century. Analysis and comparison of the content and style of these poems illustrated larrikinism in three different forms. The discussion established that in mid-century, Australian religious poets practised their art in three modes: massaging the data of the senses by salvaging theological references, repairing tensions by meshing constructions of the mind with theological affectivities, and sharing creatively appropriated experience, the truths of the heart, as an holistic reconciliation of tensions. We noted that artefacts of greater worth were recognised by inhabitants of both cultures, the literary and the theological, as revealing refreshing insights that raise affectivity. Such poems of heightened sincerity do inculturate universal, salvational themes.
In conclusion, Australian religious poetry at mid-century met standards of worth, attempted public reconciliation of social tensions, and offered insight, sincerity and refreshment Its larrikinism as the ludic strand in our literature effectively demanded authenticity. Because these Australia’s religious poets typically shared “a metaphysician’s sensibility without a belief in the metaphysical,” [53] Australian religious poetry was comfortably secular, avoiding overt theological discourse, and preferring instead to focus on events (physical, virtual, remembered or fictional) and their significances. It aimed not to be transcendent or sublime or even atheological, but more often explored significances analogically derived from the great theological themes, or as one notable Catholic writer defines it, “shows a sensitivity to that deep level of consciousness where integrity is formed.” [54] . There is no contradiction in observing that larrikinism and irreverence in Australian religious verse is a living holy spirit, for the sincerity and refreshment it brings is as authentic and insightful as any transcendent feeling conventional religion delivers.
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Tulip, J. “Poetry since 1965.” In The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. pp. 475-492. Penguin Australia, 1988.
Wallace-Crabb, C. Toil & Spin: Two directions in modern poetry Hutchinson Australia, 1979.
Wright, J. “Eli, Eli” in Woman to Man Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1949, 1967. Judith Wright Collected Poems 1942-1970. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971.
[1] Defined as “a state of being noisy or disorderly”. [Online] [2001 February 14]. Also John Rickard’s short history of the larrikin, Forgiving the larrikin, includes the following: “Increasingly dissociated from its origins, the larrikin tradition is now up for grabs. In Clem Gorman's description, "the larrikin is almost archly self-conscious, too smart for his or her own good, witty rather than humorous, bending rules and sailing close to the wind, taking the piss out of people, cutting down tall poppies, larger than life, sceptical, iconoclastic, egalitarian yet suffering fools badly, insouciant and, above all, defiant". His collection of larrikins includes "Breaker" Morant, Dawn Fraser, Mary Hardy, Mo, Graham Kennedy, King O'Malley and Mother Mary MacKillop.” in Lovable Larrikins and Awful Ockers in Richard Nile, (ed.) The Australian Legend and its Discontents. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press 2000), p. 302.
[2] Gerard Hall, The Australian Sense of the Sacred? Private manuscript, Australian Catholic University, Mitchelton, Brisbane, 2001, p. 1
[3] Ronald Conway, Land of the Long Weekend (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1980), p. 13.
[4] David Tacey, Re-enchantment -The New Australian Spirituality (Sydney: Harper-Collins, 2000), 2: “For the most part, Australian intellectual culture has remained steadfastly secular, and this has driven a wedge between those who think about 'this' world and long to change it (the social reformers) and those who reflect on the 'other' world and long for redemption.”
[5] Michael Ackland, “Why read Australian poetry?” Southerly 57.1 (1997), 183.
[6] Tony Kelly, A New Imagining: Towards an Australian Spirituality. (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1991), p. 9.
[7] The famous Judith Wright tag, quoted by Tony Cornwall in his obituary, “Australian poet Judith Wright (1915-2000): an appreciation” 31 August 2000. [Online] [2001, March 31], p. 2.
[8] Bruce Dawe. Sometimes Gladness, Collected Poems, 1954-1978. (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1978), p. 192.
[9] Noel Rowe in Vivian Smith (ed.), Australian Poetry 1986 (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1986), 55.
[10] The ghazal is a Persian format of rhyming couplets bringing loose associations in a circle and is seldom used in English; when it is used, the couplets often end up not rhyming. See Angela Bennie “Judith Wright The passion of the poet, and a noble plea for the dead of our land” The Weekend Australian Magazine 20/21 February 1998 p. 9.
[11] H. Coombes, English Literature Made Simple (London: Heinemann, 1977, 1982), p. 38.
[12] Judith Wright, Woman to Man (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1949), 1967 edition p. 26.
[13] Garcia-Rivera The Community, p. 19.
[14] Citing Lawrence, in H. Coombes, English Literature, 44.
[15] Kelly, A New Imagining, p. 14.
[16] A term I borrowed from Brian Castro in “Autobiography” in Morag Fraser (ed.) Seams of Light (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 130.
[17] My spin upon the discussion of Monistic aesthetics in Alejandro Garcia-Rivera The Community of the Beautiful (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1999), p.72.
[18] Tony Kelly, A New Imagining, p. 26.
[19] Chris Wallace-Crabb, Toil & Spin: Two directions in modern poetry (Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1979), p. 122.
[20] Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (Penguin Australia, 1963), p. 160.
[21] Noel Rowe, “Are there really angels in Carlton? Australian Literature and Theology.” Pacifica 6 (June 1993), p.143.
[22] Judith Wright, “Song for Winter.” Judith Wright Collected Poems 1942-1970 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971), p. 93.
[23] Michael Ackland, “Why read Australian poetry?” Southerly 57.1.(1997), 184.
[24] Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art, p. 163.
[25] Cited by Kerryn Goldsworthy in “Landscape of a heart, a review of Half a Lifetime” in The Weekend Australian 21/22 August 1999 p. 11.
[26] Ivor Indyk, “The pastoral poets” in New Literary History of Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin 1988), p. 360.
[27] A term I have appropriated from A. D. Cousins, “Barron Field and the Translation of Romanticism to Colonial Australia” Southerly 58 (4), 169. I intend it to mean ‘opening itself to the public gaze and criticism’, but not ‘opting for less than its worth’, e.g., as one might say in the Calvary carnival of the Cross.
[28] Tony Moore “Australia’s Bohemian Tradition” in Richard Nile (ed.) The Australian Legend and its Discontents (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000), pp. 275, 280.
[29] For one discussion of shades of English Romanticism, Cousins, Field and Romanticism, p. 171.
[30] Adapting doctrines of Sufi teaching that everything worth knowing is already within us, Yeats was “sensitive to the deepest inner resonances of the sound of language” in Josef Sila “Mystical aspect of W.B.Yeats’ poems and life.” Available: Online [2001 March 31] and [Radio National online]
[31] Understanding experience as mere expressions of an ultimate meaning via symbology, numerology, mystic interpretation, occult lore or esoteric doctrine, such as in the nineteenth century Symbolist movement. See entry “Cabala” in Richard Todd Carroll, The Skeptic’s Dictionary. [Online] [2001 March 31]. See also David Brooks, “Feral Symbolists: Adamson and Tranter” Australian Literary Studies 16.3 (May 1994), 280-88.
[32] Transcendentalism strives to find cosmic destiny or organic teleology in ordinary actions. [Online] Available: at ocean.st.usm.edu/~wsimkins/trans.html [2001 March 10]. Emerson’s version stressed primacy of Consciousness, Quietude and Self-reliance: “Every individual is responsible for his own actions” and the primacy of individual intuition: “There can be no peace without but through peace within.” [Online] [2001 March 10], p. 1. He insists on the power of Thought and of Will, and Inspiration: ”The idealist affirms facts not affected by the illusions of sense.” The Transcendentalist Boston January 1842. [Online] [2001 March 23], p. 1. Such conscious individualism or reading True Meaning into Reality is an intellectual accretion inimical to our public secularism and so does not underpin Australian larrikinism.
[33] My term and observation from his short stories intimating ghostly presences in the Bush, e.g., "Water Them Geraniums" p. 173; “The Bush seemed full of ghosts that night-all going my way. . . " in Brighten’s Sister-in-Law in Henry Lawson The Bush Undertaker and Other Stories (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1989), p. 159.
[34] T. S. Eliot citing I.A.Richards in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 1970), p. 131.
[35] Bruce Dawe, “Tributary streams: Some sources of social and political concerns in modern Australian poetry” Australian Literary Studies 15.3 (May, 1992) 102.
[36] Quoted in Barbara Boxhall “Bruce Dawe: an ordinary man for all seasons.” [Online]. [2001 April 25].
[37] Eliot, Use of Poetry, p. 26.
[38] ibid.
[39] ibid.
[40] Eliot, Use of Poetry, p. 29.
[41] Alejandro Garcia-Rivera The Community of the Beautiful (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 16.
[42] Rahner’s transcendental anthropology in Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych (New York: Herder and Herder 1968), passim. Cited in Garcia-Rivera, The Community, p. 78.
[43] Karl Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian” in Theological Investigations IV (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), p. 364
[44] Rahner, Poetry, p. 363.
[45] Rahner, p. 360.
[46] Rahner, p. 359.
[47] Rahner, p. 365.
[48] Gerard Hall, “Judith Wright (1915-2000): Australian poet and prophet” Outlook 22, 9: (November 2000). [Online]. [2001, March 12], p. 2.
[49] James Tulip,. “Poetry since 1965.” In The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. (Penguin Australia, 1988), p. 479.
[50] Dawe, Tributary streams, p. 103.
[51] Tulip, op.cit., p. 478.
[52] Tulip, op.cit., p. 481.
[53] A helpful paradox borrowed from David McCooey, “Poetry as first and last resort” Eureka Street 10.9 (2000), 37.
[54] Tony Kelly, A New Imagining, p. 13.
