Music, Poetry and the Natural Environment

The article surveys Australian poets and composers from Barron Field and Henry Handel Richardson to Les Murray, Percy Grainger and Peter Sculthorpe, arguing that the land of Australia challenged the acoustical imagination of European settlers and their descendants and that re-imagining it from within has inspired innovation in musical composition

Silent Heroes

The war has made of Australia - a young community without traditions - a nation ... W.M. Hughes in a foreword to Patrick MacGill, The Diggers, London, 1919. By 1919 this was a received idea which had its source in the first dispatches from Gallipoli. During the war it was developed by newspaper editorials on Australian troops and popular books such as C.J. Dennis\u27s Moods of Ginger Mick (1916); soon afterwards it was given its classic formulation by C.E.W. Bean in The Story of Anzac: The First Phase (1921). Subsequently its significance has been examined by many historians, including Inglis, Serle, Manning Clark, Robson, Horne, Souter and Gammage, and although it has been revised and qualified, it has never been denied. Sixty years or more after the events that inspired it, the idea was re-examined and upheld by W.F. Mandie in almost the same terms as it had been formulated by W.M. Hughes.

The paradise tram

The Paradise tram left from the Boer War monument outside the gates of Government House in Adelaide on the long route through the northeastern suburbs to the foot of Black Hill, where the River Torrens breaks out of its gorge in the Mount Lofty Ranges into the Adelaide Plain. At the terminus the maroon drop-centre trams changed tracks and waited by a stand of gum trees, through which the sun slanted across the blue-stone walls of an early settlement and the newer brick and sandstone facades of double-fronted bungalows with scalloped verandah walls, decorative renderings of stucco or pebble-dash and tapered columns inset with river stones. Among them were gaps for houses yet to be built, where smallholders continued market-gardening on the river silt. This was Paradise

Survival of the jindyworobaks

Rex Ingamells, the Jindyworobaks chief, was a teacher at Unley High School when I went there as a student in 1946. He resigned soon afterwards, leaving his legacy, a Jindyworobaks anthology of Australian verse, ~hich produced in me an aversion to my native muse which was not completely eradicated until I discovered the poetry of Les Murray. Because of it, failed to benefit from the courses in Australian literature given by Brian Elliott at Adelaide university, a loss which I now regret. The fault was all mine; through complacency and compliance with the prevailing fashions in culture, I lost an opportunity available to few people at the time, for whatever might be said for or against the original Jindyworobaks, they must be given credit for insisting on the value and relevance of Australian literature in a world still prone to the cultural cringe, and there could not have been.many schools and universities in the forties and early fifties which tried seriously to develop an appreciation of local culture

Laszlo\u27s Testament

\u27The dominant impulse in the new writing in Australia is now an internationalist one (wrote Michael Wilding in 1975) \u27 ... younger writers are concerned with being writers, with creating verbal artefacts, with relating to other writers, in California and Argentina and Europe and New York and Asia\u27. He expressed a similar view in his editorial of the Australian Stand and developed it in the recent ALS devoted to new writing.\u2