This chapter traces early migration from Europe during the Gold Rush and the change from multiculturalism to monoculturalism with the advent of the White Australia policy. However, it focuses primarily on first-generation migrant writers from Europe following World War II. The chapter argues that migration should be viewed through the lens of heterogeneity, shaped by geographic, cultural, linguistic and class disparities. The chapter discusses how first-generation migrants existed as ethnic minorities who often experienced hostility and were directed towards manual employment. It examines the emergence of ethnically specific periodicals, following by literary journals, literary and cultural associations, poetry collections, and anthologies. The chapter identifies a predominant theme of nostalgia, with related elements of loss and hope. Another identified theme is social justice, including empathy for the impact of displacement felt by Aboriginal peoples and a support of Aboriginal sovereignty.

This chapter discusses early Chinese writing in Australian Chinese periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century, which was then followed largely by an absence of Asian voices in Australian anthologies until the late 1950s. It critiques the early anthologies that turned attention to Asia as either focusing only on ‘Australian’ perceptions of Asia or separated ‘Australian’ and ‘Asian’ writers along lines of ethnicity. It discusses the publication of poetry collections by Asian Australian poets as occurring in the late 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of Asian Australian studies in the 1990s in light of American Asian studies. It critiques the limitations of an ‘Asian Australian’ framework along with the tendency to homogenise migrant writers under the rubric of multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Australia. It discusses the emergence of literary magazines as forums for Asian Australian writing and as developing cross-cultural solidarities, and anthologies, criticism and writing that has foregrounded diasporic frameworks and intersectionality. The chapter then undertakes analysis of four major recent writers.

This chapter begins with outlining the repeated appeal from non-Indigenous Australians to share in the heritage of First Nations people without recognition of the ongoing impact of colonialism. It argues that one devastating consequence was the loss or endangering of many first languages of Australia. The chapter considers the relationship between poetry, language and Country, described by Alexis Wright as ‘library land’. Foregrounding the immeasurable significance of these archives of land and lived cultural practice, the chapter details the differences between Aboriginal oral traditions and the translation of Indigenous song poetry into a written context. Aboriginal women’s poetry of mourning and lament, milkarri, is discussed, the chapter pointing out that the power of such songs remains with those to whom the songs belong and the Country that has created the songs. It turns attention to attempted translations of Aboriginal song into English by Eliza Dunlop and then more contemporary translations of Indigenous oral traditions, such as John Bradley’s bilingual book co-authored by Yanuwa families, Stuart Cooke’s translation of Kimberley song cycles, and the Queensland University Press bilingual anthologies of Aboriginal song cycles. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the translation history of the Moon Bone cycle.

This chapter considers the role of periodicals, little magazines and literary clubs in fostering communities of Australian poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the importance of such communities in encouraging debate, circulating new poetries and encouraging generative connections between poets. The chapter discusses periodicals such as The Bulletin as a hub for what came to be known as the Bush School of poetry, and Vision that became an instrument for the poetics of the Lindsay circle. Yet it also discusses other little magazines such as The Heart of the Rose, The Triad and Stream. It considers the proliferation of literary clubs, which began as bastions of male homosociality but also began to include women writers or were for women only. It also discusses how periodicals and little magazines drew attention to and encouraged experimentation with new forms and concepts such as Symbolism and Vitalism. The chapter also includes the significance of literary magazines, some of which were supported by or emerged out of universities.

From the Frontier Wars to contemporary conflicts, this chapter considers the role of Australian poetry in shaping understandings of war. It includes early critiques of British command during the Boer War and national mythmaking around Breaker Morant. It then considers the patriotism and propaganda of poetry in World War I and the generation of the Anzac or digger myth in national identity. It considers the role of humour and the vernacular in popular poetry, and writing from the homefront. It traces the change in attitudes as World War I continued and resulted in a heavy loss of Australian lives. The chapter also considers poetry written during World War II and the Vietnam War. It considers how writers experimented with form and imagery to create a vehicle of protest, as well as to navigate disillusionment and loss. The chapter considers poetic engagements with a movement into perpetual war and conflict in the late twentieth century, including the role of media. Lastly, it considers the voices of asylum seekers and the role of poetry in protesting and critiquing government policy around border security.

This chapter examines the early colonial imaginary of Australia. It demonstrates how there was no unified perception of the land but rather movement between utopic and dystopic visions, often according to audience. The chapter discusses poetic speculation on the expansion of empire into what was viewed as the ‘New World’ and the publicising of the colony as a space of pastoral idyll for prospective emigrants. It also considers the negative depictions of Australia as a penal colony, particularly through broadside ballads that were popular among the working class. Lastly, the chapter analyses the representation of female convicts and the adaptation of the eclogue form by Robert Southey.

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’. 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.

This chapter examines the ways in which Judith Wright shaped Australian literary culture, not only through her poetry but also through her work as an editor, anthologist and critic. It contextualises the development of Wright’s poetry in light of her childhood, education and the impact of World War II, arguing that misreadings of her pastoral lyric during Wright’s lifetime failed to appreciate how it undercut settler mythmaking. The chapter discusses Wright’s exploration of a psychic interior during the 1950s and how she became increasingly focused on the settler-colonial mind during the 1960s. It outlines Wright’s engagement with Aboriginal land rights and her leadership in the burgeoning environmental movement. The chapter ascribes much of this change to the influence of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and discusses their poetic correspondence and friendship in the 1970s. The chapter also considers her turn from poetic voice towards practices of observation and listening, arguing that Wright’s attention to ‘the human pattern’ evident in her last volume, Phantom Dwelling, suggests less a silence in her later years than a realignment of her focus and energy.

This chapter considers conceptual books, conceptual writing and concrete poetries, while distinguishing conceptual books and writing from other experimental work. It analyses several examples to demonstrate how their very structure forms a critique of dominant knowledge systems, including structures of settler colonialism and nation. It also considers the relationship between conceptual art and conceptual writing, and the focus on materials, processes and practices surrounding the poem or book’s existence, value and consumption. It discusses the role of visualism in much of conceptual writing. It discusses how conceptual writing has troubled both First World and North-centric mappings and influences, creating parahistoriographies that might be considered parallel to, and separate from, dominant histories.

While pointing to poetry’s diminishing role as a public medium and its increasing absence from major addresses by Australian heads of State, this chapter considers how critical discussions of events that have drawn poetry and the State together often focus on the poet’s politics rather than examining the poetry itself. An example of this is Prime Minister John Howard’s invitation to poet Les Murray to assist in drafting a Preamble to the Australian Constitution. Instead, the chapter focuses on the ideology underpinning the relationship between poetry and the State through three examples from different historical periods. It reads Douglas Stewart’s ‘The Silkworms’ as an allegory for the citizens of a modern, industrialised State in the post-war 1950s. It considers Vicki Viidikas’s ‘Weekend in Bombay’ as engaging with progressive liberalism in the 1980s, and Chloe Wilson‘s ‘Ice’ as articulating the spiritual need and helplessness felt by Australians in light of political and environmental crises and perpetual uncertainty.

This chapter synthesises empirical methodology with detailed contextual analysis to reflect on the ways in which anthologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century constructed or de-prioritised national, canonical and generational frames. Noting previous interpretative frameworks such as ‘new lyricism’, this chapter argues that a number of anthologies during this era reflected an ethical turn in Australian poetry and emerged out of or postulated literary communities and networks. The chapter includes an analysis of the two Best Australian anthology series and an analysis of anthologies with canonical impetus. Lastly, it considers the shift in definitional terms from the ‘modern’, ‘new’ or ‘now’ to the ‘contemporary’, as well as forms of discontent with such a term.

This chapter examines the changing reception of Charles Harpur’s poetry. Firstly, it considers the valuing of Harpur as a nature poet, and secondly, the impact of literary theory on interpretative approaches. It then outlines a third phase that is text-historical or text-critical, and which is attentive to the poems’ multiple moments of composition and revision. The chapter discusses Harpur’s navigation of colonial readership, and how he experimented with a range of voices. It includes an examination of his translations that are related, in part, to Harpur’s fascination with the role of the poet and with other poets, such as Coleridge.

This chapter investigates the penal colony in Australia as a radical extension of European systems of social discipline and moral transformation. It considers how poets in colonial Australia faced a multitude of tasks, including the adaptation of British literary cultures to new territories, developing a sense of colonial belonging, taking imaginary possession of Indigenous lands, and also occasionally expressing ambivalence to Indigenous dispossession. The chapter discusses how poets responded to early administrative structures, with many engaging with a satiric form known as pipes that circulated clandestinely. While some poetry embraced a more ironised and alienated poetics, other poetry such as Michael Massey Robinson’s odes reinforced a Virgil-influenced alignment of land cultivation and moral improvement. The chapter then considers Barron Field’s nation-building use of poetry and the relationship between poetry and promotion of the unwritten doctrine of terra nullius.

This chapter argues that any discussion of Aboriginal writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is political in nature and requires an interrogation of the role of Western epistemologies in the colonisation of Aboriginal lands, waters and cultures. It considers the role of English language and text in the conceptualisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Australian literature’s role within Western epistemological supremacy. The chapter argues that Aboriginal storytelling modes, particularly poetry, have been central to resistance and struggle against British colonisation. It explores the strengths of Aboriginal writing and the role of Aboriginal poetry in decolonisation.

This chapter examines the small press activity that continued to flourish in large Australian cities in the 1980s while smaller centres were dominated by particular individual writers. It considers how some poets began to adapt poetic language to the novel. It also tracks the publication of anthologies by mainstream publishers, including important collections of Aboriginal writing and women’s poetry by Penguin. The chapter includes a discussion of the Sydney Women’s Writers Workshop that began in the 1970s and continued through the first half of the 1980s. It analyses poetry by a wide range of writers, including John Tranter, John Forbes, Les Murray, Robert Gray, Vicki Viidikas, Anna Couani, Martin Johnston, Laurie Duggan, Alan Wearne and John A. Scott.

This chapter considers the emergence of gay and lesbian voices in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to political activism and forums such as small press culture, the visual arts and performances. It discusses how some of these were associated with the women’s movement. It notes how an early coalitionist approach transformed into separatism between the lesbian and gay communities, followed by a return to coalitionist approaches in light of the AIDS crisis. The chapter analyses the print culture supporting gay and lesbian writing during these decades. It tracks the emergence of queer poetries that rejected identity categories, including queer Aboriginal poetry. It discusses the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ writing, including the film adaptation of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. Lastly, the chapter considers the proliferation of publications by gay, lesbian, queer, trans and non-binary poets from 2010 onwards, contextualising them in light of public debates around the Australian Marriage Law postal survey, the Safe Schools Coalition, and protests around police participation in and corporate sponsorship of the Mardi Gras Parade.

This chapter traces the ways in which Surrealist concepts and textual features were engaged by and absorbed into Australian poetry. It begins with Surrealism’s early reception in the 1930s, followed by the response of writers associated with Angry Penguins, and the work of Ern Malley. It then considers the re-emergence of interest in Surrealism in the ‘generation of ’68’, particularly in the writing of Jas H. Duke, Philip Hammial and John Jenkins. The chapter concludes by analysing the Surrealist ‘automatic effect’ in selected contemporary poets.

This chapter analyses the role of anthologies in the documentation and shaping of feminist poetries. It considers how they perform cultural, political and aesthetic work for communities of writers and readers, and exist both within and beyond institutions. The chapter considers the engagement with feminism as developing in different generations but also as having important inter-generational connections. The chapter also undertakes close readings of major feminist poets in the late twentieth century to today.