ARTICLE BY: Vivian Smith

TASMANIAN POETRY

Poetry has been important in Tasmania from the beginnings of white settlement in 1804. The convict and transportation ballads and songs that put the names of Botany Bay and Van Diemen’s Land into popular currency represent one side of the story, the poems published in newspapers in the early years of the colony represent another. Drawing and sketching and the writing of verse were considered to be part of the accomplishments of the educated person, and like the sketch books and albums of the era, colonial poetry tells us a great deal about the feelings and tastes prevailing at the time. Most of the early verse expressed a sense of exile and isolation but it was not long before the observation and depiction of the Tasmanian landscape and its strange, beautiful and rare native flora and fauna started to emerge.

Social satire and political verse first appeared in book form in Pindar Jevenal’s The Van Diemen’s Land Warriors (1827). The personal lyric dominates in John Knox’s Poetic Trifles (1838), Edward Kemp’s A Voice from Tasmania (1846) and Caroline Leakey’s Lyra Australis (1854). The strong sense of British and European connections that is characteristic of these and other colonial volumes does not overshadow the expression of burgeoning local loyalties and affections.

Louisa Anne Meredith (1812- 1895) was the first important professional writer to make Tasmanian landscape and nature her main preoccupation. She published seven books of poems (some written specifically for children) between 1835 and 1891 and these, often illustrated by her own attractive etchings and sketches, are probably the best known works of observation of Tasmanian colonial life and its fauna and flora.

" A Tasmanian Memory" is a narrative about the massacre of natives: " Tasmanian Scenes" depicts various native flowers and plants.

By the 1890’s with the first moves towards Federation, Tasmanian poetry enters a new phase. James Hebblethwaite, Frank Penn- Smith and Helen Power combine in their work wide cultural references with fin de siecle tones of regret and melancholy. Hebblethwaite migrated to Tasmania in 1890 and taught at schools in Hobart and Latrobe. At his death in 1921 he was the incumbent of Woodbridge parish, D’Entrecasteaux Channel. He established a wide reputation for his writing and did more in his period for Tasmanian culture, history and poetry than has been generally realised. Helen Power published in the 1920’s and 1930’s lyrics of exquisite refinement and taste while Norma Davis continued in the early 1940’s a line of natural observation that recalls Anne Meredith.

A Renaissance of Tasmanian poetry was heralded in 1958 by the editors of the Penguin Book of Australian Verse who found in the poetry of Christopher Koch and Vivian Smith a new regionalism, " a feeling of antiquity and silence of aguish winds and empty beaches". Tasmanian poetry also started to become more widely known with the move to Hobart in 1961 of James McAuley (1917 — 76) and the publication in the following year of the first volume of poems by Brisbane born Gwen Harwood (1920 — 95) who had lived in Hobart since 1945. Both writers wrote of Tasmanian scenes and places in their later work.

The literary situation has changed considerably in the last twenty-five years throughout the whole of Australia with the development of the cultural and arts industries. Tasmania now has its own literary Journal Island, its own writers’ festivals which draw national and international as well as local attendance, and various writers’ and readers’ groups and societies spread across the island. It also has a whole flourishing range of new poets who have been settled there for some time, poets of the calibre of Margaret Scott, Tim Thorne, Stephen Edgar, Andrew Sant and Sarah Day, all of whom are now writing at the peak of their powers.

The poetry of Tasmania was collected in the anthology Effects of Light, edited by Margaret Scott and Vivian Smith (Hobart, 1985) and in Along these Lines edited by C.A Cranston, Cornford Press (2000).

The following poem is one of the few short lyrics that attempts to reflect the physical differences of the island from continental Australia and to capture the history and atmosphere of the place, as many knew it during the twentieth century.

TASMANIA

Water colour country. Here the hills
rot like rugs beneath enormous skies
and all day long the shadows of the clouds
stain the paddocks with their running dyes.

In the small valleys and along the coast,
the land untamed between the scattered farms,
deconsecrated churches lose their paint
and failing pubs their fading coats of arms.

Beyond the beach the pine trees creak and moan,
in the long valley poplars in a row,
the hills breathing like a horse’s flank
with grasses combed and clean of the last snow.

Vivian Smith

 




Hobart born Vivian Smith, poet, critic and editor has published more than 20 books, including 6 collections of poetry, critical studies and numerous essays on Australian poetry and poets. He taught French at the University of Tasmanian for 10 years before moving to the English department at the University of Sydney. Recipient of various literary awards including the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, he also received the 1997 Patrick White Literary award.