TY - JOUR
AU - Maling, Caitlin
AB - Born in 1935 to a family of early and successful Western Australian squattocracy (squatter aristocracy), the celebrated mid-century novelist Randolph Stow’s early life in rural Geraldton exposed him to the political contexts surrounding Australian pastoralism, particularly the dispossession and racist treatment of the Yamatji and Wajarri people of the central Gascoyne region and associated environmental destruction.1 This article reads two of Stow’s pastoral poems in light of these tensions, following the work of Stow’s Geraldton countryman John Kinsella’s understanding of settler Australian pastoral as inevitably fraught, for instead of a blank arcadia, even in retreat the landscape is always occupied (“Contrary Rhetoric” 136).2 The most influential voice in contemporary Australia (if not international) criticism of the pastoral, Kinsella argues that environmental violence is inextricable from violence done to the occupants of the land as functions of colonization, and the pastoral as it primarily operates in an Australian context occludes this violence. Kinsella writes that the “hierarchy of land ownership, a concept imported from Europe in particular, has meant that no nostalgia, no return to an Eden, is possible. These Edens are about dispossession and ownership by the few” (“Is There an Australian Pastoral” 348). Yet, is this necessarily other to the pastoral, which traces one of its many origin points to Virgil’s dispossession from his ancestral property at Mantua following the 42BC battle of Phillipi?3 How might an understanding of the pastoral as social form—complex, communal, and political—better help unpack the work of Stow and others? In this article, I take this question as my central concern, revisiting the poetry of Stow, which has largely rested in a critical lacunae since his death in Harwich, UK, in 2010.4 I am interested in teasing out how the pastoral is intrinsically linked to citizenship and community, or as William Empson writes, “the problems of one and the many, especially their social aspects” (21). This is the rusted pastoral of the Western Australian Wheatbelt Stow offers us, one that, through the questioning of human communities, is porous, allowing nature, history, and politics to filter through. I propose that Stow uses the pastoral mode reflexively, interrogating how important the pastoral mode has been in Australian life and letters, which, as Kinsella writes, is defined by a peculiar “consciousness even paranoia” that such a pastoral must exist (“Contrary Rhetoric” 135). Writing out of the same place as Stow decades later, my pastoral responses to his two poems “The Land’s Meaning” and “In Praise of Hillbillies” are presented as evidence of Terry Gifford’s “essential paradox of the pastoral” that, “Retreat … actually delivers insights from the culture from which it originates Pastoral authors are inescapably of their own culture and its preoccupations. Thus the pastoral construct always reveals the preoccupations and tensions of its time” (Pastoral 82). Unlike Stow’s pastorals, which are embedded in the debate about the role of poetry in nation building, mine are pastorals of what Lynn Keller terms the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” signaling the Anthropocene as the key “tension” of my time, a “powerful cultural phenomenon tied to reflexive, critical, and often anxious awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet” (Recomposing Ecopoetics 2). Here the question is definitively, as Paul Alpers’s phrases, one of “human strength relative to the world.” I adopt Alpers’s “representative anecdote” of the pastoral mode as being about “the lives of herdsmen” as a key term in my investigation, specifically as Hans Bernsdorff writes from Theocritus onwards there is increasingly an identification between the role of the shepherd and the role of the poet (“What is Pastoral?” 27; “Of Theocritus” 207). With poets more often questioning what role writing can play in a time of environmental crisis, I perceive that the pastoral is hopeful, offering a mode for how writers have engaged with such large complex issues. The pastoral, which positions the shepherd and the writer as fundamentally circumscribed in power, offers a long-standing tradition from which ecopoetics might draw rather than see as inimical. Hence one subtle intervention this article makes in contemporary scholarship of the pastoral is that unlike Raymond Williams’s idea of the counter-pastoral; Terry Gifford’s formulation of the post-pastoral; or John Kinsella’s notion of the poison-pastoral—not to mention the multiplicity of understandings of anti-pastoral—I propose to read Stow’s work as pastoral and to present my own work as such. In the rest of this introduction, I establish the communal potential of the pastoral and detail the particular type of intertextuality that I, following Paul Alpers, term “re-singing,” which I will use to read the citation practice in Stow’s poetry and use to formulate my own versions of Stow’s pastoral. The Pastoral and the Communal In his landmark What is Pastoral? Paul Alpers addresses critiques of the pastoral as conventional. Instead of the pejorative sense of conventional as enforcing a status quo, Alpers suggests a meaning of “coming together.” He writes, that, “Pastoral poems make explicit the dependence of their conventions on the idea of coming together” (80). While writers such as Ken Hiltner and Tom Bristow have provided inroads examining Renaissance and Australian pastoral through environmental lenses, the particular communal function of the pastoral I am proposing, and its relationship to ecopoetics, is undeveloped by contemporary critics with the potential exception of John Kinsella’s reading of shearing songs as pastoral (Contrary Rhetoric 148). Likewise while there has been recuperation in recent years of the political potential of the lyric this investigation has not as yet been fully extended to the pastoral in an Australian context, despite the centrality of the mode to Australian national identity (Keller “Green Reading” 602). Extending beyond the important work of John Kinsella, recent work by Corey Wakeling and Matthew Hall has provided a small amelioration to this, examining the poetry of Peter Minter and J.H Prynne from within the lens of the pastoral, while also attending to the specific Australian ecological and socio-political contexts of the pastoral. Hall reads Prynne’s 2005 Acrylic Tips as elegiac pastoral expressing “a legacy of imperial dominance as it is represented against the Australian landscape and Indigenous culture,” while Wakeling asserts of the pastoral more broadly that “the negative condition of the pastoral in postcolonial contexts is arguably so pervasive that it underscores much nationalist, postcolonial literature in general” (2; 141). It is crucial that both readings position the pastoral, as deployed by these writers, as being ironically self-aware of the contested position of the form—as Wakeling states “[o]f all the genres of poetry, it is the pastoral which continues to be selected to comment on a range of social political, and economic questions about how societies should interface with environmental contexts” (137). In presenting my analysis of Stow and my own pastoral, I attempt a small contribution to this rethinking of Australian settler pastoral, following in the dual lineage of both Greg Garrard’s and John Kinsella’s separate conceptualizations of a “radical” pastoral. Garrard does not separate the pastoral into different categories (for example the anti-, poison-, or post-pastoral), rather he writes: if pastoral can be radical, if it has been so, it is not as a finished model, exhortation or ideology, but questioning, as itself a question. With a new appreciation of the literal, and a theory of the pathetic fallacy as ontological problematic, and a recognition of the special power of poetry to hold in suspension the undecidable, “radical pastoral” appears as the political, poetical question of be/longing, of the root of human being on this earth. (464–65)5 The pastoral does not then “succeed” in a traditional artistic sense, rather it is a potential vehicle for the consideration of unfixed ideas, which in both Stow’s and my case involve the power of poetry in relation to a world at risk. As we might expect, John Kinsella’s understanding of “radical pastoral” pushes beyond universal questions to frame pastoral specifically from within the lens of pastoralism: Radical pastoral declares that what might be seen as idyllic in the country in conventional pastoral is really reflective of a corruption of nature, that modern … farming and rural living lead to the destruction of the environment … are exploitative of the non-human, and are very often part of an exploitation of the working poor. (Disclosed Poetics 9) Hence what Garrard terms radical “political, poetical questions of be/longing” also drive a lot of ecocritical considerations, particularly in the contested settler contexts from and of which Stow, Kinsella, and I write. In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood proposes reducing individualism and the dualism between self and other as key to overwriting the Mastery narrative that has led to ecological devastation. This position connects to an idea of the pastoral as founded in the collective rather than the individual. She considers: the mutual self as providing an alternative account of relations to nature which both breaks down self/other dualism and provides a model from relations of care, and respect for nature, and hence for the ecological self. (142) I perceive that the pastoral is likewise engaged in questions of dualism, between self/other and self/world. For even in Thomas G. Rosenmeyer’s essential, if decidedly un-ecocritical, work of Theocritean criticism The Green Cabinet, the importance of the collective is privileged over the individual and perhaps more importantly is portrayed as inseparable. Rosenmeyer writes that for pastoral shepherds, “Companionship, pastoral song, mutual benefit … are the conditions upon which pastoral freedom is based, freedom both as a condition and as an awareness” (105). Crucially, this is a limited freedom, curtailed by the extra-than-human power of the world. Through the selection of the shepherd or the “common” figure, as opposed to the heroic, pastoral “suggests a view that human life is basically limited in its capabilities” (Ashburner 68). By focusing on the way Stow’s pastoral makes visible the limitations of the powers of the poet-shepherd and his settler Australian society, I demonstrate that his pastoral is a movement towards a less anthropocentric one, through emphasizing the collective over the individual. “Re-singing,” Collage, and Community in the Pastoral The primary way this article traces ideas of the “collective” in poetics is through collage or “re-singing.” Just as we will see that Stow collaged inter-texts to develop his questioning of the role of poetry and the poet in shaping the nation, my recycling of Stow opens up his poetry to contemporary ecopoetic concerns. Collage recognizes the peculiar temporality of the pastoral, that, while specific instances are embedded in the concerns of a writer’s particular time, the mode as a whole is, as Xanthe Ashburner writes, “fundamentally transhistorical” (68). Hence Alpers writes on the Eclogues: the pastoral poet depends on prior usages and texts, either accommodating their grander odes to bucolic modesty, or imitating, echoing, and adapting, as if the responsive singing represented in eclogues were a model of the poet’s own activity. Literary shepherds often recall and sing for each other the songs of their masters and predecessors. (“What is Pastoral?” 81) The historicity of the mode is what permits it to work across scales, to transform the simple shepherd into a “representative herdsman” who stands for more than himself (Marinelli 90). In the Eclogues, it is the layering of Virgil’s own persona with Menalcas and his extensive quotation of Theocritus that “alerts us to the argument woven through the Eclogues as to whether poetry has a social function, and if so, where it rates on the scale of social usefulness” (Patterson 5). Here, as Patterson writes, “Virgil establishes the principle that genuine imitation, especially of pastoral, always remakes its object in a new historical context” (39). There is no singular author, rather a collaged authorship, one that both Stow and my own pastoral deploy to critique the role the pastoral has played in the nationmaking program of Australia. In This Compost, a work that specifically develops an ecologic collagic method, Jed Rasula proposes “wreading” as an ecological method, highlighting his own lack of traditional citations “as an exercise in ecological solidarity” where instead the texts are “blended into polyphonic configurations” (xii). Rasula states that this method is in opposition to anthropocentrism for it deemphasises the authorial role “restor[ing] to the poetics at hand that solidarity in anonymity which is the deep issue of planetary time” (9). The collaged authorship of much pastoral speaks to Rasula’s composted method. Collaged authorship occurs at two levels. First, pastoral can involve the direct, unacknowledged quotation or recycling of other pastoral writers, as in Virgil’s use of Theocritus in the Eclogues. Second, in the convenings common to Alpers’s understanding of the pastoral, the pastoral itself consists of a collective of voices, singing together and in response to one another. In both of these exemplars authorship and subjectivity is split, shared across a group real or imagined. Again, we return to the idea that in the pastoral, not only is man held by his “strength relative to the world” but that what strength he has, what voice, only emerges in a state of relationality. I contend that my re-singing of Stow through deliberate and messy intertextuality is a different type of “wreading,” one that emphasizes the collective in composing the pastoral and the geological spaces Stow and I share. As Rosenmeyer writes, “pastoral is best analysed as a loose combination of independent elements. It is left to the listener to weld the parts together in his imagination if he so wishes; the poet provides few if any clues for such an act of consolidation” (47). The unfinished, rusted pastoral is opened up in this interpretation to the kind of active reading practices that engage the reader as a participant in the collage itself. Re-considering the Pastoral of Randolph Stow It is this idea of the pastoral as unfinished, or a Garrard phrases it, as a “question,” which opens up Stow’s work to readings that complicate what we understand as settler Australian pastoral. Stow’s pastoral critiques how, as Ann Vickery writes, “In Australia, pastoral poetry has been integrally tied to a discourse of nationhood, of asserting and affirming the ties between person and place” (176). As I move into close reading of these Stow poems, I will also be considering these factors. Instead of placing primacy on the metaphorical potential of the landscape, I am interested in showing how Stow’s landscapes are permeated by historical and social concerns. This reading includes how Stow wrestles directly with the role of poetry, and the poet, in representing and also in some ways composing society. In each reading, my aim is to show how a model of pastoral as social, communal form can engage Stow ecopoetically in ways previously neglected. From his 1962 volume Outrider, “The Land’s Meaning” remains Stow’s most well-known poem: FOR SIDNEY NOLAN The love of man is a weed of the waste places. One may think of it as the spinifex of dry souls. I have not, it is true, made the trek to the difficult country where it is said to grow; but signs come back, reports come back, of continuing exploration in that terrain. And certain of our young men, who turned in despair from the bar, upsetting a glass, and swore: ‘No more’ (for the tin rooms stank of flyspray) are sending word that the mastery of silence alone is empire. What is God, they say, but a man unwounded in his loneliness? And the question (applauded, derided) falls like dust on veranda and bar; and in pauses, when thinking ceases, the footprints of the recently departed march to the mind’s horizons, and endure. And often enough as we turn again, and laugh, cloud, hide away the tracks with an acid word, there is one or more gone past the door to stand (wondering, debating) in the iron street, and toss a coin, and pass, to the township’s end, where one-eyed ‘Mat, eternal dealer in camels, grins in his dusty yard like a split fruit. But one who has returned, his eyes blurred maps of landscapes still unmapped, gives this account: ‘The third day, cockatoos dropped dead in the air. Then the crows turned back, the camels knelt down and stayed there, and a skin-coloured surf of sandhills jumped the horizon and swamped me. I was bushed for forty years. ‘And I came to a bloke all alone like a kurrajong tree. And I said to him: “Mate – I don’t need to know your name – Let me camp in your shade, let me sleep, till the sun goes down.” (96–97)6 “The Land’s Meaning” is most commonly read in terms of how Stow frames the landscape as a kind of metaphysical question. It is also the poem where Stow engages most with the types of desert tropes characterizing Fay Zwicky’s influential readings. Zwicky argues that in Stow’s desert poetry, “man merges with his environment, progressing from the particular to the general, and thence to the universal” with Stow demonstrating “an understanding of man in his environmental features themselves” where “the inhuman forces of nature impinge more powerfully than the presence of any human agent” (29). This includes an extensive wrestling with the dialectic between speech and silence. For Zwicky, this is a function of the anti-lingual masculine nature of settler Australian society coupled with the post-Romantic period’s constant scrutiny and challenge of the ideas of audience and communication (26–27). The existential interpersonal angst of modernism in Australian poetry is transferred onto the landscape “as if to compensate for the detachment from his fellow man, the writer reveals a deep and sometimes ambiguous involvement with place” (29).7 At the outset, “The Land’s Meaning” reads as an existential interrogation of love. The opening two lines, which set up the premise of the poem, seem to speak directly to Zwicky’s reading of Stow: The love of man is a weed of the waste places. One may think of it as the spinifex of dry souls. (96) The couplet places primacy on the emotional concerns of the poem. The landscape that appears is purely metaphorical, a vehicle for the ‘think’ing through of love, one that at outset matches Paul Kane’s description of the trope of Australia “as empty” void, where: “as the heart of the Australian continent is dominated by harsh and empty deserts, so too is the heart of Australian culture or intellectual life … lacking familiar features of landscape, flora, and fauna: it is empty of the physical markers of a civilised land” (Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity 44). But if we continue into the poem with a focus on the social aspects of the pastoral, we find it dominated not by the dryness of desert but by the dryness of Stow’s particular type of social wit and irony. Stow himself described the poem as a “wry sermon preached on the text of the solemn first lines” (Hassal Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow 75). Here, he highlights the poetic space as one knowingly made and targeted at an audience. The sermon opens I have not, it is true, made the trek to the difficult country where it is said to grow; but signs come back. (96) The set-up of the poem as “a trek to difficult country” presents a mirrored inversion of the pastoral retreat of the metaphysical type identified by Judith Wright as aiming for “some post-human wholeness” (“Australian Poetry Since 1941” 25). Hassall highlights how, for Stow, “the very seeming emptiness of the interior … mirrors the spiritual emptiness ascribed to Australians, that challenges exploration and discovery” (“Quests” 406). Hence, the poem is engaged in drawing into question the role tropes of “quests” and “explorers” have played in Australian letters. I argue, however, that Stow’s framing this poem as a sermon undercuts any reading of the poem as purely lyric introspection. From the perspective of treating this poem as a form of pastoral, where pastoral is defined by communality in theme and form, the idea it being a warped sermon is particularly appealing. A sermon and the act of preaching are aligned with the term “pastoral.”8 Both are public speech designed to address an issue of importance to a local group. In short, the poem serves a social function, even as the satirical notes bring into question exactly what power the sermon—and thereby poetry—can have in this context (Hassal Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow 75). This need not be an inherently positive thing, as Kinsella asserts in Disclosed Poetics; the pastoral must always be examined for “its social and spiritual evocation …. The protection of the flock is seen as a noble thing, but the flock is being preserved only for human use …. So works the priest or rabbi or imam, the social worker or the teacher-–guidance becomes a form of social or spiritual control” (3). One way that Stow’s pastoral operates both in form and function is to question the potential of such social or spiritual control. For if this is a sermon, it is an ironic and unwieldy one. It jumps from the opening couplet to an extensive diversion describing the more literal rural “waste place” where this congregation of men gather. It is a place of “tin rooms” that “stank of flyspray,” a “veranda and bar,” an “iron street,” and a “township’s end” (96). Although the landscape of the “trek” is into metaphorical country, the landscape where this pastoral song takes place is grounded in literal pastoralism. It is a rural town, a pastoral Western Australian settlement, populated by men similar to those we find in other Stow poems. Dorothy Hewett writes that “one of the problems” in interpreting the privacy of Stow’s writing career has been that Stow, “Incidentally a gifted linguist, wrote out of an anti-lingual society. His ideal clan were working men, tight-lipped bushmen, who suspected the gift-of-the-gab” (Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett 72). While I, and others, have written elsewhere on how in his love poetry Stow was pushed and pulled between a desire to speak and a deep urge to remain silent, “The Land’s Meaning” is not entirely about a failure of the individual Romantic self to find fulfilment (Maling; Beston 12–25). By virtue of its set-up as a communal speech, it appears more about the emotional and literary development of this masculine society as a whole, where, as Tony Hughes D’Aeth writes, “‘simplicity becomes small-mindedness, quietude becomes boredom, and seasonal cycles represent endless stagnation” (“Like Nothing Else on Earth” 526). By virtue of its set-up as communal speech passed between the narrator and other speakers, the poem appears to be more about the emotional and literary development of this masculine society as a whole. This includes questioning the type of pastoral, and poetry more broadly, that might be produced by this Western Australian pastoralism of scarcity and silence. As Raymond Williams writes, “the problem of the knowable community is then, in a new way, a problem of language” (171). It is the young men, no doubt on some level intending to include the young Stow, “who turned in despair from the bar, upsetting a glass, / and swore, ‘No more,’” that go searching for something beyond the ex-lingual Australian pastoral society (96). What they find however is “that the mastery of silence / alone is empire. What is God, they say / but a man unwounded in his loneliness?” (96). The answer to the question of what constitutes the “love of man” is only more silence, the ascetic unwoundedness of a God or a society of pastoral shepherds, each alone in their work. These lines are a crucial intertext, punning off Patrick White’s celebrated 1957 novel Voss. Hence the failure of the community to develop language in “The Land’s Meaning” extends outwards towards the wider writing community, including its most venerated denizen in White. In Voss, White develops a distinct metaphysical language around man, silence, and God as the explorer Voss and his companions venture out into the desert. As Voss’s travelling companion Le Mesurier writes in one of his prose poems that leads to Voss’s crisis of faith: “Now that I am nothing, I am, and love is the simplest of all tongues. Then I am not God, but Man” (291). Yet the language of Stow’s play on Voss doesn’t plunge “The Land’s Meaning” into a similar metaphysical quagmire. The combination of wry, witty tone and the unreality of the concluding images, such as “Mat, eternal dealer in camels” who “grins in his dusty yard like a split fruit” prevent the poem from being mired in emotion (96). Thus while Stow shares what Ivor Indyk describes as key Australian modernist Kenneth Slessor’s “habitual way with pastoral, which is simultaneously to invoke and negate its characteristic features,” Stow’s humor and the social dimension of his pastoral prevent him being placed with White, Slessor, “Harpur, Gordon, Lawson and Brennan, for whom the Australian landscape’s most compelling signification is death, ‘defeated glory,’ and despair” (354). It is precisely this defeated glory and despair, and how it functions in Australia’s identity, that “The Land’s Meaning” so wryly deconstructs. The humor and irony in the poem also separate it from isolated outback convenings such as Voss and his fellow explorers; instead, the quintessentially Australian locale of the outback pub presents the pastoral space as democratic and social, if inherently masculine and Anglophone. The conclusion of the poem is given over to “one who has returned, his eyes blurred maps / of landscapes still unmapped” (97). Formally, this story—even with its aggrandized peculiarity—is similar to the mythic tales sung by shepherds in the earliest pastoral singing competitions. As in Virgil’s “Eclogue VII,” the voice of the poet introduces the situation before the voices of other shepherds sing the rest of the song. After this introduction by the narrator, the account given of the trek into “difficult country” where the “love of man” lives as a “weed” is biblical in its set up and Australian in its imagery. Like a bizarrely translated parable, the man’s story is hard to parse down to exactness: the third day, cockatoos dropped dead in the air. Then the crows turned back, the camels knelt down and stayed there, and a skin-coloured surf of sandhills jumped the horizon and swamped me. I was bushed for forty years. (97) This first stanza has a sense of a momentous reckoning, heavy with allusions to Noah’s flood. Wrestling with the undefinable contents of the poem, Hassall writes, “The poem … is attempting to communicate the incommunicable, and one of the temptations for a writer confronted with this contradiction is to revert to silence” (Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow 77). In some ways, the poem asks readers to consider not just how the “love of man” works in such a land, but also how we might speak, or sing, of this. There is intimation in Hassall’s unpacking of “The Land’s Meaning” that it is the limited history of Australian society that leaves these men unable to speak. This includes the emptiness of communal memory of place and history for settlers. In one especially telling interview with Xavier Pons and Neil Keeble in 1976, Stow is quick to state that while he doesn’t mind having been thought of as a regional Western Australian writer, he has now “moved out of that region … having thought I had exhausted it, rather” (357). He goes on to state that “the society of Australia itself was perhaps too simple, and that landscape was not a sufficient subject to keep me going” and that “a society that is so new as Australia has something which is lacking from the point of view of a writer” (359). At first glance these statements by the author would confirm a view of his poetry as wrestling with the familiar desire of settler poets to somehow deepen the literary lineage of Australia.9 I argue, however, that far from removing Australian society as a poetic concern, Stow actually engages with the idea of cultural exhaustion as a social condition, including the exhaustion of the pastoral mode. When the speaker at the end of the “The Land’s Meaning” encounters another person the exchange between them is also wordless: ‘And I came to a bloke all alone like a kurrajong tree. And I said to him: “Mate- I don’t need to know your name – Let me camp in your shade, let me sleep, till the sun goes down.”’ (97) If we think of pastoral convening as Alpers does, as the gathering of shepherds to share songs that in some way solidify some custom of society, then “The Land’s Meaning” is a quintessentially Australian pastoral about the impossibility of pastoral. Rosenmeyer’s thesis that pastoral is founded on the friendship and community of man here meets a community of men without necessarily kinship and almost without a common language (105). Yet the collage of voices creates for the reader a sense of a convening-–even if it is an isolated one pulled between the small moments of dramatic action and larger lyrical discursiveness of the sermon. The poem operates paratactically, the parts held next to but separate from one another, mirroring the passing of speech from the opening speaker to the young men and finally to the returned explorer. The poem appears not as a conversation but rather as a series of self-colloquies. Throughout the poem there is a doubling of social concerns with more personal ones. The way the desert features in the poem, as noted, enhances a sense of isolation both as a representation on some level of Stow’s psyche and a basic condition of how Stow perceived Australian society. Some of this reflects what Kinsella terms the “colonising psychology of the desert as emptiness.” In one instance Kinsella highlights how, “‘[e]xploration is key here. It’s a deadly word …. this exploration doubles for colonising activity in the literal sense, but also in an opening oneself to the void being filled with the silence” (Stow The Land's Meaning 37). In “The Land’s Meaning,” wryness and humor engage with exploration in a slightly different way. There is a subtle undermining of the celebration of the desert explorers and their presence in Australian literature. These are not venerable heroes, they are “'Mat” “eternal dealer in camels” (97). Stow is consciously critical of heroism being born out of the void of “the waste places” (96). “The Land's Meaning” is not just an existential wresting but also a societal critique of what has come from venerating silent bushmen who engage with the land only to die on it. “The Land’s Meaning” performs a synthesis between the common tragic tropes of exploration revisited in Australian modernism and the earlier immensely popular colonial narratives, where Cliff Hanna highlights “[m]ore than one-third of the songs deal with the fool who becomes both victim and figures of fun” (204).10 By bringing these two competing visions of the outback into conversation, Stow deconstructs them and the pastoral mode containing them. “In Praise of Hillbillies” If “The Land’s Meaning” complicates the role of exploration and desert in settler Australian mythos, “In Praise of Hillbillies” is even more conscious in its troubling of the bush ballad, the form that marks the apotheosis of the development and enshrinement of the Australian rural legend in Australian letters (Frost 53–66).11 It is a peculiar poem that has not received any critical attention. “In Praise of Hillbillies” is consciously constructed of the songs of three balladeers or folk singers, engaging both the wider ballad tradition and the 1950s revitalization of folk music in Australia following similar movements in America and Britain (Kirkpatrick): Harry, who has two squeeze-boxes, can yodel high as the sun. His music is the spheres, and earth, and all earth’s tears; so that I tremble, sitting across his bed, lest I betray by weeping how my six unworthy years kneel to his seventeen. His drovers’ wives tear at my heart. Flood, fire and bullet slay his horse, his dogs; he hymns their blameless lives in notes that wheeze and mourn, in tones that pray.     Because past the gumtrees     of Koogereena     lie my tomorrows     of war and danger,     I will sing simply     of simple sorrows,     and work for death then,     and be no stranger. Jabulmara’s hands on the guitar are long and black; his black feet rise and fall to meet the measures of his repertoire. Griefs for departed ballad-singers; praise of black sheep filled with brother-love, or tall Hellenic stockmen cut down in their prime, far from the Flying Doctor. Olden days, and white men’s youth and mothers ask slow time, much sympathy. His eyes fill as he plays.     Although the brown river     flows back forever,     there’s no regaining     the taken city.     In this rock country     no soft complaining,     no harsh rebellion,     but only pity. Kev, in the country of the myall tree, crashes a plastic pick across the strings, throws back his head and sings, enormously, of broken-hearted sheilas left behind in cities he may never know. He brings sophistication to the bush, with tales of shearers loose in Sydney on a blind and sheiks in Scrubby Creek. The listener pales to think what Kev might come to, unconfined.     Because past the saltbush     the red road may never     lead me, in playing     I act out my roaming.     But though I speak only     of drifting, of straying     the end is returning     - the song is my homing. (89–90) Laurence Lerner highlights how artifice often appears in the pastoral via “obliqueness of presentation,” including the very self-conscious way poet-shepherds announce that they are to sing before actually commencing singing (140). Hence, while “In Praise of Hillbillies” interacts with the bush ballad tradition, it is not itself a bush ballad but rather a pastoral version of one, with the speaker not singing the story but providing the pastoral framing for the other singers. The traditional pastoral features of shepherds gathered to share song forms the backbone of the poem. More so than “The Land’s Meaning,” it is particularized to the peculiar working conditions of a mid-century rural Australia of “drover’s wives,” the “Flying Doctor,” and “shearers loose in Sydney.” The natural features of the landscape, including “flood, fire,” “gumtrees,” “myall tree,” “saltbush,” and “red road” are also particularly Australian. Also present in the insistence of naming “Koogereena” and “Scrubby Creek” is the tendency highlighted by Brian Elliot in colonial Australian poetics of a “pre-occupation with minor local tradition and the naming of places” (70). Unlike that in the “The Land's Meaning,” the landscape seems to be operating on a narrative, or more literal, level here. These natural features and the hardship of the work expressed in the poem introduce the common conflict of landscape in Australian life and literature. Instead of the traditional arcadia of a locus amoenus—pleasant place—there is again a sense in this poem that the land on some level resists its human occupants—or at least resists its settler occupants—while colonization prevents the Indigenous singer Jabulmara from “regaining / the taken city.” I would argue that, despite its obvious humor and irony, through the different strengths of each poet-shepherd, the poem demonstrates an awareness of the dualistic structures of colonization underwriting settler violence done to peoples and environments.12 Yet, the literary “Australianness” of this poem is almost overwhelming, and the reference to “Scrubby Creek” indicates that we might take this poem more as ironic pastiche than as actual homage to the landscape. “The Sheik of Scrubby Creek” was a song by comedic country performer Chad Morgan released in 1958; it is also Morgan’s well-known nickname. Nicholas Birns highlights how by the 1970s “Australian writers were praised for having specifically Australian content” proposing that, “Nationalism within Australian literature had burgeoned” (4). I perceive that one level on which Stow’s pastoral operates is as a critique of this nationalism; however, he is still invested in teasing out exactly what an Australian poetics might be; as Empson writes, “the fundamental impulse of irony is to score off both the arguments that have been puzzling you, both sets of sympathies in your mind” (54). In his work on Australian pastoral, Kinsella highlights the shearing shed and shearing songs as a particularly democratic form of pastoral (Contrary Rhetoric 148). In “In Praise of Hillbillies,” the singers Harry, Jabulmara, and Kev are offered equal space in the poem, the voice of the educated speaker given over to their experiences. The “I” of the narrator only occurs in the opening four lines of the poem and by the end is shifted from “I” into “the listener.” This movement represents a shift from occupying the interior space into viewing simply the collective—the same movement that occurs in “The Land's Meaning.” As in much pastoral, the authorship of this poem appears to be shared, akin to how Alpers conceives of the plural in pastoral, proposing that “first-person utterance is shared among the gathered speakers, made equal by their vulnerability to a greater power. By the time the poet speaks, he has already ‘owned his passiveness’ by representing his imagined companions speaking for him” (What is Pastoral? 304). Peter Marinelli notes in his study of pastoral that “the shepherd [of classical pastoral] remains first and foremost an emblem of humanity, a general rather than specific type” (90). In this poem, each of the speakers represents a different “type” of Australian poet-shepherd. Importantly, Stow, through the speaker of Jabulmara, includes the Indigenous peoples of Australia in this collective and acknowledges how the pastoral life of Australia is founded on colonial conquest. It is an “unsettling” move, in Michael Farrell’s understanding of unsettlement, in that it renders visible, and upsets, the processes involved in colonization, including the bush ballad itself (4–5). This is where the pastoral’s particular political power is most acute. By ceding space and voice to Jabulmara in the poem, Stow avoids—at least formally—the pitfalls of incorporating the Indigenous other into the self and also what Plumwood terms “hyperseparation,” where the other is portrayed as “devoid of any elements of mind” (145). Instead, in his voicing of Jabulmara, Stow attempts to illustrate the destruction associated with such logic. Yet Stow’s depiction of Jabulmara, while emerging from a position of empathy, is still a flawed one. Beyond the ethical concerns of speaking for an oppressed people not your own, Jabulmara is presented as passive, silently accepting that his land will not be returned to him. It is a static portrayal edging close to the common primitivist trope of Australian Indigenous people as ancient, wise, and doomed to die out or be assimilated. But the poem through use of the pastoral mode, beyond many of its contemporaries, does represent thinking through of these issues. Beyond being engaged with the actuality of the Australian landscape, Stow’s poems allow us to enter into the unresolved political issues of his time, ones that continue to haunt us. The poet-shepherds of Stow’s pastoral of colonial Western Australia are not Melibee unseated from his own lands but the soldiers doing the unseating, the (un)settling. Re-singing Stow I Have Not Made the Trek to the Difficult Country After “The Land’s Meaning” Atop Mt Leseur, by the survey marker, I sip mildew-tinged water from my camel-bak and hold the name of the town under my tongue. Tonight is the fifth week the jackpot hasn’t sounded from the stubby holder above the back bar where Fridays bring all four hundred houses out of the fly-strewn heat at the thought of something free. Doug the owner leans back to balance his beer belly proclaims, “You never know?” It is meant to be cold but the warm currents linger, the wind in updraft lifting the surf of sandhills to beyond the horizon. “It’s easy enough, you see, to live, flyspray, WD40, Fortune 500 for the grass and ants.” I come and go, tuning Town in and out of reception with hands that have never hauled a net, baled hay or clutched the back of man or camel, “We make our own luck around here,” spinning weeks and water from the base of the mountain, to the sea. This Song is our Homing After “In Praise of Hillbillies” Country of Geraldton wax, roo ticks and starving pythons. Country of dry rivers and melting roads, tar acrid in the heat, fires jumping grasstree to grasstree under colourless, high, sky. We pass with one-fingered waves and need not open our mouths to song of country of shotgun shells and squashed rabbit skulls. A man’s song is pain and we are all men in this country where history stretches back along the track, bodies flying to either side of the road. We have enough in our heart to grieve the future without the past indistinct as the brown, brown, scrub, the ash of song after the flame.13 In my poems, I have shifted the pastoral location from the interior to the sea to form almost piscatory eclogues. My Western Australia, and that of Stow's, is largely a littoral one defined by the sea where nearly the entire population lives by the coast (Bennett “A Beach Somewhere” 31–44). While there is a tendency in Australian poetry to look inward to the large empty center as a source of existential inspiration, I turn to look outward at the ocean and what lies beyond the nation. Here, I gesture toward the work of Peter Minter, among others, who asks us to imagine “What would happen, for instance, if we were to take ‘the Land’ out of Australian poetry? …. Rather than ‘the Land’ and its monocultural aesthetic, we might imagine a polyphony of terrestrial islands, archipelagos or habitus and poethical emergence” (“Archipelagos of Sense” 160). While the poems, particularly “I Have Not Made the Trek to the Difficult Country” echo Stow’s desert imagery, this is collaged with primary images of the sea, keeping the poems largely located within the communal, populated areas of the town, the pastoral areas between the urban and rural poles. I resist naming places with the liturgical feel of Stow’s “In Praise of Hillbillies,” preferring instead to emphasize the archetypal nature of the town. In “The Land’s Meaning” Stow’s speakers report back from the physical and metaphysical wilderness of desert; however, in my poems there is a more uneasy and cross-implicated relationship between the locales of town and outback. The distinction between the two is deliberately blurred as I aim for how Tony Hughes D’Aeth describes Kinsella’s nature poetry as “an industrial poetry about the unnaturalness of nature” (“Salt Scars” 27). Unlike the “anti-lingual” masculinity of Stow’s pastoral, the “herdsmen” of my pastoral, for example “Doug, the owner” and the unseen other speakers in “I Have Not Made the Trek,” are the vocal singers in the poem, reflecting, as I write in the following poem, “we are all men in this country.” Following the work of Val Plumwood, I tried to highlight the role masculinity plays, and has played, in the colonial and environmental violence in Australia, embedding the poem with a historical consciousness, so the poem becomes littered with bodies from the violence of ongoing colonization, both animal and human. On some level, this gesture speaks back to the gendered history of the pastoral; as Sidonie Smith has argued, “access to the pastoral speaking position is determined by cultural possessions – of specific educational, class, gender, and racial identities” (170–71). The shepherd speakers in my pastoral, as in Stow’s, are masculine men of the bush; however, the voice of the poet contrasts with these speakers, subtly highlighting and undermining the dominant masculine model, making from their pastoral visions my own hybrid pastoral. In creating a collaged authorship of my own words, the words of the collective, and Stow’s words, I hope to show how in the fifty years since Stow’s poem was published, many of the political issues remain the same, although the central tension has shifted from the human toward the intersection with the extra-than-human world. Kate Rigby writes of her work tracing ecological thought through the Romantics that in the context of ecological crisis “it might be valuable to reconsider paths not taken in order to demonstrate that even in the West a different passage to modernity might have been possible” (Rigby 259). By collaging Stow’s work—which is itself a collage—into the context of the Anthropocene, I forefront the lineage of thought that has led to environmental crisis and place it in the context of the ecological destruction associated with the pastoral through images of “flyspray” and “WD40.” The inclusion of these global, branded objects extends my pastoral out beyond the national. I am also trying, potentially unsuccessfully, to link this local space to the broader global space through addressing larger climatic patterns in the “warm currents” and the bushfire imagery dominating “This Song is Our Homing.” Introducing his provocative edition of Plumwood Mountain on decolonization and geopoethics, Peter Minter advocates a poetic renewal that is “about both form and content …. A shared poetics. The country gets involved, speaks through it all, while the imagination dilates to admit everything, from all across the continent, the Pacific, the Indian.” I have attempted to contribute to such a shared poetics. By eradicating the borders between the traditional pastoral enclosure, the natural world and the global, my pastoral traces how these concepts are troubled in contemporary times. Conclusion Ursula Heise demands in her analysis of genres that: [a]n awareness of such forms and their cultural background and implications is part and parcel of an environmentally oriented cosmopolitanism that not only seeks to explore how global systems shape local forms of inhabitation but also is aware of how this exploration itself is framed by culturally specific assumptions. (65) In revisiting Stow’s pastoral, I have made some tentative steps toward exploring how the pastoral—when positioned from Alpers’s understanding of conventional—might help us in this exploration of how we construct and understand our inhabitation of this planet. My own pastoral, written out of the first quintile of the new millennia is necessarily global, even as it wrestles with what it means to live in Western Australia in the here and now. As many writers have commented, recognition of the fact that we are globally imbricated in ecological crisis, does not change the fact that fundamental investment in our local spaces is key to developing the type of affect required to care for the world more largely. Which is, in essence, another version of the pastoral, the complex put into the simple (Empson 23). Footnotes 1 Stow first published a volume of poetry, Act One, in 1957, followed by Outrider in 1962 and A Counterfeit Silence in 1969. Through his life he would also publish seven novels, most famously To The Islands (1958) and The Merry-Go-Round-the-Sea (1965). 2 Settler is a commonly used term to refer to the non-Indigenous population of Australia, particularly Anglophone. 3 For a good overview of the origins of classical pastoral see Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral, also Daniel Halperin’s Before Pastoral provides an outline of pastoral as it leads up to and through Theocritus. For a thorough examination of how Virgil remade the pastoral, allowing the shepherd to become the vehicle through which political issues of the time would be addressed, first see Paul Alpers’s The Singer of the Eclogues which analyses the eclogues for how they reveal a Rome still in political turmoil after civil war, then see Annabelle Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology for how this model of pastoral would travel across Europe. 4 The only book-length study of Stow, Anthony Hassal’s Strange Country, appeared in 1986. Since 2000 only three works (to this author’s knowledge) have addressed Stow’s poetry, most notably John Kinsella’s introduction to his 2012 selection of Stow’s work The Land’s Meaning. 5 The 2011 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference included a roundtable entitled “Cosmopolitics and the Radical Pastoral” on whether and how the pastoral might be repurposed for ecocritical aims. Contributions are preserved at Walls and Newman’s “Cosmopolitics and the Radical Pastoral” and at the blog associated with the roundtable: http://radicalpastoral.blogspot.com.au. 6 All page numbers used to refer to Stow’s poems throughout are from The Land’s Meaning © Randolph Stow, edited by John Kinsella, published by Fremantle Press 2012, who have given permissions for the reproduction of the full poems in this article. 7 Martin Harrison typifies this type of approach to modernity “as a discourse to do with evacuation, emptiness and removal” (“The Myth of Origins” 149). For characteristic writing on this type of approach to Australian modernism specifically, see Bruce Bennett’s “Perceptions of Australia, 1965–1988”, where he locates Stow with Patrick White’s Voss “in which the real test was not of ingenuity and engineering skills … but their capacity for spiritual growth” (445). Also see Julian Croft’s slightly more optimistic “Responses to Modernism, 1915–1965”, in which he states that after the uncertainty of the early twentieth century, depictions of “Journeys to the interior might confront a vacuum and death, but insight resulted” (412). 8 “‘Pastoral’, with a root sense of feeding, as in ‘pasture’, is in common use for shepherds from the fourteenth century, and has an almost contemporary analogical meaning for priests,” notes Raymond Williams in his appendix to The Country and the City (307). 9 For seminal works tracing the rise and pressures placed upon settler Australian poetry, see Judith Wright’s Preoccupations In Australian Poetry and Brian Elliot’s The Landscape of Australian Poetry. 10 See Robert Dixon’s (2009) Writing the Colonial Adventure on colonial narratives and their distribution which highlights how incredibly popular they were by the 1870s. 11 Popularized in The Bulletin from its founding in 1880, bush ballads were a local vernacular offshoot of the Victorian literary ballad tradition (Kirkpatrick). 12 While the Georgic is beyond the scope of the present paper, it is worth noting that an understanding of the reality of farming conditions in Australia leads Paul Kane to propose that the Georgic, with its reference to the actuality of rural working life and environmental destruction, is the true modality shift in Australian pastoral (“Woful Shepherds: Anti-Pastoral in Australian Poetry” 280). 13 Versions of these two poems have previously appeared in the creative work Fish Song © Caitlin Maling, published by Fremantle Press 2019, who have given permissions for the reproduction of the full poems in this article. 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Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A Western Australian Pastoral of Rust and Dust
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa132
DA - 2020-10-08
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-western-australian-pastoral-of-rust-and-dust-WGK2MWgiog
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -