In 1961 a woman who would soon be described condescendingly as a Hobart housewife and mother of four punctured one of Australia’s most monstrous egos. Her two acrostic sonnets, written under one of the male pseudonyms that she used because of her sense of how poetry by women was undervalued in Australia, was published in the Bulletin. To the petulant rage of its editor, Donald Horne, the pair of poems by ‘Walter Lehmann’, ‘Abelard to Eloise’ and ‘Eloise to Abelard’, had a contemporary satirical point for which the doomed medieval lovers had been enlisted. Read vertically, the initial letters of each line spelled out ‘so long Bulletin’ ‘fuck all editors’. Harwood’s first book of poetry, published by Angus & Robertson after unconscionable delays, did not appear until 1964. The Bulletin scandal is what she is perhaps still best remembered for, but her later achievements would lead Clive James at least, and gallantly, to proclaim Harwood as Australia’s finest twentieth-century poet.

Alison Hoddinott has been a ‘keeper of the flame’ for Harwood for more than half a century. With Gregory Kratzmann, she edited Harwood’s Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003) and, on her own, the prize-winning Letters to Thomas Riddell 1943 (1990). Now she has edited one of the most pungent and engrossing collections of letters by any Australian writer, the mildly titled Idle Talk: Letters 1960–1964. In her Introduction Hoddinott explains that ‘these letters from Gwen Harwood were written to me and my husband Bill (WGH) between early 1960 and March 1964’. Many were on the back of what Harwood called Sappho cards, illustrations cut from Victorian and Edwardian books and magazines, a number of them reproduced here, with often mischievous captions. Hoddinott anticipates: ‘[Harwood] describes academic and social gatherings with a lively mixture of excitement and satire.’ Often as the letters declare Harwood’s hatred of Tasmania—‘this ugly charm flung in seas of slate’—and Hobart in particular, she was inspired to acerbic wit by the tight, fractious and talented scene that she found there.