[In the following essay, Krahn explores the techniques that Harpur and Peter Skrzynecki employ to express ownership of the culture and landscape of Australia.]

Notions of place have been central in the cultural self-definition of settler colonies like Australia, since difference in place is the most visible marker distinguishing the colony from the imperial motherland.¹ In Australian literary discourses, place is very much tied up with landscape, presumably as difference in landscape foregrounds the distinguishing difference of place.² Landscape is thus used to emphasise the distinctiveness of Australia, from earliest colonial writings to the present day discourses of nationalism, literature and tourism. As landscape is supposed to define Australia, it is by extension used to define true Australianness. One of the most poignant metaphors of this long-standing belief is A. G. Stephens's “English spectacles”, spectacles that do not allow a true perception of the Australian landscape, and thus need to be replaced by “clear Australian eyes”, which can perceive, and afterwards represent, the land “as it really is”.³ The assumption of an artistic realism which can provide such transparent and unmediated access to reality has long been debunked in literary criticism. Yet the notion that writers immersed in any culture not “native Australian” are hindered from proper perception of the Australian landscape by their cultural baggage is still relatively pervasive in cultural discourses and popular belief. I will make an oblique critique of such assumptions by studying the processes of coming to terms with landscape and place in two writers who are commonly associated with this “alien”, non-Australian cultural baggage, Charles Harpur as a colonial writer, and Peter Skrzynecki as a “migrant” or “multicultural” writer. With this choice I intend to bring together two discourses of Australian literary criticism which have long been kept strictly separate, as if they represented totally different modes of writing and experience.

Paul Carter suggests that both the colonial and the migrant environment share a sense of improvisation, hybridity and tolerance of cultural ambiguities.⁴ This notion provides a theoretical nexus where the works of migrant and colonial writer can be linked. Both Harpur and Skrzynecki are writers of transition and mediation where “alien” and “Australian” experience meet and, according to some critics, “true Australianness” of perception and representation is achieved.⁵ From a biographical point of view, both occupy unexpectedly similar positions vis a vis Australia. Harpur was a currency lad raised to the cultural contradictions of Australian self-definitions springing up amidst an official culture which Judith Wright describes as obsessed with the “cult” of all things English.⁶ Skrzynecki, on the other hand, was the child of Polish migrants who grew up in Australia, Europe being little but a culturally transmitted cherished memory.⁷ I want to focus on the way both writers take imaginary possession of place, making the Australian landscape home. For Harpur, writing the Australian landscape involves confronting an environment which may be familiar from personal experience, yet largely lacks an indigenous cultural mindset in which to approach it, so that the processes of imaginary possession move into the foreground of his endeavour to write consciously Australian poetry. In Skrzynecki's writing, a mental framework for the land is largely already in place, yet needs to be adapted for his specific cultural background. Thus, although both write from rather different positions, there is a shared need to develop a mode of imaginary possession while bearing the ambiguities and uncertainties involved with transforming cultural conceptions of landscape into new and hybrid shapes.

Harpur's mode of imaginary possession of Australia is based on his sense of mission, which blends Wordsworthian notions of the poet as the bard of his people with politically radical Christian progressivism. This combination constitutes a multifaceted and flexible ideology for writing the land. Politically, Harpur embraces contemporary radicalism and republicanism from a Christian point of view, in the venerable tradition of English radicalism which interprets Christianity so as to demand equality and government by popular consent.⁸ It seems to me that this radical political dimension allowed Harpur to create a speaking position for himself, both as a socially somewhat disdained currency lad of convict stock, and for his project of writing Australian poetry in a culture where Australia itself was largely deemed an unfit subject for poetry. Instead of accepting dominant values, Harpur puts himself in an aggressive opposition to the colonial establishment he defines as English, thus creating an Australian speaker as defined by his opposition to England and Englishness. With this stance, Harpur somewhat prefigures the radical nationalism of the 1890s, which relied on a very similar blend of radical politics with an anti-English attitude to create a distinctive Australian identity. Harpur strongly emphasises this Australian distinctiveness, claiming in “A Note on the Australian-born Whites from ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’” that “we are neither English, nor Irish, nor Scotch; but Australians; and our career as a race should be full of boldness and invention, and as little imitative as possible”.⁹ He is equally firm in his belief that Australia should not only be distinct from Britain, but should utilise political opportunities which could never be realised in England. In “The Tree of Liberty” (“A Song for the Future”) Harpur describes Australia as a place of utopian hope, where the “tree of liberty” which was wrecked by greed in the Old World can finally offer its bounties to everybody.¹⁰ Harpur's democratic republican stance thus transfers special significance on Australia while it rejects the order of the Old World; he creates a view of Australia as a New Eden, where the hopes of humanity can finally be fulfilled.

This politically informed re-interpretation of Australia allows a perception and representation of the land itself which focuses on its beauty and promise as well as its distinctiveness. As indicated above, Harpur's vision of Australia is ideologically underpinned by a brand of Christianity which understands humanity as a march towards perfection (neatly blending theology with pre-Darwinian philosophy of progress). This position is set out in detail in “The World and the Soul”, which describes the formation of the earth and creatures on it and their evolution towards the ascension of man.¹¹ Yet as the text itself makes clear, man himself is also bound eternally to struggle with his low and primal instincts in order to better himself.¹² This underlying religious dimension suffuses Harpur's perception of Australia with a metaphysical dimension, as Australia becomes a place of immense spiritual promise and hope. Michael Ackland suggests that Harpur manages to turn around previous colonial notions of Australia as a primal, undifferentiated and potentially threatening wilderness in need of civilisation, and instead makes the land itself the repository of the good;¹³ Harpur's religious ideology therefore allows for a redefinition of Australia as a place where God is present in nature. Of course, finding God in nature is nothing new in the context of European thinking, but a venerable theological tradition revived in this particular shape by Wordsworth and other Romantic poets of nature. Harpur's feat lies in daring to apply this way of seeing to the Australian landscape, which was previously overwhelmingly not defined in such a manner.

Harpur's relatively new view of Australian nature as “a repository of sacred love”¹⁴ dominates the writing of landscape in poems such as “A Coastal View”. This text presents the poetic self alone amidst a savage coastal scenery, watching and contemplating in the manner recently popularised by overseas Romantic nature poetry: “I sit alone / And gaze with a keen wondering happiness / Out o'er the sea”. The speaker feels happy in his isolation in the Australian wilderness—even more, he rejoices in the presumed absence of civilisation which most pre-Romantic writing, English as well as Australian, found rather disconcerting. The speaker describes at length and in extensive detail the landscape around him, and finds delight in its untamed oddity:

The coast how wonderful. Proportions strange
And unimaginable forms, more quaint,
More wild and wayward than were ever dreamt
By a mad architect …

The text continues to compare this coast with all that signifies the archaic, the mysterious and the exotic in contemporary writing such as “pyramidic structures”, “old Assyrian trowels”, “minarets” and “Babylonian vastness”. The speaker seems to consciously employ stereotypes of antipodean monstrosity in the metaphor of the “mad architect”, yet at the same time negates their Otherness as he emphasises his love for and delight in the landscape, and the presence of God in it. The list of Orientalist comparisons suggests the sources of Harpur's fascination with this coast in darker Romantic fantasies by Coleridge and Shelley. Yet whereas English Romantics revelled in such imagery with a self-conscious mixture of attraction and repulsion, Harpur appropriates the antipodean Otherness in its force and curious attraction. In a classic move of post-colonial writing, Harpur turns the exotic into the familiar, as the speaker is shown to be connected to this strange landscape by the force of love:

How nourishing is Nature to the soul
That loves her well! …
[…]
And hence, when thus beloved, not only here
By the great Sea, or amid forests wild,
Or pastures luminous with lakes, is she
A genial Ministress—but everywhere!
Whatever testifies of her is good …

The text's imaginary possession of the land thus rests on what Ackland describes as Harpur's transformation of nature into the “focal point of a sacramental relationship” between God and man.¹⁵ This notion of nature as a place where man communicates with God and with his inner self is itself a highly Wordsworthian approach to nature, which Harpur appropriates for his purpose of writing distinctly Australian poetry. Such a positive and hopeful approach to nature allows Harpur to incorporate even aspects of the Australian experience which previous writers would have thought of as extremely terrifying and inhospitable, such as bush fires and storms. Some critics regard Harpur's perception of something more than wilderness in need of civilisation in the Australian landscape as his greatest achievement in establishing an Australian poetry.¹⁶ Yet this consciously Australian view of the landscape largely relies on notions of nature, religion and poetry Harpur adapted from English Romanticism, thus creating Australian distinctiveness by appropriating and fusing elements from diverse cultural sources.

The processes of imaginary possession in Harpur's poetry are not always purely ideal, but can also suggest a very concrete claim of possession. “The Creek of Four Graves” describes settlers' search for new land, and shows the settlers both mentally and physically in personal harmony and communion with nature. In contrast, Aborigines disrupt this harmony like “Hell's worst fiends”, and brutally slay some of the settlers. Yet one settler manages to escape, and nature itself seems to be on his side, offering him shelter in an overhang of rather feminine metaphorical dimensions. Nature with all her spiritual force here becomes a direct supporter of white colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession. The text also describes a very tangible form of taking possession, the process of naming, as the setting of the narrated events is thereafter known as the Creek of the Four Graves.¹⁷ Furthermore, the graves themselves constitute yet another aspect of claiming possession by burying settlers in the land.¹⁸ J. J. Healy suggests the text ought to be read not simply as a colonialist tale vilifying Aborigines while celebrating settlement, but rather as a reflection of man's eternal strife against man.¹⁹ While this seems to me a reasonable interpretation of the poem's metaphysical concern, the poem exemplifies the profound ethical problem of all imaginary possession of the land. Imaginary possession of Australia can never be entirely innocent, as it is part of the colonial enterprise of actually claiming the land in a physical way, and by these means dispossessing its original owners. “The Creek of the Four Graves” shows the complex entanglement of Harpur's writing with colonial discourses of the time; Ackland suggests that Harpur's writings hover between writing against earlier discourses by re-evaluating Australian nature, and actively supporting discourses of colonial possession.²⁰

I want now to suggest a reading of Peter Skrzynecki's approach to landscape in an attempt to show some of the potential links between colonial and migrant intellectual environments. Not only does Harpur's culturally hybrid way of creating a distinctly Australian poetry survive in “migrant” writing in general, but Harpur's particular mode of approaching nature as a signifier for a metaphysical beyond is a strategy which more than a hundred years later can still be used successfully in Australian nature poetry. Like Harpur, Skrzynecki excels in precise and personal descriptions of Australian nature which ultimately derive their force and justification from viewing nature as a place of spiritual meaning.²¹ Poems like “Anvil Rock”²² and “A Walk at ‘Edge’”²³ approach nature as a place of special significance for the self, a place which ultimately points even beyond the self into some metaphysical realm. The speaker of the poems is situated in the Australian landscape which he searches, with varying success, for insights of a personal and general nature, in “Anvil Rock” literally trying to read hidden meanings from the rockface. “Anvil Rock”, similar in theme to Harpur's “A Coastal View”, focuses on the rock “shaped by centuries of wind and seaspray / it stands on a platform ledge / below the headland like an ancient signpost”. Unlike Harpur's poem, the text describes nothing strange or wild in the scenery, maybe since today various cultural frameworks are available which allow appreciation of Australian nature without emphasis on its antipodean unruliness. Yet like Harpur, Skrzynecki approaches nature as a signifier for something else, describing the rocks as literally pointing beyond the world of sensory perception: “fixed in the earth like a compass / that points to a direction / somewhere between the sea and sky”.²⁴ This vaguely Romantic idea of nature as a repository of personal and supernatural truth persists in much of Skrzynecki's poetry. Although many of the more exuberant claims and hopes of Romanticism have fallen away, nature can still thus be appropriated by defining it Romantically, as a place where personal and metaphysical insights can be gleaned by the solitary and reflective poetic self.²⁵

As in some of Harpur's texts, the processes of imaginary possession for Skrzynecki also encompass the writing of history. Glenda Sluga points out that Skrzynecki writes the “suppressed” history of migration which has not yet made its way into the annals of official Australian history, thus creating place and identity for the migrant experience in poems like “Old Hostel Site”.²⁶ Yet “Old Hostel Site” also suggests a profound ambiguity towards writing such a history. While the text creates and asserts identity in the way suggested by Sluga, it also subverts the distinctness of the migrants' identity by the direct intervention of nature itself, as nature seems to take over both place and the speaker's mind:

Where a wagtail breaks into song—
Barking dogs
Rip
At Air
And the illusions
Of rediscovery I brought along.

Nature's intervention in history becomes even clearer in “Shortcut through Rookwood Cemetery.”²⁷ At the significant site of the grave of previous migrants, who made the land their own by the ultimate act of being buried in it, the speaker declares:

Nearly every month, I've stopped
To read the names,
Some like mine, others more harsh,
Grouped together
Like an electoral roll
That's never to be changed:
The Z and Y of a foreign heritage
That finally surrenders
To a landscape's claim.

Nature itself erases the differences of culture here, such as the difference of “new” and “old” Australian signified by names on the gravestones. It also appears to turn the process of imaginary possession around, as nature herself claims the people instead of people claiming the land. The Romantic notion of the landscape as a spiritual force allows the speaker to present nature as finally overriding cultural differences, uniting Australians of all cultural backgrounds as one; the migrant problem of making the alien land home can be neatly overcome by such a philosophy which assigns nature an active role in the process of making the new land one's own.

Nevertheless, Skrzynecki's use of Romantic approaches to nature is not naively anachronistic, but reflects the different circumstances of contemporary life. Instead of Harpur's hopeful and utopian look into the future, Skrzynecki's view is more resigned and directed towards the past, for instance in the emphasis in “Anvil Rock”²⁸ on nature's antiquity. In “A Walk at ‘Edge’”, the speaker recounts an excursion into landscape where the search for meaning in nature is frustrated—the land remains silent:

[…]
each braved the assault of winds
in a silence that was as withdrawn
as the earth that our fingers traced over—
that found lines of stone as rusty as sediments
in a river that human hands
had never disturbed and only petals
had stained the colour of a swallow's throat.
There was no answer to what
we searched for, no handful of knowledge
to bring back through an assembly
of awkwardly gesturing branches,
no souvenir to retrieve on a later occasion.(29)

Yet in a truly postmodern manner, nature's silence does not stop the speaker from repeating the gesture of expecting nature to provide entrance to some beyond, as “another heath beckoned / from the northern green horizon”. As in “Anvil Rock”, the Romantic attraction of nature is not so much the actual access to the deeper truths Harpur enjoyed, but the simple promise of a beyond—the speaker's inability to attain what is promised des not keep him from seeking it further. Although contemporary modes of thought seem to have reduced humanity's access to deeper truths in nature, the very act of seeking these truths still seems worthwhile repeating, even if there is little hope of fulfilment—while the search itself enables the speaker to make the land home.

Overall, I would suggest that both Harpur and Skrzynecki rely on a somewhat similar strategy of imaginary possession which is essentially derived from English Romanticism. Faced with landscapes for which both need to create a new cultural framework, they succeed in this task by interpreting the land both as an extension of the self and as a signifier of supernatural meaning. This particular poetic strategy allows both to create very detailed and often very loving poetic representations of Australian landscapes. Both writers also paradoxically emphasise the writing of a distinctly Australian landscape and poetry by adapting foreign literary modes. There is nothing surprising about this, as despite their many differences, both colonial and migrant writers' creativity is almost inevitably based on utilising and exploiting cultural ambiguity. Far from blurring the perception of Australia, I would argue that such “English” or generally “foreign” spectacles may not be a liability but an asset, providing cultural opportunities and insights as uniquely Australian in their particular hybridity as the “clear Australian eyes” of the native born.

Notes

1. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 213.

2. Kevin Magarey, “Place, Landscape, Saussure, Region and Two Australian Colonial Poets”, in P. R. Eaden and F. H. Mares (eds.) Mapped but not Known: The Australian Landscape of the Imagination (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986), p. 106.

3. John Barnes, “‘Through Clear Australian Eyes’: Landscape and Identity in Australian Writing”, in P. R. Eaden and F. H. Mares (eds.), p. 86.

4. Paul Carter, “Lines of Communication: Meaning in the Migrant Environment”, in Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley (eds.) Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992), p. 9.

5. Judith Wright, Charles Harpur (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1963), p. 30; Michael Griffith, “Peter Skrzynecki: ‘the revelation of a Landfall beyond any known map,’” Southerly, 54, 1994, pp. 119-128.

6. Judith Wright, p. 7.

7. Peter Skrzynecki, “Paradox of the empty socks (or Slowing down to hurry up)”, in Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley (eds.), pp. 52-54.

8. Michael Ackland, That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994), p. 42.

9. Michael Ackland (ed.), Charles Harpur: Selected Poetry and Prose, (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986), p. 21.

10. Ibid., p. 21.

11. Ibid., p. 103.

12. As I am not entirely sure whether Harpur means “men” or “men and women” in his writings about “mankind”, I deem it cautious to accept his gender specific form without changing it to the more inclusive forms popular today.

13. Michael Ackland, That Shining Band, pp. 43.

14. Ibid., p. 47.

15. Ibid., p. 77.

16. Judith Wright, p. 30; see also Adrian Mitchell, “Writing up a Storm: Natural Strife and Charles Harpur”, Southerly, 53, 1993, pp. 90-113.

17. For the significance of naming see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber, 1987).

18. Elizabeth Webby, “The Grave in the Bush”, in Dennis Haskell (ed.) Tilting at Matilda: Literature, Aborigines, Women and the Church in Contemporary Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994), pp. 30-38.

19. J. J. Healy, Literature and the Aborigine in Australia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978), p. 96.

20. Michael Ackland, That Shining Band, p. 20.

21. Michael Ackland (ed.), Charles Harpur: Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 44.

22. Michael Griffith, p. 19.

23. Peter Skrzynecki, Easter Sunday (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1993), p. 33.

24. Ibid., p. 118.

25. Ibid., p. 33.

26. For such a reading of Skrzynecki's poetry, see Michael Griffith, p. 125.

27. Glenda Sluga, “Dis/Placed”, Meanjin, 48, 1989, pp. 153-60; Peter Skrzynecki, The Aviary (Sydney: Edwards and Shaw, 1978), p. 10.

28. The Aviary, p. 48.

29. Easter Sunday, p. 118.