Oak Park Reserve and Gnamma Holes

By Tracy

Yesterday we went for the first time to a place called Oak Park Reserve, just out of Goomalling.

It was late in the day but we still managed to walk around one loop of the track, which runs through a section of the reserve full of flat rock and sheoak, and leads past an area with gnamma holes. These are water-collecting holes in the rock, sometimes very deep, made or modified by Aboriginal people (in this area, Balardong-Nyungar). They occur in other parts of Western Australia too.

Because it was getting dark and shadowy I couldn't easily get a photo of the gnamma hole we saw, but I did take a snap of one of the flat granites.

Where the track begins you can also see grooves in the rock which the signs say were where Nyungar people sharpened spear and axe-heads, among other things.

Around the reserve are big lakes which are now completely salt. It's a bit like arriving at Lake Taarblin further south: utter devastation.

Dead trees in a waterless expanse. The mind tries to reconstruct how it must once have looked. Farmland surrounding Oak Park is so saline and bare that it misled us, as we travelled, into thinking we must have overshot the designated "picnic area", but this was it.
(Above: Lake Taarblin, south of Wickepin)
(Below: Edge of salt lake at Oak Park Reserve)


We saw only a small part of the reserve, and hope to go back again and learn more about the area, especially its significance to Nyungar people (which must be ongoing) within the context of respect and sensitivity for that significance.

Pink Flowering Gum

By Tracy

Here's a photo John took in our back garden today.























And here's a poem from me...

Pink Flowering Gum

This frustration at imprecision
I must refuse, using only the general name,
could search and press for taxonomic clarity: yes
to this feature, no to that, and whittle
back to Latin exactitude but what
would it prove, only restate an apparent
lack of purchase on the world

how can you be a poet
and not know that?

said as I wandered a coastal heath
long ago in youth, lost in the vast
profusion of instances
just as today I hover bee-light, birdlike
around this mass, a bursting presence
outside language in which all states
make themselves felt at once, from newgreen nub
through slick huddle of thread like wet feathers at
egg-chink on to this pink, each flung fist or flourish that rings
its single stigma frail as snail horn that would wince
should I presume to touch.

Poets and “their" Words?

By John

Another fine day in the central wheatbelt. Winter. Further north, farmers are direct-drilling into dust. Hoping the rains will come. Wrote a piece on drought today. Thinking about land and ownership, I came across an incredible poem by Norman Cameron, entitled “The Invader”. The last stanza goes:

Invader-outcast of all lands,
He lives condemned to gorge and crave,
To foul his feast with his own hands:
At once the oppressor and the slave.

Born in 1905, Cameron was a propagandist for the British military during the Second World War. Prior to and after the war he worked in advertising and this poem is (ironically to me) so effective because of the neat lines that accumulate, compile, like advertising slogans. What I like about it is its universality: could equally apply to the British and others invading Terra Australis and dispossessing the indigenous peoples, or to an invasion in, say, wartime Europe. There’s also the resistance of the invaded, that no matter how hard the invader tries, they can’t access the identity, the spirit of those robbed. This brings to mind issues of hybridity and, I admit a little obscurely, copyright.

As an anarchist, I see copyright as a defensive reaction of the State. To own and control words, no matter whose those words are, is to control reception and usage. As a writer, I make my living in part, and sometimes entirely, from selling my words. This is complicit with the state and capitalism in a variety of ways, though one always argues that it’s better than other ways of feeding the State-capitalist system. I guess, depending on what your words are intending to do, and what they are actually doing (impossible to say, really). In terms of “umbrella” anarchism, you can turn this process against the capitalist State – writing against it, and at the same time managing to feed yourself and your dependants. It becomes a subversion of the means of production. As I said to a correspondent today, referring to a portal where people might access poetry free unless they wish to download it for anthologising, academic and similar purposes:

“i am not one for copyright as an absolute (or as such), but i am one for poets making a living! so, on that level, i think it's very positive that poets get some reward for their efforts. textual piracy doesn't bother me, but i do like the idea of poets being fed!! ... i particularly like the fact that people can access free - then, if they wish to profit from the work, the poet gets something back - that seems ethical to me.“

Intellectual property seems like another way of staking claims when all the land has been stolen, “used up”, staked and demarcated. But in the end, what’s being discussed in the case referred to above is the issue of “work”. For me, work not property is the vital variable. Work doesn’t mean one should have more rights than any other to something (an object, a space, an idea), but that appreciation and respect should be given for that work. “Work” is not merely labour in the obvious sense; it is not only value-adding, sustaining at best and fetishising at worst, but a sense of belonging and participation. This can be cultural work. This can be spiritual work. It can be preparing the meal, or growing food, or seeking to “protect” a piece of vulnerable bushland against the profiteers of the capitalist State, or of the State in general (communist states are just hyper-controlled and cartelled versions of capitalist states — the corporation is the Party, rather than the oligarchy of business interests).

Which brings me to think of land owners in the nineteenth century around here. One prominent family, the Slades, owned a property known as Glen Avon out near Toodyay on the Avon River. We often drive out that way, and visit a small church off an elbow of the river where the Slades are buried. I have written a number of poems about the place. The Slades interest me, as they were the parents of a very great Western Australian poet, Elizabeth Deborah Brockman (for some of her poems, see this online anthology I edited). There is an essay on Brockman’s poetry and life in my book that’s launched next week — Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language. I have been fascinated by Brockman's slim oeuvre for many years and would go so far as to say that she is one of the greatest poets in English of the nineteenth century. She is basically unknown, even in Western Australia.

For the last few years I have been preparing a book of Deborah Brockman’s work (I am told by a family member met at a literary function in Perth that she preferred to be called just “Deborah”, and not Elizabeth Deborah), with help from my mother Wendy Kinsella, and more help to come from Tracy. It’s a major task. I feel there are many undiscovered poems, and trying to track them is not easy. Almost everything we have of hers is from her book of poems published posthumously by her uncle in Scotland, Poems (1915). Those poems were collated from Western Australian newspapers and journals, especially the Church of England Magazine. What makes it more complex is that Brockman often published under the name “E”, and quite a number of poets did just that throughout the colonies. I believe some of the pseudonymous poems carried by other colonial newspapers in Australia may have been her work. I know she corresponded at least once with Henry Kendall, and swapped poems. Anyway, Tracy is going to do a few days' research soon in various archives and hopefully we can unearth a few more pieces to include in the book.

Patricia Highsmith and metaphoric plagiarism

By Tracy

Given John's entry on Philip K. Dick, I thought I'd post a little about my own favourite (supposed) genre writer, who isn't "merely" a genre writer at all, or is only in the best sense... who is perhaps to the so-called suspense novel as Dick is to the science fiction book? (No offence intended to those who write straight genre.)

There's lots you could say about Patricia Highsmith. The Norton site on her includes a sample short story from her astonishing and disturbing collection, Little Tales of Misogyny. It's actually one of the best tales in that collection.

But what follows here is just fragmentary musing on one aspect that crops up again and again in her oeuvre.

There's a paranoia about imitation expressed throughout her novels and short stories, often taking the form of the double, the murderer and his victim, or an uncomfortably close relationship between two men.

(Less a fear of being a plagiarist, than the fear of being plagiarised, being copied?)

In the Ripley novels, I'm thinking of how this motif applies to Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, right down to Tom assuming Dickie's identity – which is done not only by imitating his look, but by forging his signature; also imitating the style of his letters – this is imitation rather than plagiarism, but has features in common with it. There are also forged artworks from second novel on. And there's a would-be imitator in The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

Or Walter shadowing Melchior Kimmel in The Blunderer, almost coveting (but unable to commit) the other man's crime. Their convergence is devastating.

There's a double of the protagonist in Highsmith's short story “The Second Cigarette” (published first in French), which, as an aside, bears some similarities to contemporary novella Cosmétique de l’ennemi by darling of French-language lit, the Belgian Amélie Nothomb… I am not suggesting she got the idea from Highsmith, but the two works are in some ways strangely (uncannily?) alike.

I want to write an entry on Nothomb another time -- that's a whole other universe.

Back to Highsmith, who wrote, in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp140-141:

“… I am not interested in seeing how another writer handled a difficult theme successfully, because I cannot keep his or her example in my mind when I am faced with my typewriter and my own problem. I read Graham Greene’s novels for pleasure, but I do not ever think of imitating him or even of being guided by him – except that I would like to have his talent for le mot juste, a gift that can be admired in Flaubert too. And given this laziness about studying my own field, it is easy to rationalize and excuse it by telling myself I believe I run a danger of copying if I read other people’s suspense books. I don’t really believe this. There is no enthusiasm in copying, and without enthusiasm, one can’t write a decent book.”

I know what she means. But given how much enthusiasm for copying her characters show, is this a less-than-honest disavowal? Does it reflect a Bloomian anxiety of influence she seeks to deny?

More on that another time maybe.

In Highsmith's story, “A Dangerous Hobby”, the thief/murderer cannot make himself authentic as himself – tries to turn himself in but is not believed, because no one can authenticate his confession – he is not even remembered by the woman he burgled, and she in turn is the only one of his victims he can remember the name of…

Fear of dissolution of boundaries with others?

Plagiarism is taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. It may mean simply the idea or shape of an idea – it may mean lifting, verbatim, what someone else has written, cobbling it together (Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le noir is a walking plagiarism, quotes Rousseau to seduce his mistresses who think it is Julien's own speech, quotes whole chunks of Latin text to impress people etc).

The problem of originality: thinking of Bloom again, and those who have investigated his ideas bearing in mind the peculiar position of the woman writer. Highsmith often seemed not to see herself quite as a woman. It's a tangled area I am going to spend more time thinking through.

What I'm reading...

By Tracy

Not much else is happening, because poor Tim is still sick, and we're a bit housebound. We'd hoped to take him to the Model Railway Show over this long weekend, as we've been twice in past years, but even without the tonsillitis, Perth's weather would be a bit daunting: around 40mm of rain in a day -- we spent most of the day on edge checking the radar to be prepared if it hit up here in the wheatbelt, but nothing doing. (Not that I'm complaining -- I am no fan of storms.)

So we still have light to read by (apparently 20,000 homes across Perth lost power today, though most had it restored), and this is what I've been dipping into:

The new (very new, just launched on Thursday night) anthology from the Fellowship of Australian Writers' WA branch, Lines in the sand: new writing from Western Australia, edited by Glen Phillips and Julienne Van Loon. There are too many highlights to list here, but they start from the very first piece, Liz Byrski's unforgettable "The Man Who Wasn't There", about those who returned facially disfigured from WWII and the way in which they were treated -- in all senses, medically, socially and emotionally -- in the town of East Grinstead, Sussex, which was also the town of Liz Byrski's childhood, so there is a personal angle to this reportage.

I also appreciated Carol Millner's short, deft prose-piece, "Say World", understated and yet so telling, about a mother's migrant experience re-examined by her grown daughter. Apparently this story had previously won the Joyce Parkes Writers' Prize, sponsored by the Australian Irish Heritage Association, and "aimed at promoting and encouraging women as writers in Australia", with Joyce Parkes herself as patron.

And a real coup for the anthologists is the brief but warm memoir of the late Dorothy Hewett (here's an interview with Dorothy from Jacket magazine) by her sister Lesley Dougan.

Other reading: The Australian Book Review -- the February 2008 issue which I picked up in Canberra because I had somehow missed it, and because it contained a prize-winning essay by Rachel Robertson whose talk at the Canberra conference I had also missed. (Rachel Robertson also has a short story in the FAWWA anthology, and I'm glad to have come across her both in person and in print. I look forward to reading more of her work.)

And last but not least, an unexpected (came in the mail) and beautifully produced short work by Lee Ranaldo (musician, poet, artist, member and co-founder of Sonic Youth) and multimedia artist Leah Singer, Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt. I picked it up to browse last night, and couldn't stop reading till I'd finished it. It's about time spent in 1995 with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, who it seems were the first "world music" group, and who'd been visited and apparently used to make a record by Brian Jones in the 1960s, as well as by Mick Jagger a couple of decades later (I didn't know about any of this because, unlike John, I'm not familiar with this strand of modern music history, so came to the book with no particular expectations. John has been saturating himself lately with Sonic Youth rarities, and intends to blog them further down the track.).

This little work is a detailed and sensitive account of an intercultural meeting-through-music (or meeting-in-music), complete with photographs, with a wonderful sense of sharing and open-hearted exchange on the part of the locals and the visitors.

Launch of John Mateer's Elsewhere

By Tracy


Elsewhere, the latest book by poet John Mateer, was launched Wednesday night at Planet Books in Mount Lawley.

Below is the text of the launch speech made by John Kinsella at the event, which drew a good crowd.

John Mateer’s Elsewhere

By John Kinsella

The persona behind these poems is a wanderer, and is indeed ghostlike, making small witnessings as he goes – even in his home-place – which pass through him, leaving a residue of loss, even pain, though often too degrees of love. The poet’s persona is a thing of emptiness that craves to be filled but must always remain bereft. Even poems that celebrate friendship, and celebrate the strength of resistance against imprisonment, oppression, and a litany of human wrongdoing, still convey a sense of the loss this process of witnessing must bring.

Poems for Mateer are not cathartic but inevitable. Though his poems express themselves clearly and concisely, noting observations of human behaviour communally and socially, there are also the private individual moments glimpsed and refracted through the wanderer-poet-ghost. For example, a street-kid or a prostitute or a white uncle and aunt who inflect the trauma of white colonisation in South Africa, or the tourist held up in a toilet block without surveillance, bitten on the shoulder by someone in “this land of AIDS”.

The achievement of Mateer’s verse is that he has the art of the storyteller but also an intense lyrical interiority that brings us close to both the experience being witnessed and the persona doing the witnessing. That doesn’t mean we’re necessarily reading Mateer himself, of course, but it does give a sense of great humanity.
As the poet wanders the globe in search of the meaning of the poet’s role, and ultimately in search of redemption in humanity, he focuses an acutely local eye on what he sees. By this I mean he is not appropriative of local custom and identity, but rather attempts to become a conduit for witnessing and even experiencing the uniqueness of any given place. Having said this, he can also be bitingly satirical toward those who hold the cultural and political capital, and how these are used to deprive others of their own heritage and rights of place. In a remarkable sequence of poems on the culling of elephants, Mateer manages both an elegy for the loss of elephants themselves and their complex social interactions, and the creation of a non-diminishing analogy for the broader condition of the oppressor and the oppressed.

One of the vibrant and deeply intelligent characteristics of Mateer’s verse, even in bleaker moments, is the revitalising nature of words themselves. He comfortably switches between English and languages of location, but this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a celebration of the power of language to redeem; in fact, quite often in the case of Afrikaans the language carries an ominous weight that is almost invasive – as does English itself. Rather, language can ironise its own terms of production and allow us to see the faults in those who use it, including the poet himself.

It should be said, though, that there are also moments of great linguistic beauty, where friendship, place, experience and words themselves light up and almost synaesthetically become one. Mateer has also made himself a master of the line – he paces the line perfectly. He judges exactly when to end a line, when to enjamb, and when to break the stanza. In many ways, he is a formalist using a whole variety of prosodic techniques, but his crossing between language and place inevitably invests the English he primarily uses with a new energy. This energy isn’t just for pleasure, but is political. It implores the reader to follow “him” into these witnessings.

Don’t for a moment think that these are travelogue-poems – they couldn’t be if they tried. The persona behind these poems feels too much of the pain, and even more than that, fears the possibility of ennui. He desires love, though is not always sure of its presence; he celebrates the body and its sexuality but is always hesitant in exploring these. This hesitancy is what brings a trust to the reader of the poems; they are never lascivious.

I should say that there is also a searching spirituality at work here. At times you feel as if some inner peace has been arrived at, but then the doubt overwhelms. In seeing a truth, we find, to quote one poem:

“The translated man I am is becoming numerical: zero, ok.”

It would be a mistake to read this persona across Elsewhere as consistent and the same traveller-ghost in every poem – he is not. He transforms and transmutes – even though in many ways the external observer, he always absorbs a bit of the place he is in, which alters him. Then there’s the haunting intelligence which leads to the inevitable ironising of his own condition. Irony becomes his survival technique, the only way he can get through the trauma of this witnessing.

In the final section of the book we are in the Americas. His harshest insights are there at the centre of empire; “after the eagle has sprung to the Astroturf”, we join the eagle as empire inevitably draws us all to its centre. From America to Mexico, the final poem of the book, which is in the voice of the drug-smuggler (as Holy Ghost), the final line is “Wherever there is commerce I AM THERE”; the harshest judgement is reserved for the poet-wanderer-ghost-witness himself. This is also part of his persona, as inevitably all witnessings involve vicarious participation. He does not depict himself as standing outside the problems. There is no sense of the holier-than-thou in this book, and this is what makes Mateer one of the most genuinely ethical, sincere and visionary of poets.

The title of the book is so telling. Whenever we are not “at home”, we are elsewhere. And yet home for Mateer is one place and many. The book has made me realise how often the concept of elsewhere in so much other writing is an evasion of the responsibilities of respecting each and every place we pass through. The word “elsewhere” as it is generally and generically used seems so dismissive, but in the context of Mateer’s poems is so strongly evocative of the diverse threads that make up all of us, and our responsibilities toward each other.

Fairly obsessive #2 ?

By Tracy

Tim (5) has been off school with tonsillitis this week, but it hasn't stopped him singing around the house (hoarsely at times) all day long (and pretty well into the evening until bedtime too).

He's more Brel-addicted than I am now, and the acquisition of a Brassens CD was not so much a question of passion as of trying to "diversify" -- not to wean him off Brel exactly, but to get some relief from repetition... he has been in the habit of doing full-on Brel tribute performances (complete with gestures and facial expressions) for months now, and we need a little variety.

He did this with Syd Barrett for a long time too -- Syd is his earliest hero. While still a baby who couldn't talk sentences, Tim would chime in with the end-words of every line of every Barrett song. All of us in the family love Syd Barrett -- but you can have too much of a good thing...

Anyway, he likes the Brassens -- especially "Chanson Pour L'Auvergnat" and "Je Me Suis Fait Tout Petit" -- and is quite smitten with a short DVD of old Edith Piaf performances too, even to the point of incorporating one or two of her numbers into "his" routine.

But he still maintains (and I have to agree) that Brel is superior to both.

Already with Brel I have to watch some of the lyrics (for a 5-year-old!) as he can be quite risqué -- but Brassens goes even further, to the point of satirical obscenity (in order to condemn other kinds of obscenity, for example in "Le Gorille", which was banned in France for some time). They are, nonetheless, very clever.

We've also spent time making little books which I stitch together, Tim illustrates, and I fill with the words he tells me to put in. (He can write, but only slowly, so that's expedient.) He is very smitten with this process and told me yesterday, "I am a real illustrator" as he went to put his book alongside all the "real" books in his room.

Speaking of the written word, I've been enjoying -- insofar as you can enjoy anything when your child is sick -- the new issue of Meanjin, especially some of the prose, which includes a striking story by Robert Drewe, a bizarre piece of memoir from Pip Proud (disappointingly disparaging and brief in its mention of Dransfield) and an article on matters Austenesque by Laura Carroll.

There's also a snappy piece of memoir -- "Full Immersion" by Vanessa Russell ("on growing up with the Christadelphians"), which particularly drew my attention because my own novel about evangelical Christians, not Christadelphians but Baptists (Sweet), has gone off to the printers and is due out in September -- to be launched at the Big Sky Festival in Geraldton. So my thoughts have been "immersed" in that sort of material for a while now.