The history of poetry in Australia is a history of languages and nations. This volume provides multiple perspectives on that history. Literary histories are always full of contention and this is especially so in Australia where the political and social reality of nation is itself in contention. Poetry was an influential medium through which the structure, experiences and values of settler colonialism and then nationhood were articulated and debated. But it was also complicit in the unconscious assumption of terra nullius in the language of settlement. This is not, then, a history of the untroubled development of a nation and its poetic traditions, but of deep and ongoing debates over language, aesthetic paradigms, land ownership, and cultural and spiritual life. History emerges through documents and narration of ‘the past’; it is part of what Lisa Lowe calls ‘the economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalises the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of understanding’.Footnote ¹ Poetry is also part of this economy yet can, perhaps more than any other genre, approach that which eludes the archive or exceeds it. This includes those subjects, practices and geographies that have been excluded from ‘the human’ as well as aspects of the ordinary, of embodiment and feeling. It may provide a mode of care for cultures and communities. With its epistemological and ontological charge, poetry has been both constitutive of and the limit-point of representation.

The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry responds to the imperative to rethink and update literary history in Australia. While we have adopted a roughly chronological framework, chapters demonstrate uneven flows and thematic points of return. It is one account, albeit a polyvocal one, of the history of Australian poetry, yet it does not claim an exclusive or comprehensive totality. Rather it hopes to generate a dialogue that will enhance understandings of Australia and the significance of poetry in shaping such understandings. Throughout its compilation, we have been continually reminded of the hegemony of the English language, the degree to which the academy promotes both it and other forms of cultural influence, and our own settler monolingualism. While a publication within the Cambridge History series is itself implicated within Eurocentrism and an economy of intellectual prestige, we hope aspects of this volume will critique values and hierarchies associated with English and its print culture, problematise practices of literary history, and begin to address the relationship of the academy to surrounding, more diverse communities. To invite contributors who are principally practitioners or cultural workers rather than academics is but a small starting point. As Albert Wendt asserts, ‘all creative writers are historians’ and ‘[t]he most revealing and meaningful histories about a people are the stories, poems, myths, plays and novels written by those people about themselves’.Footnote ² We also wanted to address the fact that some poetries have been institutionally elided and required a sharing of knowledge, often through interviews, from within communities. Linked to this was our sense of the need to invite contributors who can begin to address the enormous linguistic breadth of Australian poetry.

The critic Emmett Stinson argues that literary criticism in Australia has had two strands, the scholarly and the popular, that reflect different contexts, institutions and audiences.Footnote ³ This bifurcation is apparent in one of the earliest critical surveys, Nettie Palmer’s Modern Australian Literature 1900–1923 (1924), that was part of the poet and her husband Vance Palmer’s nationalist programme to foster and legitimate the work of Australian writers. Miles Franklin distinguished Nettie Palmer from ‘practising university teachers’, characterising the latter as ‘gnats buzzing in the eyes of Australian writers’.Footnote ⁴ Yet the distinctions between the two strands are less clear in other early criticism. Poet Zora Cross’s An Introduction to the Study of Australian Literature (1922) drew upon her lectures at Sydney Teachers College. Although recently relocated to the University of Sydney, the college had little of the symbolic power and distinction wielded by the university in which it was housed. Cross’s friend, the poet John Le Gay Brereton, then a professor at the University of Sydney and one of the few at that time teaching Australian literature, encouraged her to expand her lectures for schools more generally, but she did not pursue this.

H. M. Green, also at the University of Sydney, was already writing An Outline of Australian Literature (1930) when Cross’s survey was published. Like Cross, he was adjacent to the professoriate in his role as librarian. It would be his subsequent two-volume A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied (1961) where Green attempted a larger ambitious mapping that was historical in focus. Worked on for over a decade and completed by 1954, he made further minor additions until its delayed publication. Green dedicated it to his wife, the poet Dorothy Auchterlonie, acknowledging their literary partnership and adding that her ‘critical suggestions, not always received with due gratitude, made all the difference’.Footnote ⁵ Auchterlonie made further revisions to the History in 1984. In her preface to the second edition, she argued that Green’s History demonstrated that ‘the term “Australian” is contingent and can only be provisionally defined’.Footnote ⁶ Green had sought to convey a heterogeneous vision, yet Auchterlonie felt a need to revise due not only to the rise of new writers but also to changes in what is read and how it is read (and evaluated). The perspectives of generations, she argued, were distinct. While Green’s omission of any reference to Aboriginal literature may seem ‘surprising’, Auchterlonie notes that he specifically focused on literature in print and ‘would in any case have been the last man to annex … without permission ancient Aboriginal poetry and legend in translation’.Footnote ⁷ Even so, Green overlooked Native Legends (1929) by Ngarrindjeri writer David Unaipon, and while he expanded what was counted as ‘literature’ (and was criticised for doing so), it remained relatively limited. Auchterlonie herself hoped that ‘before too long a history of Aboriginal literature will be written by an Aboriginal scholar’.Footnote ⁸

Peter Pierce identifies a movement towards a more dispersed approach to literary history following World War II, with a number of poets producing essay collections. They include: Vincent Buckley, Essays in Poetry, Mainly Australian (1957); Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965); A. D. Hope, The Cave and the Spring (1965); Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Melbourne or the Bush (1975); and Fay Zwicky, The Lyre in the Pawnshop (1986). Auchterlonie (as Dorothy Green) would move further afield than poetry in The Music of Love (1984), which drew together her essays, reviews and addresses. Geoffrey Dutton sought a broader coverage in The Literature of Australia (1964 and 1976), the book’s high sales reflecting an appetite for such a history within the education sector. Eleven of its twenty-one chapters were on poetry. The concentration of poets in such critical exercises reflects a growing institutionalisation of the disciplinary field and movement of poets into the academy.

Dutton’s The Literature of Australia was followed by Ken Goodwin’s A History of Australian Literature (1986), which approached poetry generously. Responding to Leonie Kramer’s The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981), Goodwin sought to be ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘judicial’.Footnote ⁹ Rather than a focus on form (with Kramer electing to have three scholars take carriage of fiction, drama and poetry, respectively), Goodwin proceeded chronologically but argued against definitiveness, stating that ‘every reader can have the materials for finding individual patterns in the literary history of Australia’.Footnote ¹⁰

Funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority and the Australia Council to celebrate Australia’s Bicentenary, and a joint projectFootnote ¹¹ of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and Australian Literary Studies, the Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) countered that year’s overwhelming focus on British settler colonialism by looking to diverse and competing histories. Broad in scope and multi-authored, it became a model for subsequent literary histories, and led in the way poetry increasingly began to be framed.Footnote ¹² But with three specialist chapters out of thirty-four, poetry was overshadowed by fiction and difficult to locate in its thematic chapters. In The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature (2020), poetry subsequently receives a solitary specialist focus on the twenty-first century, although the work of Judith Wright is considered in detail in relation to her deafness. While The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000) and The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1999) feature a couple of specialist chapters on poetry, The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009) has four. One volume that offers considerable space is the North American published Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (2007). Edited by Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer, it includes two survey chapters and chapters focused on Les Murray, Dorothy Hewett and Ouyang Yu. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Australian Literature has a number of essays on Australian poetry but these have been released irregularly. The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry is the first large-scale critical engagement with the histories of Australian poetry. It is complemented by The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry (2024), which features historical approaches alongside other methodologies.

Dorothy Auchterlonie pointed out that H. M. Green was ‘reproached as much for what he left out of his History as for what he put in’.Footnote ¹³ Her identification of the significance of generational shifts in revisiting literary histories is one that we have kept in mind. Whereas Green was criticised in The Bulletin for not ‘devot[ing] attention to Snugglepot and Cuddlepie’,Footnote ¹⁴ Evelyn Araluen’s recent poetic critique of the racism in such creations is a crucial part of her recent award-winning poetry collection Dropbear (2021). Auchterlonie adds that Green was highly aware of the ‘price’ that he would pay in attempting a literary history with a commitment to ‘social equalitarianism’.Footnote ¹⁵ Aware of its limitations, Green framed his book ‘as a starting point for his journey of exploration’ and knew that its ‘outline map’ would continue to be altered.Footnote ¹⁶

Laurie Hergenhan argued in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia that Australian critics had hitherto been ‘slow to change their approaches to writing literary history’.Footnote ¹⁷ His volume problematised a ‘history’ of ‘Australia’ and the narrow range of representations that might be considered either ‘Australian’ or ‘literature’.Footnote ¹⁸ Elizabeth Webby’s cultural materialist approach in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature extended to a historicisation of literary criticism itself. In his introduction to The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), Peter Pierce also discusses the institutionalisation of a national literature in the academy and notes its deployment across the world as a form of cultural diplomacy. He adds that this ‘rage for nation’, to use Philip Mead’s phrase, is one that can be dangerous in its desire for unity or uniformity.Footnote ¹⁹ Pierce closes his History with Mead’s chapter. Mead starts the conversation around alternative ways in which Australian writers have thought about their positionality in terms of regionality and the world.Footnote ²⁰ Like Auchterlonie and Hergenhan, Pierce views literary histories as generationally bound.Footnote ²¹ Each contributor, he argues, knows that they are ‘responding to a particular cultural moment’ and that the History is only part of larger movements that continue to reconceptualise literary histories.Footnote ²²

We hope to extend the inclusive orientation of H. M. Green and Dorothy Auchterlonie but to problematise the trope of exploration and the presumptions underlying cartography that territory is knowable, accessible and reducible to text. We have also encouraged a number of co-authored chapters to facilitate the practice of literary history as one where different knowledges and understandings might generatively be brought together. The group-authored vision of The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry engenders a constellation of perspectives around key events, movements and works that invites further conversations around the histories of Australian poetry. While Pierce approached women’s writing and the literature of war through other chapters, The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry has chapters focusing specifically on women poets and the impact of feminism as an increasingly diverse and culturally nuanced movement. The volume also includes a chapter on the poetry of war that rethinks it in light of settler colonialism and contemporary recognition that we live in a world of perpetual conflict and displacement. Australia currently claims 40 per cent of Antarctica’s territory, larger than the whole of the Australian continent. With the acknowledgement of the deep geological time when Australia and Antarctica were both part of Gondwanaland, this will be the first literary history to include a chapter on poetry and Antarctica.

Chapters are built not only around thematic, regional and historical perspectives, but also around influential, individual voices (Charles Harpur, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Francis Webb and Les Murray). A conscious decision was made not to include single-author chapters on living poets, given the concern around the History’s potential to be influential in canon formation. We hope, however, that The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry will be read in tandem with The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, which considers the poetry of individual authors beyond a historical framework. Besides attending to Wright and Murray, the Companion contains chapters considering Gwen Harwood’s heteronymous and incendiary verse, the work of Lionel Fogarty through the framework of negative lyricism, and the activism informing John Kinsella’s poetic practice. Chapters could have alternatively been written on Ouyang Yu or Wadih Saʾadeh as leading diasporic writers, PiO as one of the foremost experimenters of the long form, or Ali Cobby Eckermann who was the first Indigenous writer worldwide to be awarded the Windham Campbell Prize. The spirit of this History is to encourage an additive rather than substitutive lens. While some of the History’s chapters range widely over a great many poets, others focus only on a small set of individuals and might be viewed as sitting between the single-author chapter and a broad-based one.

Owing to the constraints of the volume, we only provide select bibliographies at the end of each chapter. These are not intended to be comprehensive and we recommend the consultation of the AustLit database (www.austlit.edu.au) for any who are interested in exploring the range of works by individual authors, sourcing anthologies, or finding an extensive range of scholarship pertaining to Australian literature and its contexts.

As with all literary histories, there are imbalances and gaps, in terms of both poetic and critical voices. While many nineteenth-century settler women writers appear across chapters, there is not an extended engagement with their navigation of a gendered and racialised society, domestic and public realms, and conventions of authorship and use of poetic forms. Likewise, the chapters contain only a few examples of non-white writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How to respond to the historical marginalisation of women and people of colour requires more than strategies of inclusion but also analyses of the relationship between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and recognition of difference. Another significant gap is poetries of lived disabled experience and their contribution to Australia’s growing awareness of its disability culture. While Andy Jackson points to a long history of writing by disabled people in Australia, he identifies a new wave in which disability is ‘given space to express itself … in its complexity and diversity’.Footnote ²³ Besides anthologies such as Shaping the Fractured Self, there have been feature journal issues and scholarship that is changing the way we think about the nexus between bodies and textuality.Footnote ²⁴ This History also does not contain a chapter that considers the important question of poetry’s role as both a therapeutic and a transformative means to reconceptualise self, community and care in terms of ageing.Footnote ²⁵

While editing is open to a shared or collective vision, it still relies on a degree of cultural power in its curation. The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry includes First Nations contributors but it is not the Aboriginal-led history of Aboriginal literature hoped for by Auchterlonie. This History does, however, seek to foreground the centrality of Aboriginal poetries in Australia and their increasing leadership in the twenty-first century. The History is the first broad-based literary history to spend an entire chapter on a First Nations Australian poet, highlighting Oodgeroo Noonuccal as a major cultural leader in the mid twentieth century. As Peter Minter points out, Oodgeroo not only promoted First Nations rights of self-determination nationally and internationally, but her poetry also laid the groundwork for the flourishing of Aboriginal arts practices that continues to this day. Other chapters track the role that Aboriginal writers have played in paradigmatic shifts in understandings of the interrelational nature of culture, peoples and the environment. We realise that far more is required, particularly the need to attend to the specific histories and contexts of authorship, publication and reading in Australia that might then inform processes of decolonisation. Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven has pointed to some of these questions in speculating on a treaty of shared power between author and reader of her volume Throat (2020): ‘Whose Country do you belong to and whose do you occupy? What is our relationship with each other? What are our expectations of each other?’Footnote ²⁶ In considering ‘How … we co-exist on this page’, she wonders if ‘this [is] an agreement or a series of unanswered questions’.Footnote ²⁷ How we recycle the ‘refuse of colonialism’Footnote ²⁸ and reconceptualise life and poetry both within and beyond the settler colony is being led by Aboriginal poets. As Jeanine Leane writes in ‘Still Gatherers’, ‘Blak Women … rewrite national narratives, / chronicle our genesis – project our future – gather old and new. / In creative solidarity … gather to tell – / keep telling, create – recreate’.Footnote ²⁹

Australia is home to the world’s oldest continuing cultures. At the time of invasion, there were 250 languages and 800 dialects spoken in Australia. Today there are 120 Aboriginal languages, many of which are endangered, although language recovery and revitalisation are also being undertaken.Footnote ³⁰ While The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry has a broad chronological framing, it is cognisant of the role played by Western temporality in reinforcing the structural logic of settler colonialism and mindful of Leane’s foregrounding of the interconnectedness of past, present and future. The predominance of English and the ascendancy of Western literary traditions can present a lopsided, even misleading view of poetries in Australia. In her opening chapter, Eugenia Flynn points to the alignment between British colonisation of Aboriginal lands, waters and cultures and Western literature’s framing and subsumption of Aboriginal storytelling modes. She discusses the flattening of Aboriginal ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies, and the reproduction of racist scientific paradigms. Flynn critiques an ongoing fascination with and insistence on Aboriginal orality that typically went hand in hand with the removal of Aboriginal authorship and ownership in transliterations of Aboriginal song. She goes on to discuss more recent processes of repatriation and decolonisation by Aboriginal writers and scholars that resist Western hierarchies and presumptions of supremacy.

Early British poetry of Australia imagined it either as a New World of Romantic possibility or as a place of exile and alterity. The First Fleet arrived in 1788 and established a penal colony, with free settlers arriving five years later. It was the beginning of protracted frontier wars that resulted in the death of much of the Aboriginal population, and was, from a British perspective, the creation of just one more colony. In his chapter, Robert W. Rix discusses how broadside ballads depicted transportation to the new colony through a cautionary lens, while eclogues often presented the utopic alongside the dystopic. Subversion of English authority saw well-known poems parodied on emigrant ships to Australia and the emergence of what became known as pipes in early colonial society. These were occasional verse that were often anonymous, satirical and ribald. Thomas H. Ford and Kyle Kohinga point out that while poetry may have had a nation-building function, as in Michael Massey Robinson’s official odes, or an educational drive, as in the poetry of Mary Grimstone, it could also reveal ambivalence towards colonial knowledge and order. Barron Field would announce his collection, First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1823), as an origin point for a national literature but one that is deeply ironic (Ford and Clemens). To it can be added Frank the Poet (Francis MacNamara)’s satire of failing government policy in A Convict’s Tour to Hell (1839) and Mary Bailey’s mock epic of life in Tasmania, ‘A Voice, from Ass-Mania!! Or, Neddy’s Bray’ (1847).

Paul Giles suggests that nineteenth-century poetry often explored shifting angles of perspective and, in doing so, challenged the temporality of Western cultural history. He points to the example of ‘The Tower of the Dream’ where Charles Harpur redraws English literary history to configure a republican trajectory. He also considers how Eliza Dunlop’s compass points for exile extend beyond Europe to India and Africa and how Henry Kendall’s poetry is in dialectic engagement with European traditions. These all seek a difference from a European centre. Paul Eggert argues that Harpur, in his development of a rich polyvocal poetics, may have taken a cue from Coleridge’s experimentation with modes and translations. Yet he adds that Harpur’s frequent improvisation and extensive revision of poems were a means for him not only to constantly test his own role as poet within a removed English literary tradition but also to appraise his situation within a specifically Australian environment and his relation to God.

Jonathan Dunk argues that poets were central to early imaginings of a national type. The bush school associated with The Bulletin in the 1890s would reinforce labour as a form of proving oneself ‘native of the land’, and articulate it in poetry through a class struggle with a bourgeoisie that was presented as either absent from or liminal to the land. Many ballads and poems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were masculinist and predicated on racial elision, including most importantly a logic of Aboriginal extinction. Michael Farrell suggests that anonymous songs and ballads that emerged in the nineteenth century should not be presumed to be wholly by or for white male settlers and had the flexibility to hold a diversity of voices. Different versions, he argues, may reveal different pressing concerns as well as differing sensitivities towards race and gender. While many early ballads carried stories of revolutionaries or outlaws, Farrell agrees with Dunk that they typically convey a moral message but adds that their humour provided a means of catharsis. Farrell points out that many ballads became redirected to children as ‘quasi-pedagogic entertainment’, and that nineteenth-century ballads continue to feature large within twentieth-and twenty-first-century cultural imaginaries. While festivals of bush poetry continue to be popular, once-popular works such as C. J. Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke have been reframed as a verse novel to gain new middle-class audiences.

The twentieth century would see an increasing accommodation of white women’s voices in English-language publications. Jess Cotton notes how the emergence of women’s voices in Australian poetry was inseparable from an increasing focus on industrial labour and reproductive labour, which was linked to a rights discourse informing the Suffrage movement. The violence associated with racism, however, was often elided. Its nexus with nostalgia and futurity in the work of early women poets such as Mary Gilmore and Marie E. J. Pitt would delimit their otherwise radical vision. The rise of the New Woman would likewise be tied to a problematic discourse of purity that pervaded the pages and editorials of early women-run magazines such as Louisa Lawson’s The Dawn. Cotton tracks how women poets such as Zora Cross sought to challenge cultural constraints around femininity but were still limited by censorship in the publishing industry. Poetry that was aesthetically and thematically radical such as that of Lesbia Harford remained in the private sphere, even while she was an active figure on the political Left.

Nancy Berke points out that greater possibilities for travel in the early twentieth century meant that writers were increasingly mobile. While some such as Mary Fullerton would remain focused on Australia, others such as Lola Ridge and Anna Wickham, whose time in Australia was foundational to their subsequent experimentation, enlivened modernist circles in the United States and England, respectively. For others who came to Australia, expectations around what constituted national voice proved to be limiting. New Zealand-born Dora Wilcox (1873–1953) was best known for her collection Verses from Maoriland. Her poem ‘Australia in Luce’ was read to commemorate the opening of the first federal Parliament House in 1927. It would be derided, not for articulating a national vision of Aboriginal absence, but for being too feminine and derivative of English literary tradition.

As Kristine Moruzi and Beth Rodgers discuss in their chapter, literature for children provides telling insights into the cultural values deemed important to instil in future generations. Children’s literature in Australia has tended to be obscured by an overwhelming critical focus on fiction, yet poetry remained the most prominent form for children in the nineteenth century. Poetry for the youngest of children, such as the alphabet books that would proliferate from the 1850s onwards, tended to entrench settler colonialism and Christianity, yet also revealed tension between British imperialism and growing nationalist sentiment. While volumes imported to Australia from London circulated cautionary tropes such as the child lost in the bush, children’s columns and pages in newspapers and periodicals increasingly featured positive representations of free-spirited children. State-based school readers that began to be produced from the end of the nineteenth century reminded children of the continuing significance of the British Empire. Moruzi and Rodgers trace a renaissance of children’s books in the 1920s that emphasised entertainment and magical worlds with recognisably Antipodean elements. Children themselves wrote poetry, their work appearing in periodicals, anthologies and occasional single-author collections. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that children’s poetry featured more culturally diverse perspectives.

Moruzi and Rodgers point to the significance of newspapers and periodicals in cultivating readers, even from an early age. Peter Kirkpatrick reinforces the importance of newspapers in not only encouraging literacy but also literary sociability in the nineteenth century. The emergence of clubs would also quicken a sense of artistic community, with early ones informed by a male homosociality. Women’s clubs and reading groups such as the Lyceum and the Austral Salon (which founding member Ethel Castilla would lovingly dub ‘The Hen Roost’) would also strengthen networks for women writers. Little magazines, too, increasingly provided significant forums for literary communities and the emergence of new forms. While The Bulletin’s Red Page was dominant for decades, it featured both poems depicting the bush and some of the earliest Symbolist poetry in Australia. Kirkpatrick also discusses how academic journals extended forums for poetry and its criticism.

Philip Mead discusses the cinematism of perception in Kenneth Slessor’s writing, arguing that Slessor’s interest in the new medium of film gave him a visual sense that was broader than Imagism. Mead argues that Slessor’s experimentation also has an affective current to it that heightens both Slessor’s existential anxiety and historical awareness. While Mead considers Slessor’s representation of World War II both as a poet and as an official war correspondent in detail, Ann Vickery traces the role of poetry in understandings of war and conflict in the ongoing impact of European invasion, the extension of national mythos through the ANZAC digger, Australia’s involvement in World War II and the Vietnam War, and the contemporary era’s sense of perpetual war, crisis, and displacement.

In their chapters Toby Fitch and Gavin Yates discuss the impact of Symbolism and Surrealism on Australian poetries of the early twentieth century through to today. Fitch identifies two streams that track through Christopher Brennan, with one leading to mid twentieth-century poets such as Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James McAuley, and the other more wayward stream leading to the later work of Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Chris Edwards. Yates discusses Surrealism’s reception in 1930s Australia followed by its adoption by those associated with the little magazine Angry Penguins, then poets of the 1970s, before considering how it informs the work of contemporary poets. Nicholas Birns contrasts the formation around Angry Penguins with the Jindyworobaks, with the former looking to the global and the latter to the local. Rex Ingamells and Ian Tilbrook’s ‘Conditional Culture’ is a manifesto of the Jindyworobaks in their rejection of European frameworks in favour of Indigenous culture and Australia’s distinct environment. Birns points out that the Jindyworobaks’ selective appropriation of Indigenous languages and culture was often delivered through recognisably Western forms to gain populist accessibility. In contrast, Max Harris sought to foster a specifically Australian genius within global modernism in the pages of Angry Penguins and believed he had found just that in the form of unknown, recently deceased ‘Ern Malley’. A hoax devised by James McAuley and Harold Stewart, Birns argues that their statements purporting to be those of Malley might also be thought of as a manifesto. Finding overlaps between Ern Malley’s imagery and the Jindyworobaks, he points to the way in which both movements have been subsequently reduced to a couple of poets. Yet whereas the Jindyworobaks largely disappeared from view, Ern Malley’s poetry continues to attract attention from writers in Australia and elsewhere.

Georgina Arnott argues that the Ern Malley hoax provided the means to break a perception of the superiority of British literary tradition. Anxieties of cultural authenticity and originality, she suggests, fed into a mid twentieth-century desire to reinforce a national canon. Her chapter maps the dominance of the publisher Angus & Robertson in shaping Australian poetry for several decades, the emergence of new, highly influential literary magazines, and the role of political parties and government in supporting poetry initiatives. A growing recognition of Australian literature as a discipline led to a concentration of poets who also wrote criticism entering the academy. The conservatism of Australian culture under Robert Menzies would shape a turn back to European literary tradition. It was an era, Arnott argues, marked by male sociability, insularity and the need for cohesion. As she points out, it would be women writers such as Gwen Harwood who would test such presumptions, and Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal who would demonstrate poetry’s potential to disrupt imperial inheritances, including what constitutes literary value.

Two chapters consider the importance of Wright and Oodgeroo as poets, public intellectuals, and cultural workers. Sarah Kennedy maps the shifts in Wright’s poetics in light of her aesthetic and political networks, and her support of the Aboriginal land rights movement, friendship with Oodgeroo, and involvement in the environmental movement. Characterising her as the ‘grandmother’ of Aboriginal poetry, Peter Minter discusses Oodgeroo’s critique of the correlation between colonialism and the English language, and her significant decolonisation of Aboriginal literary expression. He condemns the false binary of poetry and protest writing through which her work was sometimes dismissed. As Minter discerns, Oodgeroo became a leader in civil rights, land rights and Aboriginal-led environmentalism. Both Wright and Oodgeroo would turn away from poetry as they undertook cultural work through other means.

Nicholas Jose undertakes a ‘shadow project’ in looking back on translations of Australian Aboriginal songs in English, pointing out the range of problems in attempting to translate that which is culturally specific, site specific and event specific, as well as the additional issues of translating into the coloniser’s language and print culture. He frames this as an ‘unwanted and impossible archive’. Bonny Cassidy assesses the influence of 1950s access to anthropological documentation of First Nations poetry in Jindyworobak poetry as well as analysing how aspects of settler violence trouble Jindyworobak poems. She traces a growing reflexivity and accountability in later twentieth-century settler poetry, from tonal forms of discomfort in Randolph Stow’s poetry to Philip Hodgins’s taoistic approach that is simultaneously blunt and resonant. Even later poetry of place, she suggests, undermines illusions of the colonial nation-state, whether focused on the regional or the urban. She tracks poetic attention to a layered and mobile littoral and, in particular, the role of the visual.

Continuing with place, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton discuss how the suburb was neither rural nor the inner-urban, and was long viewed as an unsuitable subject for poetry or depicted as a place of diminished creativity and opportunity. This began to change by the end of World War II with advances in art and the depiction of the quotidian in the hoax poetry of Ern Malley, soon to be followed by the work of the ‘Melbourne group’ of poets, including Vincent Buckley, Evan Jones, R. A. Simpson and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Hetherington and Atherton demonstrate how nuanced engagement with suburban uneasiness and related existential questioning occurred among other poets, focusing at length on Gwen Harwood’s multiperspectival work. They also consider the emergence of hybrid forms such as the verse novel and prose poetry, and how their capacity to hold irony or the demotic has been particularly generative for linguistically and culturally diverse poets as well as women.

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth argues that three ontologies of regional poetry exist, these being an Indigenous ontology of country, the ontology of science through bioregions, and the ontology of settler belonging. He adds that these ontologies are distinct from each other and incommensurate. In his chapter, he considers Paul Carter’s theory of creative regions, which derive their significance from their potential for community. Hughes-D’Aeth’s chapter focuses in on two literary regions, one of mid north New South Wales and the other, the Western Australian wheatbelt. A space not often considered in literary histories is that of Antarctica. Elizabeth Leane observes that poetry would be a source of entertainment in early expeditions to Antarctica and that early depictions by poets such as Henry Kendall present it as a haunted, mysterious and sublime space. While the ‘Heroic Era’ of exploration had occurred in the 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century, it was poems of the mid twentieth century that mythologised Antarctica through narratives of heroism and conquest as part of a movement to quell anxieties over national identity and authenticity. Australia’s challenging position on Antarctic mining regulation in the 1980s and 1990s would lead to a renewed interest by creatives and initiatives such as residencies have continued to result in poetic engagement.

Ali Alizadeh considers poetry’s relationship to the state, demonstrating how poetry both reflects dominant ideology and often presages hope for the future. Accordingly, a life of security and consensus modelled in a 1950s poem is reflected in its regular form; a 1980s poem reflects the era’s progressive neoliberalism both in its form as an irregular prose poem and in its valorisation of the individual’s perceptions over recognition of inequity; and the contemporary poem reflects the crisis-prone material conditions of life and an understanding of a lack of choice available. While the mid twentieth-century poem is hopeful of a continuation of economic boom, the contemporary poem often contemplates the possibilities of survival.

In his chapter, Andrew Taylor identifies a sense of colonial provincialism and restriction at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to a number of writers relocating to England or the United States. Among them would be Peter Porter, Katherine Gallagher and Clive James. As Louis Klee asserts, the concept of the expatriate has been a racialised concept and fails to account for more complex relations between place and identity that diasporic movements often bring.Footnote ³¹ While chapters in the History discuss poetries emerging out of some of these broader diasporic movements, we might also add the relocation of poets to Japan and Korea (e.g., Harold Stewart, Corey Wakeling and Dan Disney) or to what is now the European Union (e.g., Louis Armand, Marc Jones, Sam Langer, Marty Hiatt and Joel Scott). Just as Nancy Berke’s chapter traces the transnational mobility of early twentieth-century women poets, we might also consider the similarly complex mobility of later poets such as John Mateer and Michael Brennan.

Taylor discusses the debate between Porter and Les Murray, which distinguished between an Athenian tradition of poetry that looked to a cultivated city centre and its marketplace while the centre for the Boeotian was any place seen as sacred. Michael Hofmann considers how Les Murray’s poems were dedicated to God’s glory in their celebration of Australian distinctiveness. He recounts his own revelry in the torque, freshness, singularity and seeming effortlessness in Murray’s poetry, and his marvel at Murray’s capacity to find startling resemblances and connections. Yet he also discusses how Murray himself later contributed to a reductive pathologisation of his poetry. One of Murray’s best-known poems, ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’, took as its template Ronald Berndt’s translation of the ‘Wonguri-Mandjikai Song Cycle of the Moon-bone’. Criticised for its appropriation and elision of Aboriginal culture, Murray would allude to himself, partly facetiously and partly seriously, as the ‘Last of the Jindyworobaks’.Footnote ³²

As Hofmann suggests, Murray would promote his own sense of the sacred. In her chapter, Lyn McCredden views Murray’s need to court argument while in the pursuit of spiritual truths in terms of the intense debates then occurring around religious, social and political positions among poets. As she points out, religion has long been contentious due to perceptions of Christianity’s alignment with colonial authority. The impact of Darwinism would see some in the nineteenth century grapple with a crisis of faith while eugenics, church reform and spiritualism also shaped religious belief. McCredden considers Fay Zwicky’s exploration of ancestry and devotion, elements of Buddhism in Judith Beveridge’s poetry, and the foregrounding of Aboriginal spirituality through the poetry of Lionel Fogarty. A chapter on Francis Webb by Bill Ashcroft examines Webb’s poetics through not only his Catholic conviction, which would be highly significant, but also his early travel and long-term mental illness. Ashcroft suggests that Webb has occupied a position as a poet of obscurity and of fervent admiration. McCredden argues that the twenty-first century is seeing a greater awareness of religion’s intersectionality with other aspects of identity, growing recognition of important Muslim voices, and Indigenous-led understandings of religion.

Konstandina Dounis writes of a monoculturalism generated by the White Australia policy and the development of a hierarchical settler scheme following World War II whereby a wave of immigration from Europe other than from the United Kingdom was seen as an antidote to a decreasing population. Dounis contextualises the poetry written by first-generation migrants in light of their treatment as ethnic minorities, noting that many wrote in their first language and circulated their poetry through community magazines and clubs.

The 1970s saw a shift away from the conservatism that characterised post-war Australian culture. Besides the rise of various, often interconnected rights movements such as the sexual liberation movement, the women’s movement, gay and lesbian liberation, and the Aboriginal land rights movement, there was access for a short period to free higher education, protests against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, and experimentation with mind-altering drugs. Fiona Scotney argues that poets were beginning to look for new models in light of the realisation that, as Robert Kenny phrased it, we ‘are not from our backyard’. Important influences here were contemporary movements, publications and figures in North American poetry. The connections were also sometimes personal with visits to Australia in the 1970s and 1980s of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson and Denise Levertov. New print technologies would result in a proliferation of little magazines and presses, followed by anthologies that themselves became part of a volatile, highly contested field. Poets to emerge out of this new dynamic of Australian poetry included John Tranter, Robert Adamson, Pam Brown, Jennifer Maiden and John Forbes, all of whom would produce influential bodies of work in the following decade. John Hawke discerns that while the subsequent decade of the 1980s began with a marked division between poets associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’ and affiliations with the previous one, greater complexity soon became apparent involving regional nuances, intergenerational and cross-‘faction’ influences, the emergence of new voices, and longer innovative experiments with poetic form.

With the absorption of the Commonwealth Literary fund, which had been founded in 1908, into the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 1973, government support for writers was expanded and reshaped according to a modern arts policy. Support for poets and poetry was part of this revamped arts funding regime. From the 1970s, literary prize culture has grown into both state-based and federal recognition for writers, as has the establishment of further major prizes. Yet, as Clare Millar has pointed out, there has sometimes been a lag time or lack of recognition for poetry.Footnote ³³ While the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were established in 2008, poetry only became a category in 2012. The Tasmanian Literary Awards have only recently included an award for poetry. The Australian Book Industry Awards does not have a poetry category. The Stella Prize only began accepting poetry collections in 2022, a decade after it began as a counter to the under-representation of women in Australian prize culture. Both its naming and creation were a reaction to the male-dominated shortlists of the prestigious Miles Franklin Award (particularly the 2009 and 2011 shortlists); the Miles Franklin Award itself continues to focus on the novel (although verse novels are eligible). Hazel Smith points out in her chapter that there has been less recognition for electronic writers in both Australian prize culture and public funding than elsewhere in the world. Just as some states included a digital category for a temporary period, the Australia Council ran a grant for digital and new media works from 2011 to 2014. Poetry prizes have provided significant boosts to the reputation and income of writers. In 2023, for example, Gavin Yuan Gao won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry ($80,000) for his first poetry collection, At the Altar of Touch, having earlier won the 2020 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize that awarded $2,000 but also, more significantly, a publishing contract. And in 2024, Grace Yee won both the Victorian Prize for Literature ($100,000), as well as the Award for Poetry ($25,000), for her debut verse novel, Chinese Fish.

Despite the delays surrounding poetry’s inclusion in prize culture, Alexandra Dane discerns that it is the only genre that has closed the gender gap in literary awards, with the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry being the only one in her 2020 study where the majority of its winners were women.Footnote ³⁴ Other factors inform understandings of literary value. The Stella Count 2019–2020 found that 68 per cent of all poetry reviews in 2020 were written by men, up from 62 per cent in 2019. Including non-binary writers in 2019 since it first started in 2012, the Stella Count also found that 4 per cent of all poetry books reviewed in 2020 were by non-binary writers. Moreover, the ‘gender siloing’ where ‘men tend to review men and women tend to review women’ has ‘evened up substantially’.Footnote ³⁵

Poetry anthologies are a further means to promote literary value but can also test how poetry is evaluated and reveal new demographics of both writers and readers. In her chapter, Kate Lilley discusses Kate Jennings’s anthology Mother I’m Rooted as groundbreaking and emblematic of the grassroots collectivism that marked second-wave feminism. Published in International Women’s Year in 1975, its market success demonstrated a broad appetite for women’s poetry. She notes that subsequent women’s poetry anthologies in the 1980s and 1990s were published during an era when departments of women’s studies emerged, and feminist theory and women’s writing were familiar in literary studies curricula. Anthologies of the twenty-first century ventured into both greater specificity and intersectionality, often challenging the delimiting lens of colony and nation. Lilley also discusses the material, archival turn in feminist poetry, particularly in terms of naming and calling out sexual abuse and settler-colonial violence. Jill Jones and Bonnie Reid note intersections between feminist poetry and queer poetry in their exploration of an embodied politics of sexuality and intimacy. Their chapter traces the role of small presses in gay and lesbian liberation and community-making and the coalitionist politics evident in the editing of anthologies and journals. Included in these publications were hybrid pieces that crossed the creative and the critical and would sometimes be viewed as fictocritical, as well as innovative forms that articulated the multiplicities of embodied experience. Verse novels would also align the subversion of genre boundaries with challenges to heteronormativity. Queer, trans and gender diverse writing increasingly began to appear in the twenty-first century, as well as poetries that resisted colonial logics and which celebrated First Nations understandings of sexuality.

Building on Peter Minter’s chapter on Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Philip Morrissey discusses her continuing activity in the 1980s. Morrissey argues that the First Nations poetry that followed Oodgeroo’s We Are Going (1964) drew attention to the role of language in not only reproducing settler-colonial authority but also as that which can contest such power. Citing Jack Davis, Stephen Muecke, Mudrooroo Narogin and Adam Shoemaker that ‘Aboriginal writing can often be seen as a community gesture toward freedom and survival’, he demonstrates poetry’s effectiveness in protests, often in the form of chants. Alongside the criticism of Mudrooroo, the work of Kevin Gilbert and Lionel Fogarty would both build upon but be distinguished from that of Oodgeroo. Besides poems on Aboriginal deaths in custody, including Fogarty’s brother, Morrissey traces the extensive testimonies of prison poetries. To Gilbert, Fogarty and Mudrooroo, one might add Lisa Bellear, Romaine Moreton and Kerry Reed-Gilbert, and Reed-Gilbert’s The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) to Inside Black Australia (1988). Morrissey considers how twenty-first-century Aboriginal poetries have extended critiques of colonial violence and articulated Aboriginal subjectivity and the importance of First Nations languages to this subjectivity.

As mentioned earlier, Australian culture has been indelibly shaped by diasporic movements. There have been multiple diasporas from Asia, the world’s largest continent, of forty-eight countries. In their chapter, Prithvi Varatharajan and Lucy Van consider how the term ‘Asian Australian’ often refers to poetries of South East or South Asia. They discuss how editors and scholars have often sought to keep ‘Asia’ as fluid, with the emergence of ‘Asian Australian’ as a term reflecting this unboundedness. At the same time, they also discuss the limitations of such a broad term, particularly a loss of cultural specificity. Huang Zhong and Wenche Ommundsen have drawn attention to poems in Chinese languages appearing in periodicals of Chinese communities in Australia at the turn of the twentieth centuryFootnote ³⁶ while Ommundsen has also observed that the impact of the White Australia policy meant large-scale migration from Asia only became possible from the 1970s onwards.Footnote ³⁷ Varatharajan and Van’s chapter tracks how anthologies before Contemporary Asian Australia Poets (2013) were either unable to accommodate poets of Asian origin in Australia, or featured Australian poets with predominantly European genealogies, or otherwise merged Australian poets of Asian ancestry into a broader category of multiculturalism. While ranging broadly, their chapter also provides detailed readings of writing by poets of South East Asian diasporas: Adam Aitken, Merlinda Bobis, Ouyang Yu and Michelle Cahill.

Paula Abood considers poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas, suggesting that diaspora retains an affective memory, as well as being multi-sited and, most importantly, translingual. Abood, like Dounis, articulates a sense of alliance among diasporic poets with First Nations’ people and the relation of language to country. Abood argues that while poets such as Wadih Saʾadeh have attracted international acclaim, it is only recently that he has been recognised as a presence in Australian literature. Abood discusses the precarity and risk of the poet in terms of witness and protest, the articulation of cultural memory, and the role of translingual poetics in reinforcing community. She also notes the significance of journals and literary collectives in providing space for such poetics.

As with migration from Asia, migration from Latin America occurred in the 1970s. The first Spanish-language poetry collections in Australia were produced by writers from Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay. As with other diasporas, periodicals have been significant spaces for Spanish-language poetry in Australia, as Stuart Cooke discerns, while anthologies have also drawn together such writing. He discusses how the sense of being continually cast as Other shaped Silvia Cueva-Morales’s decision to move to Spain, Cueva-Morales having migrated from Chile to Australia as a teenager in the 1970s and published in Australia throughout the 1990s. Cooke also covers the creation of the Australian colonies of New Australia and Cosme in Paraguay in the 1890s and the racialised vision of a possible utopia. Out of this social experiment emerged Mary Gilmore’s continuing interest in Latin American writing, which she shared with Nettie Palmer.

A number of chapters consider histories of different poetic forms: performance poetries, long form poetry, concrete and conceptual poetry, and digital poetries. Andy Jackson documents how performance poetry and its scenes often provided a form and space for those invisible in hegemonic representations of society. Elizabeth McMahon has also pointed to performance poetry as a form that ‘sets up traditions and connections outside the English literary canon’.Footnote ³⁸ In his chapter, Jackson outlines the renaissance of performance poetries in the 1970s, including La Mama readings in Melbourne, the establishment of the Poets Union in Sydney, the establishment of Adelaide’s Friendly Street, and the shift from university-based readings organised by the ‘Seven Poets’ group in Perth to more community-based readings. The 1980s saw a diversification of performance poetries and institutional interactions, whether in the form of prison workshops or writers’ festivals, whereas the consolidating decade of the 1990s was partly shaped by a DIY culture of zines and independent music. The 2000s onwards saw the popularisation of poetry slams and an increase in poetry festivals.

In his chapter on long form poetry, Simon Eales identifies a shift in epic functioning as a vehicle of settler poetics to becoming a means to critique settler poetics from the 1980s onwards. Eales also discusses the emergence of the verse novel as a recognisable and highly popular form, before proceeding to consider non-fiction long poems (including verse biography and autobiographical long poems), documentary poems (with its subcategory of the historical long poem), Indigenous long poems and experimental long poems, including those marked by mixed media and typographical innovation. In his chapter, A. J. Carruthers approaches conceptual poetry as a form of demonstration and symbolic critique that often includes contradictions. He also covers concrete poetry and artists’ books, noting that many examples include visualism as a key aspect. Hazel Smith traces the emergence of electronic poetries in the 1990s, including their enactment of a post-human cosmopolitanism and increasing use of multimedia. As she notes, early electronic poetry experimented with hypertext, text generation and recombination, digital manipulation of word and voice, and Flash poems. While Mez (Mary Anne Breeze) would create her own language, others would experiment with game frameworks and, interrelatedly, with 3D, or with artificial intelligence. Smith also examines Indigenous digital poetries, often critiquing the presumptions surrounding ‘programs’. Lastly, Smith considers the movement towards digital publishing in the twenty-first century, digital databases, and the marginalisation of digital poetries in prize culture.Footnote ³⁹

In his chapter, Tom Bristow considers recent environmental poetry in light of the Anthropocene. While a precept of First Nations culture is caring for Country, which acknowledges the material and spiritual connectedness of humans to environment, the English invasion would have catastrophic consequences on what was then ‘one of only eight biologically “megadiverse” regions on the planet’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Environmental historian Tom Griffiths has argued that ‘Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management, sometimes a horrifying concentration of environmental damage and cultural loss, and sometimes a heartening parable of hope and learning.’ He adds, ‘Such a roller-coaster of environmental history makes us think differently and more sharply than the rest of the world on many ecological matters.’Footnote ⁴¹ In his chapter, Bristow undertakes close readings of contemporary poets to demonstrate the ethical lens increasingly brought to bear on how we live in our time and place. Many of these poets were part of a special feature, ‘Unrooned: Dry and Tender Poetics from Australia’, edited by Michael Farrell that appeared in a 2006–9 double issue of the international journal ecopoetics.Footnote ⁴² Following on from Oodgeroo’s trailblazing work, contemporary First Nations poets are leading the way through embedded and transcultural practices of sustainability and respect towards ecologies. John Kinsella has also argued that poetry itself is not enough and that it should take part within a connected and collective activism for environmental protection.Footnote ⁴³ Ellen van Neerven explains the Indigenous writer’s aversion to poems about nature when she argues that ‘First Nations people don’t have a separate word for nature in our many languages.’ She adds, ‘I am not aware, either, of any First Nations’ words for such things as environment or ecology.’Footnote ⁴⁴

The final two chapters turn to anthologies from the 1990s to today. This extended focus on anthologies represents an innovation in the literary history of poetry in Australia in its inclusion of empirical methods to investigate patterns in how and when poetries were being grouped and categorised, who was anthologising or being anthologised, and the kinds of explanatory frameworks that were being used. What these chapters illustrate is the ways in which anthologies provide insights not only into the varieties and contexts of contemporary poetry in Australia but also into the ways they are being valued and by whom. In the first of these chapters, Jaya Savige considers the millennial drive to anthologise as arising partly out of a moment to review and reconceptualise Australia’s poetic canon, and partly out of the need to identify a newer generation of poets. Sometimes these strands were not unrelated. Savige discusses the emergence of historical surveys and anthology series promoting the ‘best’ of contemporary Australian poetries. He argues that anthologies seeking to capture a new generation are marked, significantly, by an ethical turn.Footnote ⁴⁵ The second chapter considers the proliferation of specifically oriented anthologies. These map material and affective change and typically ‘coalesce strategically’ around some form of cultural identity or a ‘thematic, aesthetic, formal or dialogical imperative’. Many, as Savige discerns, ‘extend recuperative, topical, or other discursive trajectories established in the late twentieth century’. The relational practices of these anthologies often exceed or resist ‘cultural nationalist definitions and priorities’. A significant addition to understandings of developments of poetry in Australia, Savige’s approach sits valuably alongside the continuing power of close readings, as exemplified in Martin Duwell’s essays and reviews on his Australian Poetry Review site.Footnote ⁴⁶

Characterising the current state of Australian poetry, Bronwyn Lea declares, ‘The richness, strength, and vitality of Australian poetry is marked by a prodigious diversity that makes it as exhilarating to survey as it is challenging to encapsulate’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This History hopes that the complexity and energy in Australian poetry is also apparent throughout its chapters.

Michael Hofmann reminds us in his chapter of just how much a poem can exhilarate, how a ‘turn of the page’ may result in not ‘knowing where you would be’ and encountering a poem that radiates, ‘lit out on its own’. While we hope that the History will generate critical dialogue, we also hope that it will lead to an engagement, above all, with the poetry itself and other aspects of the reading experience and the excitement and joy that it can bring.