Off the Bluebush: Verses for Australians West and East
9781465676702
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
They say that, when Abraham Lincoln had seen Walt Whitman, he summed his impression in the emphatic “This is a man.” That is what one feels in reading the verses of Western Australian writers—“This is a man.” The work of the tribe of pseudonymous writers in Western newspapers—especially Kalgoorlie Sun and Perth Sunday Times—the work of “Bluebush” and “Dryblower,” “Crosscut,” “Prospect Good,” and the rest—is the most virile and the most original poetry that has been made in Australia since the Commonwealth began. “Here’s manhood,” I say, and “Here’s Australian manhood.” For vigour and versatility the East at the moment has few writers to rival this little Western comradeship. The East has more refined writers, more cultivated and more artistic writers; but not more manly writers. Poetry is a man’s work if it performs a man’s deeds. When, on the night of 24th April, 1792, Rouget de l’Isle tramped his lodging-house room “with a head of ice and fire” to compose “The Marseillaise,” how many deeds were his exultant verses worth! How vainly he himself would have fought to achieve the feats of swelling valour to which his art inspired others. In a literary aspect the words are little more than a rant:— “Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!” But this rant, as Carlyle says, when added to the stirring tune, “will make the blood tingle in men’s veins; and whole armies and assemblages will sing it with eyes weeping and burning, with hearts defiant of death, despot, and devil.” The vigorous Western Australian verses that I praise are of that kind and approximate to that standard. They are written in peace, and cannot gain the hottest of mortal ardours, the exultation of war. But if there were [19]Australian war, here are the men to write our marching songs. There is a literature of art, and there is a literature of humanity. The one kind does not exclude the other; the best poetry is human in impulse, artistic in expression. Yet inevitably, as verse is written, there are found writers with a languid pulse whose finest effects are gained by a decorative use of language, and opposed to these are the writers who use the oldest rhymes, the oldest rhythms, to give impetus to the messages of emotion that fly hot from their hearts. This Western Australian poetry is often inartistic; it is often a poor thing considered as literature; but how broadly and strongly it appeals to our humanity! how graphic it is! how humorous or tragic! and how natural! It is written, for the greater part, not from a head to a head, but from a heart to a heart; and in its most effective passages it has the same force of sincerity, the same truth of vision, the same sympathy, that make the old ballads a precious possession, and that have captivated thirty centuries with the stories and descriptions of Homer.
