Un-mapping and De-exploration

I have been thinking about Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Visions of Captain Cook' and Philip Mead's 1997 call for a postcolonial reading ('as yet unwritten') of the poem (especially in the context of 'voyager narratives'), and my irregular but committed long-term anti-colonial reading-writing process of trying to un-map and de-explore... to refute colonial narratives in all their forms. This personal undertaking really began with my 'Zimmermann poems' (collected in Poems 1980-1994 — a selection of which are included in the first volume of my Collected Poems due out shortly with UWAP) written in the late 1980s, but which really found its fullest expression in the final version of The Benefaction (1997... and also in the first volume of my Collected Poems), a long poem attempting to undo the deeply disturbing and almost blithe colonial-explorer conquest journals of George Grey. 

In collating some texts in preparation for the next stage of this ongoing task of 'undoing' and 'rereading', I came across this 2017 'poem-text' of mine on William Dampier — an attempt at 'un-mapping' and 'de-exploring'. I will just let it speak for itself (or not... maybe other than noting that the 'a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse' saying is taken from Joseph Ritson, 1793, in primetime English colonialism), but it is another point of reference in a lifelong attempt to challenge and abandon the 'statue' myths of colonialism that still dominate official Australian narratives of 'national identity'... that still inform the 'literary canon', and that are the 'textual' basis for trade, pastoralism, mining, international relations, and the other underpinnings of the business of being 'Australia'....

Un-map De-explore

'Five Visions of Captain Cook' is not an elegy but a monument in poetry to acts of history that are tapped and re-tapped to validate nation, even where the 'explorations' are tangential or geographically distant (all are focussed through the poet's 'settler' entrenchment), whereas Slessor's great poem of time, 'Five Bells', is an elegy in cascading ways — as 'Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells' is caught in the harbour that serves nation (though the ferries ply back and forth and do not join the trade-routing, they are part of the matrix of colonial presence), he is eternally becoming life-death-memory in the flows of the harbour, and, as such, is incorporated into symbol and functionality of colonial argosy... So do we measure between events as the definition of our being 'part' of history even when we are invisible (or erased). The sense of loss is personal, but also a distress in the act of articulation, of making aesthetic the irony of presence (without ever saying so). So, colonial time (and White Australia Policy time... unsaid but never unwritten in any Australian text of the time) vs. modernist shifts in perceptions of time (alienation of auto-biography etc) —there's an incipience in Slessor, but he's still caught in the voyage and its memorialising. His 'absence' is never as clinical as it might seem, as 'Five Bells' always reminds us. 

Though often interpreted otherwise, I think that the 'chronometer' section of 'Five Visions of Captain Cook' is in fact Slessor's most viable challenge to voyager heroism (which is certainly caught up in), if there is any ‘challenge’ being made at all (ultimately, there probably isn’t). The conflation of irony with 'time' interrupts the inevitability of spatialisation of the poem and of the 'enlightenment' narrative itself (which is, ironically, a conservative affirmation of imperial science consuming/conquest motifs), and consequently the visions collapse. Cook’s demeanour and behaviour (‘snored loudest’) reassures his crew/followers/apologists, but his ‘skill’ and bravado also show the limits of irony (Slessor’s... which is mostly affectionate, if wry) — none of those who suffer from Cook’s legacy will ever feel reassured. Of course, Cook is seen through exteriors in an almost comic way at times, but it's more affection than mockery in its ironising of the 'romantic' pseudo-swashbuckling pop-lit escapades of 'seafaring captains' of 'the period'. The emphasis on the superstitious and magical as opposed to Enlightenment science (exemplified by Joseph Banks) is given Eliot-esque play, but nonetheless reinforces the colonial play (almost hi-jinks). Nature (the sea, the 'kraken', the weather) is the force to be reckoned with and maybe ultimately wins out, but this strains against the modernist urges (and urban organisation) of the poem itself as it shifts modes of telling/imparting 'views' of Cook. This seems to me to be at the core of the modernist crisis of cause and effect, of never being able to escape the politics that informs it, however much misdirected or denied.

Apropos of all the above, I doubt there's a more terrifying piece of glib imperial 'disposability' than Slessor's self-reflective (and reflexive):

'So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout,

So men write poems in Australia.'

80 000 plus years' worth?

    John Kinsella