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.

The chapter offers provisional compass points for navigating new modes of writing by 21st-century Australian poets in light of a world of overdevelopment, environmental crises and extinctions. The compass points include: modes of anxiety and grief involved with poetic form, and material forms emerging in combination with agencies, matter and forces. Inflection points include the shared becoming of humans and non-humans. The chapter includes a discussion of ecopoetic literary journals, as well as anthologies that have gathered and showcased ecopoetry, radical writing of land, and environmental protest poetry. It includes analyses of poetry by writers such as Judith Beveridge, Louise Crisp, Coral Hull, John Kinsella, Peter Minter and Mark Tredinnick.

This chapter considers the increased opportunities for women writers to travel and relocate in the early to mid twentieth century. It analyses the possible impact that living in Australia could have on their writing but also how increased mobility generated a sense of independence that led to an experimentation with form. It would also embolden some to protest against social injustice, as well as enable more unconventional life paths. The chapter also considers how these writers navigated a sense of displacement and liminality in their writing. Lastly, it demonstrates how national categories were delimiting for these writers’ careers and had a negative effect on the later reception of their work.

This chapter considers how the concept of literary regionalism sits uneasily in relation to three incommensurate ontologies: the Indigenous ontology of Country, the ontology of science expressed through the project of the ‘bioregion’, and the ontology of settler belonging. It argues for the provisional nature of literary regionalism and outlines settler regionalism as emerging most fully as a second generation of settler poets (including Judith Wright, Dorothy Hewett and Randolph Stow) began questioning their settler inheritances. The chapter includes a discussion of the concepts of ‘creative region’ and ‘author country’. It considers the literary region of mid north New South Wales in the work of Judith Wright, Les Murray and Alison Whittaker, and a literary region in Western Australia in the work of Randolph Stow, John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green.

This chapter analyses how poetry of the late nineteenth century were mythopoetic exercises which promoted a nativist labour poetics that typically subtended the primary conflict of settler colonialism. It analyses how the heroicisation of bush work in the 1870s was built upon in the late 1890s when economic depression and changes to labour conditions saw a tightened alignment between labour to values of citizenship, civilisation and moral virtue. While 1890s poetry depicted the material and psychological consequences of capitalism and economic depression, its advocacy for workers’ rights were racially bound and can be mapped onto events that led to the White Australia policy. The chapter also discusses the influence of correspondence with Walt Whitman in Bernard O’Dowd’s vision of radical nationalism, yet also how such vision was likewise racially limited.

The chapter situates children’s poetry within the print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how such poetry provides insights into the shift from a reliance on British practices and literary models to a sense of literary distinctiveness and independence. It discusses how early alphabet books developed literacy as well as inculcated social and political values. It also considers how some children’s verse disseminated the trope of the lost child in the bush, while other verse familiarised children with the Australian environment. It discusses the emergence of fairy and fantasy worlds based on distinctly Australian settings following World War I, and a growing depiction of Australian progress. The chapter discusses the pedagogic role of school readers and their role in mediating continuing connections to Britain and a specifically Australian identity. The chapter also discusses the significance of columns for children in periodicals, and how their encouragement of children to write which led to the rise of a number of child poets.

This chapter considers how Australians have looked to South America for what they might become while Argentinians looked to Australia for what Argentina could become. It traces William Lane’s failed utopic colonies in Paraguay in the 1890s and, following her participation in one of them, Mary Gilmore’s engagement with and promotion of Latin American culture to other Australian writers. It considers Latin American migration to Australia, particularly in the late twentieth century. It discusses the role of little magazines, small presses and radio shows in encouraging poetry by Latin American migrants. It analyses their sense of marginalisation to mainstream Australian literary culture, and shifts towards decentring Australia in both writers’ transcultural movements and framings by anthologies. Lastly, the chapter examines recent encounters with Latin America by Australian-born poets and discusses competing framings of the South, including by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and John Mateer.

This chapter considers the empire- and nation-building capacities of the long poem in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, including epics by R. H. Horne, Will X. Redman and Rex Ingamells. It then analyses revisions of the epic in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples that undo settler monumentality, explore other cultural narratives or make use of other media such as film. It discusses the popularity of the verse novel, observing its beginnings in the World War I writing of C. J. Dennis. It considers the renaissance of the verse novel in the late twentieth century, examining how its cross-genre form was often able to accommodate transgressive desires. The rising popularity of young adult verse novels is also detailed. The chapter traces the emergence of non-fiction long poetry, viewing it through the sub-categories of documentary, history and biography. It then discusses Indigenous long poems and recent experimental long poems, including ones that explore visual, conceptual and digital possibilities.

This chapter examines specifically oriented poetry anthologies of the twenty-first century, observing their interstitial and multivalent nature. It argues that they fall into two kinds. one is deployed towards institutional consolidation; the other, which is the principal focus of the chapter, is a strategic gathering around a cultural identity, or a thematic, aesthetic, formal or dialogical imperative. The chapter discerns that many such anthologies extend recuperative, topical or other discursive trajectories established in the late twentieth century. Many exceed national-historical formations, track evolving conceptual frames of literary and cultural studies, and map material changes in, and significant structures of feeling around, social, political, intellectual and artistic life. It also includes a discussion of the challenges and significance of translation.

This chapter considers the fraught and complex history of religion and poetry in Australia, given the context of settler – colonialism, Aboriginal understandings of Country, and Australia’s growing cultural diversity. Discerning that anti-religious sentiment has emerged through a perception of Christianity as too close to settler – colonialism, it argues for a broad understanding of religion to include major world faiths and Aboriginal spirituality. It considers how nineteenth-century poets responded to the crises of faith brought about by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and then how poets grappled with meaning-making and value-making following the two world wars. At the same time, it recognises that many poets; including Francis Webb, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley; and Les Murray; still shared an institutional understanding of religion. The chapter considers how recent poets have meditated on the relationship between the secular and the sacred. It analyses the mosaic quality of Fay Zwicky’s reflections on her Jewish ancestry, as well as the navigation of Buddhism in poets like Harold Stewart, Robert Gray; and Judith Beveridge; Christianity in the work of Kevin Hart and Lachlan Brown; and Islam in the work of Omar Sakr.

This chapter considers the profound physical co-presence and ritual language in First Nations culture, the role of poetry readings at formal occasions, folk ballads in early settler culture, and the continuing popularity of bush poetry today. It traces the emergence of performance poetry, as it is most well known, in the 1970s, discussing how it became a way for many to articulate lived experiences that were otherwise silenced in written form. Links to community and a curious general public are detailed. The chapter discusses the establishment of the Australian Poets Union and the relation of live poetry to little magazines. It considers the expansion and diversification of live poetry in the 1980s, and the fostering of vernacular and everyday experience as street poetry. It then discusses growing institutional recognition, including the creation of state poetry festivals and the increasing recognition of sound poetry. The chapter analyses the alignment of performance poetry with DIY aesthetics, disruptions of the global, branching into music and the rise of poetry slams. It concludes by reflecting on how performance poetry has been powerfully shaped by First Nations and culturally diverse poets.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.

This chapter identifies Symbolism’s influence on Australian poetry as taking two trajectories. The first, more dominant trajectory traces the Symbolism as emerging from A. G. Stephens’s editorial work and Christopher Brennan’s adaptation of Mallarmé’s doctrine into a metaphysical tradition. The chapter follows its continuation in the poetry of A. R. Chisholm, Randolph Hughes, Nettie Palmer, Zora Cross, the Vision circle, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James McAuley. The chapter argues that a second, more adventurous and feral trajectory includes Brennan’s most experimental writing, the work of Ern Malley, Patrick White’s Voss, and more recent poetry by Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Chris Edwards.