My first proper literary memory is of watching Wisława Szymborska’s Nobel Prize speech on television with my grandparents. I was six years old and I can recall only feelings and images related to that moment. My family felt much pride about the poet. Szymborska was not merely a great writer, she was our great writer. Poland was still facing challenges after regaining its independence, and Szymborska’s Nobel Prize was a big deal for us—a sign that our literature and thus our country matter on the world stage. It was my first lesson in how literature shapes the way in which a country understands itself and through which our relationship to a country is shaped. This was reflected in how Polish was taught to me at school—there was an emphasis on historical texts that in one way or another spoke to Polish national self-determination, such as Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz or Henry Sienkiewicz’s historical novels.
When I moved to Australia, I was struck by the contrast. The literature covered in English classes was radically different—with no focus on Australian books as far as I can remember, while the approach to history and culture focused on what I now understand to be a very colonial view of this country. Unsurprisingly then, I left school without a strong sense of Australia: I had no conceptual framework in which to think of it as my home or to understand my place in this land. While now I feel I am much closer to understanding Australia and where I fit, the complexities of life as a migrant in a colonial state are always going to require attention. The books I discuss below are those that were most important to me in figuring out how everything fits together.
Kenneth Slessor, Selected Poems (1957)
Kenneth Slessor’s book is my first conscious and deliberate encounter with Australian letters. I was hanging out with friends from university, among them Julian—a talented poet in his own right—who introduced me to Frank O’Hara and the New York poets, and then to Slessor. Julian and I lost touch a long while ago, and I don’t know if he still writes, but I hope he does.
The Selected Poems is a collection that grew out of Slessor’s One Hundred Poems (1944), which in turn was a collection culled from the three previous books he’d published. It was reissued under a new title because of the addition of several poems. This book precipitated the first seismic shift in the way I understood Australian literature, of which until then I only had a vague impression. I found Slessor’s writing to be wonderfully melodious and filled with music. Although I found the language difficult, it drew me in with its imagery and the emotions that it could bring out. Most importantly, Slessor helped me find my way among Australian books, and from him I found other poets such as Gwen Harwood and Judith Wright. Through them, I found others and could begin exploring the Australian canon as one that felt, partly at least, my own. While today I no longer hold Slessor in the same esteem as I did at first, his Selected Poems is still foundational to how I have come to understand Australia.
Reading the poems now, more than a decade after I was introduced to them, I’m still drawn to their beauty. I am also filled with a sense of their age. What I mean by this, to be kind to Slessor, is that I take some of his poetics to be a consequence of his time. I don’t think it speaks poorly of him or his work that the writing has aged, given the transformations in the Australian poetic landscape of the past 80 years. Considering books only from the past two or three years, Australian poetry is constantly evolving. And though he is far from the poets I am interested in now, without him I would possibly still not know any Australian poets.
Ania Walwicz, horse (2018)
horse is a book that is part memoir, part theoretical treatise, part poem and part fiction. It is all of these things, and it stands, to me at least, as Walwicz’s masterpiece. It has a unique place for me in the Australian literary landscape. Like her, I moved here when I was young. We share a common language and cultural heritage. Like her, I grew up with the story of Konik Garbusek—the Humpback Pony—by Pyotr Yershov. My grandmother would read to me from an old copy, one from which she’d read to my mother and her sister. Walwicz transforms the fairytale in framing her horse as she breaks down the boundaries between literary forms and genres, and the English and Polish languages. At one point she refers to the book as a ‘polyphonic novel’. It is a majestic cacophony of ideas exploding from the page.
Walwicz labels the text as an attempt at figuring herself out. She writes: ‘I am located within the gap and the split and absence which constitutes analytic discovery … I am going to find me. I am on my way and on my way here and on my way.’ She’s ruthless with herself. Every part of her is up for scrutiny in the text, as she digs deeper into herself to extract from the place where her ‘memories are pre-verbal, unspoken, unformed, outside of language or on the side of language, on the borderline of language and the body where sensations are located’.
Walwicz had an acute sense of place on which she drew in her work. She was an Australian poet and a Polish poet, and she was unwilling to be either to the exclusion of the other. In their ‘Australia in Three Books’ essay, Yves Rees points out, rightly, that Australia is to many writers the place to leave, but of course, for many of us—Walwicz and me included, it is the opposite. It is what we came to as our adopted home for better or worse, and which nourishes our writing. In horse, this sense of her position here is clear: she is here as a guest or visitor who is lucky to have found hospitality for a lifetime. She doesn’t try to forget where she is from but accepts both as home. Reading a writer such as Ania Walwicz has been transformative to my sense of being here—she was, and continues to be, a model of how a creative life can be nurtured in this place, how the culture I grew up with can merge with the culture here, and how navigating the boundaries between the two can be a source of creative energy.
Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear (2021)
Australian literature is largely a colonial one—the work that was my entry point is doubtlessly an exemplar of this. There is, however, in this literature a growing anti-colonial current that with each year gains strength. Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear is a recent and powerful example of how literature can be used to resist and undo historical wrongs. In many ways, this book is an act of defiance against the kind of colonial self-understanding to which Slessor’s work is a contribution, and it takes on the difficult task of challenging and reshaping the dominant Australian mythology.
Poems such as ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’ and ‘Playing in the Pastoral’ show just how the modern Australian self-understanding and mythology of this place marginalise Indigenous Australians. The dominant culture, Araluen shows, is sanitised, bland, filled with empty platitudes and unwilling to move towards justice. In ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’ she writes, ‘We are relearning this place through poetry.’ Likewise, through poetry is how I am learning this place. Coming here from the outside demands a good deal of care to avoid the risk of perpetuating historical colonial violence. Dropbear shows the necessity of constantly grappling with the idea of place, particularly for those of us who are migrants and need to figure out how
we fit here.
When considering what Australia is I am stuck in the middle point between seeing this place as my home and understanding that it is not quite mine to call home. Poetry has a way of helping one through this by pushing at the boundaries of meaning in our language, and thus uncovering more clearly the structures that bind or separate us. In each stanza and each verse, Araluen reveals and tears through the way in which colonial Australian culture is created, and leaves the reader with far more clarity. As she says in the acknowledgements of her book, ‘Many lives and stories have been erased, exploited or violated in the short but haunted history of Australian literature.’ It’s very easy simply never to become aware of this when coming into this country already half-formed and largely ignorant of its history, and when the dominant culture is so ready to accept a brutal colonial hierarchy. Dropbear is the antidote to that poison of the mind. •
Maks Sipowicz is a Polish-Australian writer living and working in Naarm.
