Writings

Beating around the bush: a search for the world of meaning

(National Outlook, October 1998)

Late in 1996, Dymocks sponsored a visit by the poet Les Murray to Wagga, the occasion being the promotion of his then latest book Subhuman Redneck Poems. The reading was free, which was unusual, and was set down for late morning in the local city library – a converted supermarket, shared with the city art gallery.

Generally speaking, visiting writers, once in town, are hosted out at the University and then in a local city restaurant at night. Someone once said that poetry belongs to the poor, that it is their 'bread'. Maybe that was true, once; it certainly isn't the case in rural Australia.

I arrived early. A small semicircle of chairs gave the impression that a huge crowd wasn't expected. I wasn't the first to arrive, however, a woman was already seated. I headed over and sat next to her, introducing myself. I asked her if she was a fan of Murray's work, and she replied that she had never heard of him. Perhaps she had a general interest in poetry, and poetry readings? No – this was the first time for her.

By now I was really curious. It turned out that she had read in the local paper that a poet was arriving in Wagga, and that a reading would take place. And then she shared the reason for her attendance. Three months previously, her son – a student in computing science at a provincial university – had committed suicide. When she went through his belongings, she discovered that he wrote poetry.

By now, a respectable crowd had turned up, and more chairs were needed. Les Murray arrived and, before long, the reading began. As I remember, he also spoke about himself, his recent near-fatal illness, his return to Taree from the city. Did he read Sydney and the Bush: 'When Sydney and the bush meet now / there is antipathy / and fashionable suburbs float / at night, far out to sea'?

I can't remember. He certainly read An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow, with those lines: '… And I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand and shake as she receives the gift of weeping'; and a poem for his father: 'People can't say goodbye anymore, they say last hellos'. The problem was that as I listened, I listened differently, conscious of the woman next to me. How did she hear those poems?

And then it was over. Les began signing copies of the book: my companion and I said goodbye to each other; she went over and bought a copy.

At the end of this year, the city library, art gallery and council chambers will move into a new, architect-designed building, more or less 150 years after the city of Wagga Wagga was founded. As I remarked earlier, the reading took place in a converted supermarket. Before 1984, the library was housed in the basement of the old council chamber. There was no art gallery. Before that, the library was in an even smaller building, if that were possible.

Until recently the story of cultural access in Wagga is one of a struggle against the indifference and neglect of all political parties. The biggest inland city in New South Wales has, in these last 10 years, only just begun to get the resources it needs for a growing population, and even now it does so against a background of endless carping over expenditure. To learn that this town was without a movie theatre for the best part of a decade in the 70s and 80s, that there were no movie matinees for kids – just the privatised world of the video and nightly television – is astounding.

The imagination has to be fed. Who benefits from the death of imagination? A society dies from within in that which is the property of the young dies with them. The suicide rate serves as an index – 12 times that of Sydney. Who is responsible for the deaths of the young – blacks and whites (before 1967, the former couldn't live in the town of Wagga)? Unemployment runs at around 25% in the country: who is benefiting from this?

The Brazilian bishop and poet Dom Helder Camara wrote: 'If the sun were as thirsty / and greedy as you, / not one puddle of water, / not one drop of dew, / would be left on the face of the earth.'

Like a lot of rural NSW, Wagga is a place without much in the way of public imagery. Very little time and money has gone into this sort of enterprise. This, in part, is due to a failure to own local history. 

To give another example: almost no changes have been made to the existing nineteenth-century images in local churches. No sign of Pentecost, with its multicultural and multiracial reality – old, when you think about it.

I put this state of affairs down to the meanness of generations of wealthy pastoralists, in much the same way as Lloyd Rees did when talking about the same group in relation to Goulburn. After all, what do wealthy townspeople, workers, want with images and poetry?

And anyway, could it just be a not-so-subtle form of censorship – a way of cutting people away from their history? Maybe that would explain the fact that nothing of Mary Gilmore's work remains in print. She grew up in the region, accompanied her father, Donal Cameron, all over the Riverina, and taught in Wagga. More Recollections, the most important of her essays documenting the period, has never been reprinted since its original publication in 1935. In a letter to Hugh McRae, she noted that the reviews of the latter in New South Wales were "chill", due to "the exhibition of our bloodstained past". How can people lay claim to a history if they don't know it?

Imagination can survive the most disastrous situations, the worst human realities. What it can't survive is meanness of spirit and the lie. Nor does it feel comfortable with mindless authoritarianism and a geriatric conservatism all too present in rural NSW. The pattern of wealth distribution looks very familiar – another Argentina – with huge rural interests in very few hands (no trust-busting here), a shift of population to rural towns and to the cities, a marginalised belt of suburbs around the major cities.

In his award-winning history Narrandera Shire, Bill Gammage detailed the centralisation of education, beginning in 1916. And nothing has changed. Nothing much will change until the State capital moves inland, like a Sacramento (California) or Albany (New York State). Why not? After all, Sydney gaols its young in Junee (a methadone program for 80 to 100 prisoners, one sixth of the prison population!). And maybe, one day in a new century, a faculty of medicine, engineering, veterinary science or law might cross the great dividing range and take up residence in a rural university. Maybe the world of small business can be enlarged to include small farmers like Les Murray's father. Perhaps the diesel fuel rebate – worth more than the ATSIC budget – might be redistributed among these people. And who knows: Mary Gilmore might rejoin her contemporaries, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, in print.

Maybe poets will continue to come from this world of enormous skies and generous horizons. While we wait, the image of that woman searching for someone she thought she knew, searching for an entrance to a world denied her – an opening into a world of meaning – might just be worth holding on to.