[In the following excerpt, Lever stresses the public and social role of nineteenth-century poetry by Australian women, noting a general preoccupation with nation-building rather than introspection.]

In the epilogue to her Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, Germaine Greer reproaches those women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who fell prey to the romantic demand to expose their female suffering in poetry.¹ These women—from “L.E.L.” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Anna Wickham and Sylvia Plath—are reprimanded for their narcissism and for their choice of a confessional, “self-cannibalising” art over life.

Whether or not she has been influenced by her Australian upbringing, Greer's comments throw light on a quite opposite feature of Australian women's poetry. While “L.E.L.” was inventing Byronic fancies in the 1830s, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) was attempting to approximate the songs of Australian Aborigines in verse; while Elizabeth Barrett Browning was dying in Florence, Caroline Carleton (1820-1874) was celebrating Australian flowers; while Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (called “perverse” by Greer) was being acclaimed in London, “Australie” (Ethel Manning, 1845-1877) was writing verse dramas about the trials of early immigrants to Australia. And the difference can be traced into the twentieth century where Australian women poets represent a robust, outward-looking tradition in contrast to the confessional mode which culminates in the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Australian women's poetry does not offer a tradition of intimate, introspective, private poetry or, indeed, until quite recently, anything which might approximate to the inwardness associated with féminine écriture. The dominant mode of their poetry, over 150 years, has been of engagement with public and social issues, and there is hardly a suicide among them. Anna Wickham (1884-1947) stands as the exception to the rule; Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn claimed her for Australia in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, and I included her in my Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse.² Greer declares that “Nowadays her free rhythms seem no rhythms at all; the clumsy rhymes seem to lead her thought by the nose; much of her writing is not shocking, but embarrassing” (p. 415). This might lead us to question Wickham's Australian credentials; she was after all only a resident from the ages of 11 to 20. But then, her first pseudonym was “John Oland” after Jenolan Caves, and her final one was taken from a prominent Brisbane Street. Wickham's poetry is quirky and personal compared to the rather more public-spirited work of her Australian contemporaries. Her poem, “The Marriage”, for example, presents an energetic, free-form depiction of the struggle of two lovers which (far from embarrassing) is exhilarating by comparison with the more careful writing of Nettie Palmer, Dorothea Mackellar, or Ethel Anderson.

What can we conclude from these generalisations about the poetry by women favoured by the main opinion-makers in London or New York, and that written by women in a small colony becoming a nation on the other side of the world? One speculation might be that Australia has been a little behind poetic fashions in the cultural centres of English language. Charles Harpur, one of the first significant Australian men poets, for example, modelled his writing on Wordsworthian ideas about the natural language of men—though he was writing a generation later. He was familiar with the poetry of Tennyson, but preferred those elements of English poetry which contributed to his own project—a determinedly Republican one. One of the recurring features of colonial writing is that writers often strike out in different directions to their cosmopolitan contemporaries, though they may be working from similar traditions. This may mean that the colonial writer appears eccentric in terms of a retrospective identification of a “mainstream”.

Like Harpur, the women who wrote poetry in Australia in the early part of the nineteenth century saw themselves as having a nation-building task. So, in 1838 Eliza Hamilton Dunlop plunged into the controversy about the Myall Creek massacre of Aborigines by publishing her imagined lament of an Aboriginal woman only a few days before seven of the convicted murderers were hanged. That this poem reads more like a Highland lullaby than any kind of approximation to a native song cannot detract from its public statement of the role of the woman poet in a new land—to provide a moral and civilising dimension to a rough and barbarous society. Some of Dunlop's later imaginings of the Aboriginal experience were set to music by Isaac Nathan, Australia's first serious composer, and whatever their weaknesses in the harsh light of retrospective criticism, they offer a firm political statement about the place of poetry as the preserver of humane values. Fidelia Hill (1790-1854), too, wrote her poetry with a sense of public gravity—as Morag Fraser has commented, she addresses her themes “like a Town Hall audience”.³ Hill is “the first white lady that ever entered Adelaide” and her “Recollections” enacts the meaning of that phrase—the white lady brings civilisation, art and, in this case, sensibility to a new Colony. In these poets, sensibility takes its place as part of a womanly concern for humane values, for justice, or for beauty as in Hill's rapturous response to the mountains ringing the new city. But they are foremost poets of sense, making their contribution to the new society by demonstrating the civilised and civilising arts.

By the later part of the nineteenth century, the more popular tradition of the bush ballad, with its folk song ancestry, was becoming part of an identification with the new country. Adam Lindsay Gordon's galloping rhymes were popular not only within the colony but throughout the Empire—hence the singular honour for an Australian poet of a place in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. While Lawson and Paterson, or Barcroft Boake, are usually cited as the pre-eminent practitioners of the bush ballad, there were some women participants in this activity. Mary Hannay Foott's “Where the Pelican Builds its Nest” became one of the most famous—a recital piece for generations of children. (Boake hung himself with his stockwhip, Gordon shot himself. Alcoholism affected Henry Kendall, Henry Lawson and Christopher Brennan. In Australia, it has been the men poets who succumb to self-immolation.)

The bush ballad has been promoted as the distinctive voice of Australia, with a literary ballad form being consciously built by poets such as Paterson on the basis of folk songs brought and adapted to the new land by convicts. Indeed, the popular nationalism of the 1890s has overshadowed the tradition of more philosophical and speculative verse, particularly by women. There has been a lot of discussion of the way in which the prolific Australian women novelists of the late century—Rosa Praed, Ada Cambridge (1844-1926) and Jessie Couvreur—have been neglected because of the determination to find a distinctive literature of the Australian bush. But Cambridge's poetry—which certainly is intellectually strong—has suffered greater neglect than her novels. She wrote no bush ballad, no lyric poem celebrating Australian flora, no historical saga about Australian pioneers, but she wrote many sonnets about social justice, and long dramatic poems about the evils of marriage without love or the hypocrisy of the Church. It is through her poetry that Cambridge most obviously participates in the social concerns of her generation. While Lawson wrote about “The Faces in the Street”, Cambridge wrote about the prostitution of women in marriage. Her poetry is overtly feminist and it elevates sexual love over social custom. Her “The Physical Conscience”, for example, claims that love between husband and wife is ultimately a physical bond not guaranteed by legal or religious ties. This seems immensely more sophisticated and dramatic material than Lawson's “Andy's Gone With Cattle”, but, at the same time, it is difficult to imagine any respectable young lady reciting it at a soiree, or a family gathering: Cambridge refers to the “conscience of the body” which “still speaks in voice and face, / In cold lips stiffened to the loveless kiss, / In shamed limbs shrinking from unloved embrace”.

Catherine Martin also attempted to use poetry as a means of meditation on the great questions of faith. Yet none of the poetry of these two women could be called intimate or confessional in any way. Cambridge discusses sexual politics through a public dramatic voice; Martin's meditations turn over public issues about religious doubt. Indeed, Martin's most ambitious poem, “The Explorers”, improvises on the subject of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition of 1861, and belongs to that strand of poetry which aims to render the pioneering experience into foundation legends for the nation.

As Michael Ackland reports, in 1871 Henry Kendall characterised “the accents” of women's verse as having “on the whole, less acuteness, less force, less passion, than those called forth by the masculine spirit, they have on the other hand, more grace, more symmetry, more sweetness”.⁴ In his novel, Such is Life (1903), Joseph Furphy has his narrator answer the question “What is the mark of a woman's work?” with “Sincerity … as a rule, men's poetry is superior to women's, not only in vigour, but in grace … But in the quality of sincerity, woman is a good first”.⁵ Such were the prejudices of the later nineteenth century. Behind such ideas rests a concern for the proper sphere of women. Kendall seems to be describing an ideal female body, rather than a writing style; Furphy's “sincerity” suggests that women have less art than men—but his most sustained criticism of women writers is that their admirable domestic and personal concerns make them insufficiently attentive to public politics.

Such stereotypes must have been challenged by the several passionate socialist women poets emerging in Australia towards the end of the century. Louisa Lawson, Mary Gilmore, Marie Pitt, and “Sydney Partrige” were all committed to the socialist cause, and their poetry was part of a range of activities, including journalism in the socialist or, in Lawson's case, a feminist press. Marie Pitt publicly challenged the view of her lover, Bernard O'Dowd, that hate should be excluded from militant poetry; “I hold that hate has also its legitimate place and no human instrument is perfectly strung without its harsher chords … without the capacity to hate and to sing of hate, the power to love, the song love would be a lesser thing than it is”.⁶

In view of such a statement, one might expect Pitt's poetry to take up what is always called in women a “strident” propaganda position. And, indeed, she did write rousing ballads protesting against the oppression of workers, such as “The Keening”, which represents the cry of women and children against the destruction of their men's health in mines. Nevertheless, Pitt also wrote beautiful nature lyrics such as “Autumn in Tasmania”, and galloping ballads worthy of Banjo Paterson. Yet, Pitt—like Martin or even Cambridge—was not prolific, and, despite Ackland's conviction that women poets found publication more difficult, perhaps the sheer range of commitments of most of these women saved them from the alcoholic or suicidal fates of the men who tried to live as professional poets.

Indeed, research for the Oxford anthology suggests that most worthwhile poems by women published in journals and newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually found their way into books. The difficulties facing women poets may well have lain not so much in the publishing world as in the domestic circumstances which limited their opportunities for writing. As well, women often seem impatient with the transcendent claims of “high” poetry, preferring to write poems which directly address immediate social contexts. …

Notes

1. Germaine Greer, Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1995).

2. Susan Hampton & Kate Llewellyn (Eds) The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986); Susan Lever (Ed.) The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995).

3. Morag Fraser, “Poetry of Grand Affirmation”, Australian Book Review, December 1995/January 1996, pp. 48-49.

4. Michael Ackland, That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994) p. 18.

5. Joseph Furphy, Such is Life (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 256.

6. Colleen Burke, Doherty's Corner: The Life and Work of Poet Marie E.J. Pitt (North Ryde: Sirius/Angus & Robertson, 1985) p. 41.