Australian and New Zealand Poetry

Introduction

When the first Europeans arrived in Australia, they found that the land was inhabited by people who had no written language. Because the Aboriginal peoples were preliterate, the settlers assumed that they were also prehistorical. What the new settlers did not realize is that the Indigenous peoples did indeed have a rich history as well as a shared system of mythical beliefs, which had been transmitted orally from generation to generation. Though the Aboriginal narratives were poetic in form, they were performance poetry: The stories were sung, danced, or acted out. Because this format was so ephemeral and because the Aboriginal peoples were reluctant to admit outsiders to their rituals, many of which were deemed sacred, White Australians had almost no knowledge of Aboriginal writings for the first hundred years that the colony was in existence. Moreover, when collections such as Catherine Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896) began to appear, even though the stories they contained followed the plot lines of their Aboriginal sources, their form was that of the European folktale.

By the middle of the twentieth century, anthropologists were producing books in which complete Aboriginal narratives, such as song cycles, appeared along with English translations, which reproduced the verbal patterns of the original works as closely as possible. Meanwhile, some Aboriginal peoples had begun to write in English, often to protest the treatment of their people. The first of these writer-activists was Kath Walker (1920-1993), who, in her first book of poetry, We Are Going (1964), warned White Australians that her people did not intend simply to disappear. In 1988, as a protest against Australia’s bicentennial activities, Walker returned to her tribal name, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, which she used for the stories and poems she wrote during her final years. Another writer who adopted a tribal name was Colin Johnson (1939-2019), whose book Wild Cat Falling (1965) was reputed to be the first novel published by an Aboriginal writer. Among the many other publications of Johnson, known since 1988 as Mudrooroo Narogin, or just Mudrooroo, are three verse collections, The Song Circle of Jacky (1986), Dalwurra (1988), and The Garden of Gethsemane (1991). Though Mudrooroo was recognized as a leading activist and an authority on Australian Aboriginal literature, The Australian Magazine published an article questioning his claim of Aboriginal identity in 1996. Nevertheless, Mudrooroo continued to be considered one of Australia’s most important Aboriginal writers. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was customary for anthologies of Australian verse to contain both translations of ancient Aboriginal poetry and poems by writers of Aboriginal ancestry, who used the English language to recall their traditions and to express the concerns of their people.

The colonial period

The first book of poetry published in the colony of Australia was First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819), by Barron Field (1786-1846), a judicial appointee from England. Field’s volume contained two poems, “Botany Bay Flowers” and “The Kangaroo.” Field found Australia interesting, but after seven years there, he was evidently happy to return home. Two Australian-born poets, William Charles Wentworth (1790-1872) and Charles Tompson (1807-1883), were more enthusiastic about their country. In his epic poem “Astralasia” (1823), Wentworth envisioned the colony’s becoming a new, more perfect England, and in Wild Notes, from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (1826), the first book of poetry by an Australian to be published in Australia, Tompson pointed out the beauties of the Australian landscape and stressed the importance of preserving the natural environment.

The anonymous bush ballads and convict songs of this period present a very different picture of life in the colony. With wry humor, the writers describe their struggles against oppressive heat and persistent mosquitoes; comment on the difference between the lives of those Australians who have money and those who have none; warn those at “home” to avoid crime, lest they be transported; and clearly regard themselves as exiles struggling desperately to survive.

By the 1830s, the colony was producing some poets of more than historical importance. Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was driven by his desire to be Australia’s first major poet. He was underrated for decades but has come to be regarded as the finest poet of the colonial period. Although Harpur relies on traditional forms, his poetic works are not conventional or imitative in their content. Whether they are philosophical discourses (“The World and the Soul”) or narratives with an Australian setting (“The Creek of the Four Graves”), Harpur’s poems are both unique and memorable.

One of colonial Australia’s most popular poets was Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870), who exemplified the masculine values that characterized the later colonial period. Gordon was admired both for his superb horsemanship and for his poems about life in the outback. One of his best-loved poetic works is “The Sick Stockrider,” a tribute to mateship, or comradeship, and to the stoical acceptance of one’s fate. It appeared in Gordon’s second volume of poetry, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870). The day after the book was published, Gordon committed suicide.

Another important nineteenth-century Australian poet was Henry Kendall (1839-1882), whose works ranged from lyrics such as “Bell Birds” and “September in Australia” to satirical portraits of outback types. Kendall also wrote poignant love poems; narratives with biblical, classical, or local settings; and patriotic or occasional verse.

Women poets in the colonial period

Even in this new country, women did not have the freedom of thought and expression that they would a century later. Whatever their private feelings, they were expected to display a ladylike sentimentality in public. Nevertheless, several women managed to publish some creditable works. One of them was Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880), who came to Australia from Ireland with her second husband, who was assigned as protector of a group of Aboriginal peoples. She was one of the first Australians to seriously study the language and culture of the Aboriginal peoples. Her sympathy for them is evident in her frequently anthologized poem “The Aboriginal Mother,” which first appeared in the Australian in 1838.

Louisa Anne Meredith (1812-1895), an Englishwoman who settled in Tasmania, won honors for her illustrated books, several of which were collections of her descriptive, lyric poetry. Another native of England, Ada Cambridge (1844-1926), spent much of her life in rural Victoria with her clergyman husband. A prolific writer, she published short fiction, novels, essays, and autobiographical works, as well as five collections of verse. Though Cambridge’s poems tend to be sentimental in tone and often have a moral, they do sometimes exhibit some intellectual complexity, as when she writes of the loss of sexual desire in “The Physical Conscience” and “Unstrung.” One of her most moving poems is “By the Camp Fire.” In that poem, while acknowledging that God is at his most magnificent in Australia, the speaker still yearns for the organ music of England, where her soul seemed so secure.

A new era

During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, it became increasingly evident that the attitudes and values of Australians were changing. Because most of the population had been born in Australia, the old nostalgia for England had largely disappeared, and as the fervor of the 1888 bicentenary celebration demonstrated, Australians were taking pride in their own hard-won land. In addition, they were rejecting many of the old ideals, notably individualism, while they exalted mateship or the collaborative efforts of working men—men, not women, for Australia remained dominated by masculine values. The Sydney Bulletin, which was founded in 1880 and soon began calling itself the Bushman’s bible, reflected the new Australia: It was against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, as well as Aboriginal peoples and Asians, but strongly supported workers, unions, and republicanism.

One of the first poets to emerge in this new era was Henry Lawson (1867-1922), who was born in the goldfields and grew up in rural New South Wales but later joined his mother in Sydney, where she was active in the republican movement. His first poem, “A Song of the Republic,” appeared in the Bulletin. Lawson, who called himself the people’s poet, became known both for protest poetry and for poems about life in the bush. Surprisingly, during World War I, Lawson wrote patriotic poems in support of the war. Although in his later years Lawson wrote a great deal of verse, his reputation rests primarily on the short fiction he wrote in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Bernard O’Dowd (1866-1953) was an even more radical writer than Lawson. The son of Irish Roman Catholic immigrants, O’Dowd was a radical socialist who voiced his demands for social justice and his hopes for Australia both in prose and in poems such as those in Downward? (1903) and in the long poetic work The Bush (1912). Another radical writer, who wrote under the pen name Furnley Maurice (Frank Wilmot; 1881-1942), published his first verses in O’Dowd’s journal Tocsin. Wilmot was one of the most vocal opponents of Australia’s entering World War I; he not only opposed war in general, but also, as a nationalist, believed that his country should avoid becoming involved in the corrupt politics of Europe and devote itself to its own development. By contrast, some poets, among them Lawson, saw wartime service as an example of mateship. Two books of colloquial verse narratives by C. J. Dennis (1876-1938) exemplified the “digger” ideal, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) and The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916); both of them were as popular with soldiers at the front as they were with people at home.

In 1923, the magazine Vision was established to oppose the mateship ideal, as well as isolationist nationalism, and to support the publication of poems in the Romantic-Symbolist tradition, focusing on the themes of art, memory, time, and death. Though only four issues of the magazine were published, it was responsible for introducing promising new poets to the Australian public. One of them was Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971), who served on the staff of the magazine. Slessor, who is credited with introducing modernism into Australian poetry, notably through his reliance on imagery, remains one of Australia’s most important poets. Another Vision poet, R. D. Fitzgerald (1902-1987), is admired for his prizewinning long narrative poem Between Two Tides, which is built on his two major themes, the need for resolute action and the inevitability of death.

Jindyworobaks, Angry Penguins, and lyricists

In the 1930s, Australians were again moving toward isolationism and nationalism, which had their most extreme expression in the Jindyworobak movement. In 1938, the Jindyworobak Club was founded in Adelaide, and that same year, the first Jindyworobak Anthology of poetry appeared. Poets associated with the movement sought inspiration from Australian history, from the outback, and from Aboriginal art. They urged becoming more closely tied to the environment, and some sought spiritual enlightenment through the Aboriginal “dreamtime.” The practice that many Australians found objectionable, however, was the use of Aboriginal words in English-language poems. Even though the final anthology appeared in 1953, the Jindyworobak movement continues to exert an influence on Australian writers through its recognition of Aboriginal art and its environmental emphasis.

The Angry Penguin movement of the 1940s was very different from the Jindyworobak movement. It began in Adelaide with a quarterly journal called Angry Penguins, which opposed nationalistic socialism and was devoted to the avant-garde in film, the visual arts, and literature. Max Harris (1921-1995), one of its editors and a major contributor, was a target of a hoax perpetrated in 1944 by the conservative writers James McAuley (1917-1976) and Harold Stewart (1916-1995). The two wrote some nonsensical poems that were supposedly by a poet named Ernest Lalor “Ern” Malley and had them sent to Harris, who was so captivated by his discovery that he featured Malley and his poetry in a special edition of Angry Penguins. After the truth came out, Harris and his modernist magazine became a laughingstock. Angry Penguins did not survive, and for some time, the modernist movement attracted fewer followers.

Among the new poets emerging during the 1950s and 1960s were A. D. Hope (1907-2000), who is still admired for his use of classical allusions and mythological references; Douglas Stewart (1913-1985), a New Zealander, who described the natural beauty of Australia and New Zealand in moving lyrics; and David Campbell (1915-1979), whose meditative lyrics are ranked as some of his best poems. Also gaining recognition during this period were a number of women poets. In 1946, Judith Wright (1915-2000) published her first volume of poetry, The Moving Image. Wright would become one of the most highly regarded Australian poets, as well as a prominent literary critic, editor, short-fiction writer, and activist in conservation and in support of Aboriginal rights. In 1992, Wright became the first Australian to be awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. Other award-winning women poets who came to prominence during the period were Rosemary Dobson (1920-2012), Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), and the feminist Dorothy Hewitt (1923-2002).

Infinite variety and international recognition

During the 1960s, a number of Australian poets voiced their conviction that Australian poetry needed to develop new themes and settings to reflect the urbanization of the nation or to experiment with forms as the American postmodern poets had. One of these would-be reformers, Thomas Shapcott (b. 1935), chose an unusual subject, life in a provincial town, for his Shabbytown Calendar (1975). Another, John Tranter (1943-2023), used fragmentary, disjointed forms in his early poems, thus illustrating the kinds of changes he had advocated in his introduction to The New Australian Poetry (1979), though his later poetry was more traditional. As the editor of the magazine New Poetry, Robert Adamson (1943- 2022) was another influential force for change. In The Clean Dark (1989), Adamson demonstrates that postmodern forms can be just as effective as a more traditional format in the communication of profound feelings, such as his love of the Hawkesbury River area, where he made his home.

Among the many experimental poets who attained recognition in the final decades of the twentieth century are Anna Walwicz (1951-2020), Dorothy Porter (1954-2008), Ken Bolton (b. 1948), and Ross Clark (b. 1953). Jennifer Maiden (b. 1949) combines fiction, fictional autobiography, and autobiography with family memories and references to current events in her poetic works, which, though often puzzling, richly reward intensive study.

Others pursued very different paths. Though in the twenty-first century, they remained as highly regarded as they were thirty years before, both Bruce Dawe (1930-2020) and Les A. Murray (1938-2019) continued to eschew postmodernism, believing that poetry can be significant only when it is accessible to ordinary readers. Thus, the poems in which Dawe takes up the cause of the ordinary person against tyranny are written in colloquial language, and the poems in which Murray urges a return to the values of the early settlers, to what he calls the true spirit of Australia, are as straightforward as the rural people about whom he writes. Dawe and Murray won numerous awards in their careers. Dawe received the 2000 Australian Council for the Arts Emeritus Writers Award for his lifelong contribution to Australian literature and the Australian Government's Centenary Medal in 2001. In 1998, Murray was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2005, he received the Premio Mondello award in Italy. He was also nominated for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2002, leading many to call him Australia’s leading poet. When he was given Germany’s Petrarch Prize (Petrarca Preis) in 1995, it was evident how much Murray contributed to the international recognition of Australian poets.

New Zealand poetry

Like Aboriginal Australians, the Pacific Peoples of New Zealand had their own mythology and rituals expressed in poetic form, and many of them were recorded by European scholars late in the nineteenth century. However, the first Māori poet to produce high-quality poetry written in the English language did not appear until well into the twentieth century. Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008) published his first collection of poems, No Ordinary Sun, in 1964. A playwright and short-story writer as well as a poet, Tuwhare proceeded to win many honors, including being named New Zealand’s Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1999. His poems are routinely included in anthologies of New Zealand poetry. Another frequently anthologized Māori writer is Keri Hulme (1947-2021). Although she is best known for her Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People (1984), Hulme also produced several volumes of very fine poetry, including Strands (1993) and her final work, Stonefish (2004). In 1990, another distinguished Māori poet, Robert Sullivan (b. 1967), published his first collection, Jazz Waiata. His other volumes of poetry include Voice Carried My Family (2005), Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010), Cassino: City of Martyrs (2010), and Tūnui | Comet (2022).

The Māori term for New Zealanders of European descent is Pakeha. One of the few nineteenth-century Pakeha poets who is still remembered is Alfred Domett (1811-1887), a statesman and the fourth premier of New Zealand. Ironically, though he was known for his uncompromising attitude toward the Māori people, after he returned to his native England, Domett wrote a fourteen-thousand-line epic about the Māori Peoples called Ranolf and Amohia: A South-Sea Day-Dream (1872). Colonial writers often expressed ambivalent feelings about their new home and even about their roles there. In “A Colonist in His Garden,” William Pember Reeves (1857-1932) admits that although he still loves England, he takes pride in his role as a “tamer” of the wilderness, while in “The Passing of the Forest,” he expresses concern over the destruction of New Zealand’s natural beauty for the sake of progress. It is significant that Reeves spent his final years in London, where he was New Zealand’s agent-general. Another well-known nineteenth-century poet was John Barr of Craigilee (1809-1889), who wrote poems in the Scottish dialect, sometimes praising life far from tyrannical lords and sometimes expressing his yearning for his native Scotland. However, the most famous nineteenth-century poet was Thomas Bracken (1843-1898), who used his position as editor of the Saturday Advertiser to provide an outlet for New Zealand writers. Bracken’s poem God Defend New Zealand, which appeared in the Advertiser in 1876, became one of New Zealand’s two national anthems.

The twentieth century and beyond

Some of the most gifted poets of the twentieth century were women. In Shingle-Short, and Other Verses (1908), Blanche Baughan (1870-1958) experimented with open forms and unusual imagery, innovations that would not be seen again until the advent of modernism. The traditional lyrics of Eileen Duggan (1894-1972) brought her international acclaim. The serene poems that Mary Ursula Bethell (1874-1945) wrote during her years at Christchurch, many of which appeared in From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929), reflect her religious faith and her appreciation of natural beauty. Another important poet was Iris Guiver Wilkinson (1906-1939), who wrote striking poems under the pen name Robin Hyde. Though her present reputation rests primarily on her short fiction, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was also a gifted poet.

The publication of Kowhai Gold (1930), an anthology edited by Quentin Pope, damaged the reputation of women writers. Although it contained poems by such fine poets as Duggan, Mansfield, and Hyde, the anthology was criticized as a collection of mere “magazine verse,” resembling the effusions produced in the previous century by sentimental ladies and altered only by the addition of verbal decorations, or “kowhai gold.” In a country still dominated by masculine values, it was tempting to apply these strictures to women writers who used traditional forms and themes.

With the publication in 1945 of A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-1945, Allen Curnow, the editor, became one of New Zealand’s most influential literary critics. Curnow had established himself as a poet with the appearance of his first published collection, Valley of Decision (1933). Shortly thereafter, he had begun contributing to the publications of Caxton Press in Christchurch. By the end of the decade, Curnow’s poetry was showing the influence of modernists such as the American-born English poet T. S. Eliot. In his selection of poets to be included in the anthology, Curnow demonstrated his approval of poetic innovations, and in his lengthy introduction to the volume, Curnow called for exploration of the national identity, arguing that the poems in the collection reflected the imaginative problems of people confined to an isolated island nation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Curnow’s preeminent position in New Zealand letters was challenged by a group of poets operating out of Wellington, led by James K. Baxter (1926-1972). The young poets of the Wellington School resented Curnow’s power and rejected his ideas, which they interpreted as nationalistic. They even managed to protest so effectively that the publication of Curnow’s new anthology was delayed for two years. During the 1960s, the charismatic Baxter not only took Curnow’s place as a literary arbiter but also produced an immense quantity of fine poetry. After Baxter’s death, Curnow began publishing again, this time poetry that was simpler and more colloquial in style and more personal in subject matter than what he had written earlier. Curnow’s achievements were recognized in 1989 when he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Just as in Australia, during the final decades of the twentieth century, New Zealand saw an explosion of poetic talent and the publication of poems written in a variety of styles. Among the many poets who came to prominence during the 1970s and 1980s were C. K. Stead (b. 1932), Fleur Adcock (b. 1934), Ian Wedde (b. 1946), Bill Manhire (b. 1946), Elizabeth Smither (b. 1941), Tony Beyer (b. 1948), Murray Edmond (b. 1949), and Cilla McQueen (b. 1949). Stead continued publishing works through the twenty-first century and served as poet laureate of New Zealand from 2015 to 2017. He wrote The Black River (2007) after experiencing a stroke and outlined his European travels in The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007–2012 (2013). Adcock's works include Poems, 1960–2000 (2000), Dragon Talk (2010), The Land Ballot (2015), and Hoard (2017). Other works from these authors include Three Regrets and A Hymn to Beauty (2005), Ruby Duby Du (2013), Anchor Stone (2017), and Wow (2020).

If New Zealand writers had not yet agreed on a national identity, at least they had come to terms with themselves and with their situation in the wider world. In addition, the international community was learning where the real wealth of the island nation lay—in the rich imaginations of its people.

Anthologies published after the 1990s include poetry by the poet-painter Gregory O’Brien (b. 1961), Andrew Johnston (b. 1963), Virginia Were (b. 1960), Jenny Bornholdt (b. 1960), and Michele Leggott (b. 1956). Another important poet, Grace Yee, was born in Hong Kong but grew up in New Zealand. Her collection of poetry, Chinese Fish (2023), earned her the 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the 2024 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry. In addition to classic works of poetry, spoken word poetry gained popularity with Australian and New Zealand poets in the early twenty-first century. Major contributors to this movement include Ali Cobby Eckermann (b. 1963), Hera Lindsay Bird (b. 1987), Courtney Barnett (b. 1987), and Claire G. Coleman (b. 1974).

Bibliography

Bornholdt, Jenny, et al., eds. An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Brins, Nicholas, and Rebecca McNeer, eds. A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900. Camden House, 2007.

Brooks, David, ed. The Best Australian Poetry, 2008. University of Queensland Press, 2008.

Harvey, Siobhan, et al. Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page. Godwit, 2014.

Keneally, Thomas. The Literature of Australia: An Anthology. W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.

Kinsella, John. Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Fremantle Press, 2017.

Marsack, Robyn, and Andrew Johnstone, eds. Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets: An Anthology. Carcaret Press, 2009.

Pierce, Peter, ed. The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Rose, Peter, ed. The Best Australian Poems, 2008. Black, 2008.

Stavanger, David, and Anne-Marie Te Whiu. Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word. University of Queensland Press, 2019.

Stewart, Douglas. Modern Australian Verse Modern Australian Verse. University of California Press, 2021.

Vickery, Ann. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2024.