Vivian Smith

This new book of Vivian Smith’s is really quite a surprise. If it were the case of any other poet approaching his eighties you might think of it as rather a grab bag, knocked together out of odds and ends. It is made up of an imaginary biography of ‘Ern Malley’; another set of sonnets, ‘Diary Without Dates' ...

It is now thirty years since James McAuley died, and more has been written about him in that time than about any other Australian poet. Poets are not usually of great biographical importance unless they are also caught up in historical and political events, or are a kind of phenomenon like Byron or Rimbaud. McAuley was not a man of action, but he was associated with a number of events which were significant in Australian development and culture; and a large, some would say inordinate, part of his life and energy went into politics and polemics. He became something of a public figure, and, as he himself recognised, the lives of such figures quickly become public property. Any book about him is bound to be of interest.

There are not many ways, I imagine, in which Vivian Smith puts one in mind of Walt Whitman, but one which occurs to me is that Smith’s successive volumes, at least since Tide Country (1982), have been, like Leaves of Grass (1855), a work in progress, in which previous poems reappear, sometimes in modified form, and new work is added, so that the whole corpus is re-presented in different ways over time. Along the Line is the latest, and welcome, incarnation of Smith’s oeuvre. 

All regions being regions of the mind, ‘Asia’ has had an especially unsettled and unsettling place in Australian thought. Australia has, in part, defined its own ‘occidental’ status with almost hysterical reference to its many ‘oriental’ neighbours. The putative border crisis of recent times, for instance, involved representing (mostly Middle Eastern and Asian) refugees as cashed-up ‘queue jumpers’ and potential terrorists who were ready to swamp our shores.

Asian ‘hordes’ have long been spectres haunting the Australian imagination. We see them in Windchimes, a marvellous anthology of ‘Asia in Australian Poetry’. But all of the usual suspects are present here, too: Asia as feminine and erotic; as terminally superstitious or spiritually enlightened; as a realm of pure aestheticism; as timeless or primitive; and as a region of war and warriors. All of these tropes, like the idea of ‘Asia’ itself (a region that supposedly ranges from China to Turkey), are as factitious as the notion that Asia is even a distinct continent. So far, so Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) made such observations postcolonial clichés. But if we consider the poetry of Australia as it reflects upon the idea of Asia, then we find an exciting literature that both maps and exceeds such tropes.

Mary Gilmore is one of the most acclaimed figures in Australian writing. A cultural icon, she appears in important paintings and sculptures and on postage stamps, not to mention the ten-dollar note. Her biography has been published, her letters collected, and now the first volume of her complete poems, edited by Jennifer Strauss, has appeared in the prestigious Academy Editions of Australian Literature. No other Australian poet except Henry Lawson has received quite the degree of attention that Gilmore has been accorded. Longevity certainly had something to do with her fame: she was a living link between the colonial Australia she was born into and the Australia of the 1960s that saw her passing. Like Lawson’s, her life and work are written into Australian history; and she too is inextricably associated with the legend of the 1890s. She never quite achieved Lawson’s popularity as a writer, but this edition makes it clear that her fame was truly earned, not merely accrued. No literary reputation is ever finally fixed, or immune to criticism, but this book will help us to understand why Gilmore, Australia’s foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century, came to be considered a national treasure.

In his 155-page essay on Australian poetry in The Oxford History of Australian Literature, Vivian Smith modestly makes only one passing reference to his own work, noting that he, with a number of other modern poets, had been influenced by university education.

I have never met Vivian Smith but respect him awfully. The remarkable thing about his editing of this new anthology of Australian poetry is that his own work is not in it. This is unprecedented among recent anthologies, and may of course be a printing error. Even that excellent poet of Buddhist leanings, Robert Gray, was unable to achieve such perfect nirvana some years back in his Younger Australian Poets. I think Vivian Smith could at least have included here his very fine poems ‘The Names’, which appeared in the most recent Mattara Award anthology.