Remembering Jo

By Tracy

 

Jo with some of her children in the late 1960s...

My mother passed away last night at age 84, so we are all feeling very sad just now, & John has written the poem below in memory of her, because she loved birds (something we all share!) and early this morning a huge flock of galahs and a flock of '28s' (ring-necked parrots) came into Jam Tree Gully -- in fact, the largest flocks we have seen here. The poem below draws on that.

Hardy & animals again

Posted by Tracy. This poem speaks for itself, defamiliarising through point of view.

The Puzzled Game-Birds
(Triolet)
Thomas Hardy

They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young - they cannot be -
These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
They are not those who used to feed us, -
For would they not fair terms concede us?
- If hearts can house such treachery
They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young - they cannot be!

Henry Lawson and me - and the contradictions

By John

The garden has been dormant over the summer, but in the last couple of weeks, I've been turning it over, and today I put in two large beds of broad beans from the seed saved from last winter's crop. Surprisingly, some artichokes I thought had completely died off over summer have come to life again, with some lush, fervent growth. That's always a buzz. As autumn is taking hold, there's a new rush of bird life, ranging from robins, black-faced cuckoo shrikes, through to black-shouldered kites.

Have been working on my introduction to the Penguin Henry Lawson Selected Short Stories. I think that Lawson is a master of the short form, especially the sketch, and I can genuinely relate to his equivocal and ambiguous views of the bush, though I think I have a far more inherent love of the land and the bush than he did. His portrait of bushwomen (of "white settler stock") has been increasingly underrated by critics over the years, but I think it is phenomenal in its admiration and respect as well as insight into how this portraiture does and doesn't segue with the blokesy world of the bush.

However, I am really struggling with his racism, for which there is no excuse. There are occasions when his very brief portraits of non-whites show some empathy, sympathy, or recognition of something outside subalternity; but largely this is not so. I don't really know how in the end one can respect even the most astute writing of place as any more than a surface gesture where this is the case. Especially given he's writing about an Australia that is constructed out of the destruction and dispossession of the traditional owners of the land.

I've also been reading Manning Clark's Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend, and aside from finding it a ridiculously digressive book, I think he gets his readings of Lawson's stories quite wrong at times. He states that Lawson doesn't see the bush itself, that is, its flora and fauna, with a close eye, but there are numerous descriptions that I think contradict this. It is a mistake to think that Lawson's descriptions are generic; rather, they capture the bush-person's interaction with place, producing a different kind of description.

It is easy to admire Lawson's acute sensitivity to "mateship", that even swagmen up-country seemingly wandering without purpose can find moments of deep connection through anecdote, humour or recollection. However, Lawson's vision is ultimately a negative one, in which as he writes more of the country, a darker vision, a loss and lack of purpose overwhelms. Manning Clark is good at recognising this. Still, a figure like Joe Wilson with his poetic spirit and grim determination is always going to be admirable. To one, like myself, who has a shearer for a brother, the anecdotes of the bush that Lawson creates almost as refrains are entirely recognisable and transferable from generation to generation.

My brother says that humour in the shearing shed works as the escape valve on the pressure cooker. For Lawson, for whom humour was so definitive in characterising the ordinary Australian bush-person (white!), it was more than a release, it was an entire world-view, an acceptance of grimness and hardship that ultimately could not be overcome. It had to be cherished because it was the actuality.

Lawson feared that the old ways of the bush would give way to technology, but in many ways they are the same, including the inherited bigotries of the invader/settler culture. Lawson's parents, the feminist and later publisher Louisa Lawson, and the Norwegian prospector Niels (Peter) Larsen, had a notoriously difficult marriage that eventually resulted in their separation, and a kind of split view of the world in their son. The mother's moral rigour, and the father's belief in the outdoor outback world, really do create a tension and a fusion in Lawson.

Working with my five-year-old son in the garden today, it struck me that it is possible for the masculine and feminine comfortably to coexist within the one gender. Timmy likes being a little "bloke" but doesn't see that as excluding his mother or sister. I find this fascinating. Lawson's portrait of women often fuses elements of the masculine and feminine, and it's really in his portrait of sexual relations between men and women that the distance is created. Without consciousness of sexual difference, it is easy for a child of either gender to embody characteristics of both and not create a hierarchy.

I have been keeping Lawson, and my experiences on our block as well as in the district, in mind with my own short-story writing, which is such a slow process for me. As I use "description" so intensely in my poetry, I want to use some other way of seeing place and space in my short fiction. I have much to learn from this apparent "inadequacy" of Lawson's, technically, I think. I have certainly been looking at our place in a different light, having been reading Lawson so closely.

I am looking at description of the land through an empathy with the people "working" it. Of course, I take to this my politics and deconstructive sense of what that land has become through dispossession, so it could never be the same as Lawson.

Interestingly, Lawson came to Western Australia on a couple of occasions, but generally stayed around the city, even camping in East Perth. He also visited Albany, writing for the local newspaper, but loathed it, as he did Perth!

Veganic Gardening Poetics

Time to get the garden going again. It’s hard to believe that it was a high-yielding vegan wonderland only two months ago. It’d been producing for nigh-on ten months and I felt it was time to let the land lie fallow for a while. Over the next couple of weeks I will dig/hoe the weeds in, turn in dry compost, water it to let the weeds emerge then turn them back into the soil after a week or two as green compost. I’ll leave it sit for another week, water, turn it again then plant with “original” organic/veganic seed.

It is an entirely veganic/organic garden, with no animal manures or products, no pesticides or herbicides or artificial fertilisers. The soil is quite acidic, so I do use plenty of wood ash. The wood ash itself comes from our bush stove which we run during winter, burning only storm-felled wood. We do not “harvest” wood that has obviously settled as habitat for insects and animals.

Last summer’s tomato crop (planted late) was still yielding in June! Even the Chinese cabbages were going into late autumn. The frost finishes things off when winter really sets in, but the dramatic seasonal shift brought on by climate change means long late summers and autumns. We also had a sizeable harvest of butternut pumpkins, masses of snow peas through winter, a winter and autumn continual harvest of sugar-snap peas and broad beans, excellent winter broccoli, silverbeet throughout the year, even in the middle of winter, late carrots and beetroot, autumn chillies and capsicum, plus various herbs (exquisite oregano and basil).

I went out to survey the garden beds today — it’s not so hot, reaching only the low 30s. A couple of weeks back it was in the mid-to-high 40s! That’s around and above 120 Fahrenheit. Sears gardens. Anyway, I checked out the ground... dry and dusty with a jungle of wild oats that came up late and were left, obscuring all. Amazing after months of no water that some things that weren’t harvested, because they didn’t finish in time, or weren’t quite up to scratch, still struggle on. Especially cabbages. Lots of dried and split broad-bean pods, spilling beans on to the ground. Will collect those. A bean so sun-affected that it caught my eye, had gone from its regular brown opacity to a transparent redness, like a fierce eye glowing at night.

I took a couple of photos (below) of part of the garden:


When it’s thriving, it attracts a large numbers of birds — all are welcome. They work out insect issues (insects are also welcome), and also naturally fertilise the ground. If it falls there without human intervention, I’m okay with it!

When I am working out there on warm evenings, willie wagtails hang around, and often a pair of red-capped robins. The 28 parrots have eaten most of the seed from the vegetables I left to go to seed. I harvest enough and they get the rest.

The garden area is quite large and spreads along the flat. It will take a lot of work to prepare but it yields enough to feed two or three families daily, once it’s up and running. If I had my way, I would spend my life growing organic vegetables for a community. Maybe down the track! Oh, that garden is the source of many poems. I have a garlic poem from six months ago I haven’t published yet. I include it below. A veganic garden is a poetics.


Planting Garlic During a Dry Winter to Ward Off


Break the corms —
separate cling-wrapped
inner growth, free succulent
cloves, organs that open to dry
winter air. Make happen.

Cloves, curved as half-moons
out from the turntable of roots,
rotating out of the stalk core,
unsteady walking stick,
nervous maypole.

Give of tension, therapy,
cure-all for colds and plague,
torn from the dry cradle,
broken-skinned, into
the earth’s crumbling

encapsulation. Purple-
veined, as if all paper written on
still pulses with life. Ink blood
we read against, white intrusion
of page, of gleam.

An action less
than snapped apart, no more
set adrift, upright from parameter
to tip, mimic-thrust from boldness
to discrete finger up,

pointing. Thrust down, cold
to curve away from straight and narrow,
rupture surface, displace
fate. Attract rain.
Make warmth.

The sun, low, insists
its sweep across the winter dry,
stenographer’s growth,
politicising nurture,
meliorating.


John Kinsella