THE SOUTHERN HIGHLAND PLACES I LOVE

Bonnie View area (Morton National Park, Bundanoon), Erith Coal Mine (Morton National Park, Bundanoon), Badgerys Lookout area (Morton National Park, Tallong), various paddocks between Wingello and Tallong, the dam near stock processing centre in Moss Vale, Gallery Ecosse (Exeter), Jumping Rock Cafe (Bundanoon), 2 Park Road The Corner Store (Bowral), Dirty Jane's Emporium (Bowral), Red Cow Farm (Sutton Forest), Burrawang Pub, Empire Cinemas (Bowral), Sturt Gallery (Mittagong), the top of Mt Gibraltar (Bowral), Cecil Hoskins Nature Reserve (between Moss Vale and Burradoo), The Bowral Bookstore, Stingray Swamp (Penrose), Wingecarribee Reservoir, rainforest between Fitzroy Falls and Barrengarry, Kangaloon Rd (between East Bowral and Robertson), Robertson Nature Reserve, Budderoo Plateau (at very edge of Highlands between Robertson and Jamberoo), Berkelouw's Book Barn (Berrima), Harper's Mansion (Berrima), Stones Patisserie (Berrima), Coffee Culture (Bowral), Seymour Park (Moss Vale), Fitzroy Falls, Carrington Falls, Belmore Falls, Banana Leaf (Bowral), the country behind Sutton Forest Inn, Golden Vale Road (Sutton Forest). LJ, November 2015. 

CRUX #7 - PETER SKRZYNECKI

I have studied Peter Skrzynecki's poetry on numerous occasions throughout my career as an English teacher in Catholic secondary schools in NSW. I never tire of teaching his honest, ambiguous and almost mysterious work. My students (those who take English in their stride and strugglers) find his work rich and engaging. Much thought-provoking discussion follows a reading of one of Peter's poems; I've had students write their own poems in response to some of his. 

Peter has many fans. The launch of his weighty collection Old/New World, in 2007, at Gleebooks' store in Glebe, Sydney, was one of the most well-attended poetry bashes I've  been to. I remember Peter finished his reading with a line about breathing in and breathing out. Is there any greater poem? 

Peter has published twenty books of poetry and prose. He has won several literary prizes including the Captain Cook Bicentenary Award, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize and the Henry Lawson Short Story Award. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the Polish government, and in 2002 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to multicultural literature. IMMIGRANT CHRONICLE, a book of poetry, was a set text for study on the New South Wales HSC syllabus for many years. His memoir THE SPARROW GARDEN was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. OLD/NEW WORLD: New & Selected Poems was published by UQP in 2007. He is an adjunct associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. A new memoir, APPOINTMENT NORTHWEST,  of life in a one-teacher school on the New England Tablelands in the 1960s  was published by Five Senses in 2014. A book of children’s poetry, THE RAINBOW BIRDS, will be published by Five Senses in 2015.

What was there before poetry? 

Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Who really knows? I prefer not to speculate. 

Tell me about your childhood/teenage years.

They were  happy years; I had no brothers or sisters but that never mattered. I had plenty of friends living in Mary Street, Regents Park, and environs. The suburb was all bushland, paperbarks, gum trees and prickly scrub. Our house overlooked a reserve and Duck Creek flowed through  it. Birdlife abounded. Lizards. Snakes.

Best of all I was with my parents. When we came to Australia my father worked in Sydney for the Water Board for two years as a pick-and-shovel man while the cost of transportation from Europe was repaid as a deduction from his paypacket.  My mother and I lived in the migrant hostel in Parkes (1949-51). That was the deal with the government. After two years you had to leave. Buy a house somewhere or buy land and build. There was the knowledge, though barely understood by me, that we had done well by coming to Australia.  We were fortunate. My parents were happy and if they were happy, so was I.  They worked very  hard and had the house paid off in four years.

Share with me a story or two from Europe.  

The first memory is of snow. In my memoir THE SPARROW GARDEN (UQP,  2004), there is a chapter called “Snow is Falling”.  My mother was a single mother and after the war she was sent to a Displaced Persons camp in Lebenstedt where she met Feliks Skrzynecki a farmer from Poland who had been in forced labor for five years. They married and he  became my adopting father. You could not have asked for a better father.

I am kneeling on a chair and looking out at  drifting snow. It is falling gently, softly, so fine and powdery it is like a mist. Directly beneath the window is a wire enclosure with a low wooden structure , like a dog’s kennel, subdivided and lined with straw. This is where my father keeps rabbits. They are not being kept as pets. I am not allowed to play with them. These rabbits are kept for their meat. They are bred, fattened and killed. Food queues in the camp are long. People resort to other means to supplement their diet. We can also sell the meat or trade it. I watch the rabbits . The snow keeps falling, drifting.

The second memory involves walking between railways carriages on the journey from Germany to Italy.  We sailed to Australia from Naples. At one point, walking from one carriage to another I saw the broken fuselage of a plane lying in a forest. The trees were filled with dappled light and the broken plane, painted in camouflage colours, resembled a butterfly. The light remains magical, unearthly, as if it appeared on purpose, just to illuminate one small part of the tragedy of war.

Why have you lived in Sydney for so long?

Sydney is home.  In FLAWS IN THE GLASS Patrick White says that for better or worse Sydney is in  his blood.  I feel like that; it is an ambivalent feeling, with all the highrise  building that’s going on. The traffic, the congestion. I sometimes wish I had settled in New England, perhaps Armidale. My first small school was at Jeogla, 50 km east of Armidale. The central west draws me also – probably because  our first home in Australia was in Parkes, in the migrant hostel on its outskirts. Now I have a home in Sydney, my wife is here, my children and grandchildren. Having reached my three score years and ten, and with   health issues arising in recent times, I have no desire to live elsewhere. I feel I belong here.

What are your feelings toward the much-loved and much-studied Immigrant Chronicle after all these years? 

I am still very fond  of IMMIGRANT CHRONICLE and proud of what it achieved. Originally it had a different title and Angus & Robertson turned it down.  About that time UQP was starting its second Paperback Poets series (the coloured covers). Roger McDonald was publisher and Tom Shapcott was the poetry editor. I sent the ms to them. From memory, Tom  and Roger did the selection. Roger and I came up with the title. Roger said the word “immigrant” should be in the title. I liked the word” chronicle”.  I flew up to Brisbane for the meeting. In retrospect, it all came together naturally, without any angst. Since 1975 it has never been out of print and has gone into twenty-two reprints.

Which period of your work are you most proud of?

Fair to say that I am proud of all periods of my work – but maybe a little more of the early years which  were the hardest when it came to meeting publishers and getting manuscripts accepted; but the need to write and express myself was always there, urgent and unavoidable.  Roland Robinson’s press, Lyrebird Writers published my first two books.  Various other publishers followed. UQP published four of my books and keeps them in print. THE SPARROW GARDEN is coming out as an E-book.

Describe your relationship with the natural world of NSW.

My relationship with the natural world is one of respect and honour. Do it proud, as they say, in what I create out of what it offers. Be it land, sea or sky.

Looking back, the natural world of NSW made me a poet. My eyes were opened up to what  beauty NSW/ Australia holds when we lived in Parkes for those first two years. I quote from THE SPARROW GARDEN...”After a sea voyage of four weeks, Parkes meant open spaces, paddocks, sheep, cattle, gum trees, magpies stalking the ground on frosty mornings and throwing back their heads to sing, Parkes meant hot, dry weather, a bushland that I loved walking through, picking at branches of scrub wattle or encountering the scent of eucalypts for the first time....”  

Last year I published APPOINTMENT NORTHWEST (Five Senses) a memoir of my days at Jeogla. A very different landscape from  the central west but just as inspirational. As I was writing,  it became apparent that this was not only a narrative of my days in a small school but also a tribute to the high country of New England with its mountains, rivers, waterfalls and wildlife.  The people, also.

What does the future hold? 

The future ? What  indeed ? Many years of good health and creativity, I hope. I have a book of children’s poetry due before the end of the year, THE RAINBOW BIRDS (Five Senses) that my son has illustrated . I  also have three more manuscripts in my head and perhaps a last collection of poetry to round it all off.
               
               

LITTLE MOUNTAIN READINGS

I am honoured to be part of this year's Little Mountain Readings at Sturt Gallery, Mittagong on November 28 (5pm start). I'll be there with mate and fellow Bundanoon resident Peter Lach-Newinsky, who will also be presenting a workshop on writing poems (he'll be dynamic and inspiring, as always). I will be reading old work and fresh work from my debut collection Morton (forthcoming from PSP). Thanks to Rhiannon Hall, Sturt and South Coast Writers Centre for having me on board. It would be great to see you there. LJ, September 11 2015.

MORTON

I'm thrilled to announce that my first chapbook, Morton, will be published in 2015 by Pitt Street Poetry. The twelve poems in the illustrated pamphlet look at a wide range of Morton National Park's features. Morton, one of the grandest and most visited national parks in NSW, is minutes from my Southern Highlands home - it always looms largely in my mind.

PSP are also releasing new things from Peter Goldsworthy, John Foulcher, Ron Pretty, Geoff Page and Mark Tredinnick. It is flattering to be among such acclaimed writers. 

Morton follows poetry I've had out in Australian Love Poems, Eclogues The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2007, The Broadway Poetry Prize collection for 2004, The Southern Highlands Poetry Anthology, Meanjin, Island, Islet, Famous Reporter, Poetry d'Amour 2013, Mascara Literary Review, The Disappearing (an app from Red Room Company), Regime, Rabbit, Wet Ink, Memory Weaving, Great Ocean Quarterly, Make Your Mark, Cordite, Uneven Floor, Bimblebox 153 and For Rhino in a Shrinking World. 

LJ, June 9 2015. 

CRUX #6 - STUART BARNES

I've not met Rockhampton's Stuart Barnes (only communicated with him via emails and twitter). I'd very much like to. I think we'd have a good chat about poetry (surprise, surprise), layers to Australian masculinity and the evolution of pop and dance music both in Australia and abroad (topics we love). 

Stuart's highly engaging and refreshing poetic voice has both a beat sensibility and an academic feel - there's a looseness, or restlessness, as well as a great sense of purpose. The stuff of his work is snatched from pop culture, history, family, place... you name it. That's not to say it isn't original. Stuart's educational and entertaining poems get me researching, taking notes, telling myself I need to take more risks in my own writing.

Queensland's bloody lucky to have him! 

Stuart is a Tasmanian-born poet and poetry editor of Tincture Journal. In 2014 his manuscript Blacking Out and other poems was named runner up in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. His first collection, Bend River Mountain, an anthology with Robbie Coburn, Nathan Hondros, Rose Hunter, Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Michele Seminara, will be published by Regime Books in 2015. He blogs at stuartabarnes.wordpress.com and tweets as @StuartABarnes.

1. What was there before poetry?

The consciousness of and fascination with poetry has always existed; the reading of and the tinkering with since childhood; the detailed re/arranging of for seven years.

2. Share with me a story or memory from your formative years.

Winter, a glass-door wood heater, my grand/parents and me, recliners, books.

3. How do friends and family help shape your writing?

From the beginning, and without knowing, my parents have helped shape my writing: my mother gave me picture books in my bassinet (the only distraction the rustling leaves of a nearby almond tree, apparently), a vinyl book at bath time and, when I was a little older, the How and Why Wonder Books, the Bible, a dictionary, an encyclopaedia; both read to me at bedtime. I’m not the first to say it: the key is reading, reading, reading. I’m grateful my parents insisted on it.

            As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Gwen Harwood was an inspiration, instrumental in my becoming a poet. At middle and high school I was fortunate to know a small group of passionate young men whose interests included architecture, film and music; one also wrote: he and I came equal second in what I think was our school’s inaugural short story competition. I was outraged: his was about catching rainbow trout, mine a man dying of AIDS. I still have that story, which borrowed heavily from The Cure’s ‘Pictures of You’ and Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’. Maybe that’s the origin of my interest in found poetry … My high school Literature teacher Amanda Jackson and English teacher Liz McQuilkin, also a poet, were very encouraging, as was Deborah Rechter, my first year Literature tutor at Monash University. That kind of support was/is wonderful, but it’s vital to nourish it. For many years I couldn’t/didn’t.

            Friends and family continue to help by reading and commenting on drafts and manuscripts, by connecting me with other poets (a couple of months ago a family friend’s brother put me in touch with Welsh poet Ric Hool, who generously provided invaluable feedback about a manuscript). Most recently they’ve been helping by inspiring: I’ve been working on poems about moments from childhood, poems written to the memory of my maternal grandmother, my favourite uncle, three friends. It has taken some time to be able to write about these much-loved people.

            Many years ago, to members of my extended family, uncles and male cousins mostly, writing was ‘a waste of time’, ‘a joke’, I a ‘freak’, ‘weirdo’, ‘faggot’, ‘big girl’, ‘wuss’. I wasn’t impervious to their bullying; I’ve always been determined; their aggression made me even more, I think. For a time I wrote for and with a strong sense of having to prove something to others.

4. What’s the most difficult thing about writing a poem?

Learning to let go of expectation, which aids determining one’s method: for some time I was heavily influenced by part of Ted Hughes’ introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems: ‘To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her … Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy.’ I first read this at 30 and placed on myself enormous pressures. Exhausting, yet necessary. 

            Once you’ve determined your method, which is always evolving, learning to accept when a poem’s not working. Learning to put it away—for a day, several, a week, half a year, seven. And learning—gasp—when to let a poem go, which might one day lead to a conversation about learning to let everything—it’s all illusory—go.

            Finally, learning there are no rules.

           

5. How do people react to you being a poet? 

Melbourne’s worlds away; there I was a very different person, a very different poet, so I’ll talk about my experience of Rockhampton, famous for its cattle farmers, FIFO workers and bewildered tourists. I love living in Rockhampton—the freedom, the proximity to the sea, the glorious, golden 4 p.m. light—but it is a bit of a crucible. The farmers I’ve met have been nothing but blunt: ‘All day all you do’s twiddle your thumbs, chew the end of a pen’: zero tolerance. The FIFO workers have been baffled (‘You make how little money, mate?’) yet respectful (‘Least you’re doing something you love.’). The tourists, most from Europe, have been pretty interested. A drawn-out ‘Oh’, often followed by ‘That won’t pay the bills’, is the most common response from some of the people who work in the local supermarket. The chap who runs the nearby post office is probably my biggest fan: ‘Are you a famous poet yet?’ every time I go in. ‘No, just here to mail a book to a famous poet.’ ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’ was never funny or clever.

6. You have a great love for British band The Cure. Share with me your favourite Cure lyric and explain its power.

I’ve admired The Cure since 1992: ‘Friday I’m In Love’ shimmied from a speaker during American Top 40 one Sunday evening (these days I can’t listen to the track, which swamped every restaurant, café and club à la ‘Glory Box’ and ‘Groove Is In The Heart’). ABC’s rage introduced the band to me in 1990; I vividly remember the ‘Never Enough’ promo: I was intrigued and spooked by Robert Smith’s bizarre and beautiful harmonies, his swooping guitar-like vocals, his alter ego’s black eye shadow and black lipstick (within a few years I was occasionally armouring myself with both). In mid-’92 I travelled to and through Russia with a bunch of Australian scouts, venturers, rovers and leaders; I bonded with T, a huge fan of The Cure who faithfully toted every album to date on cassette. By the time I arrived in Hobart a little over a month later I was smitten, bitten, hooked, cooked, stuck like glue …

            It’s not my favourite lyric (that might be ‘Fires outside in the sky / Look as perfect as cats’, for its absurdity; or ‘So I trick myself / Like everybody else’, a bit of a bowling ball in the stomach; or ‘Oh I miss the kiss of treachery / The shameless kiss of vanity’, for its guilelessness about desire and long-term monogamous relationships) but ‘I went away alone with nothing left but faith’ (‘Faith’, Faith) is the most persistent, the most insistent, and powerful for two reasons: it flays religion and embraces the spiritual. It closes an exquisite record: heavily layered synthesizers, atmospheric six-string basses, songs perfectly sequenced. Faith was written in church, where Robert Smith would ‘think about death … look at the people … [who] wanted “eternity”. … [He] realised [he] had no faith at all and [he] was scared. … [He] wanted to get at different expressions of faith, to understand why people have it, to see if it was a real thing’ (Ten Imaginary Years). As writing Faith spurred Smith to think about his lack of faith, so listening to this particular lyric spurred me to think about mine.

7. What’s your greatest writing accomplishment?

It’s not that I won’t—I can’t, I’m not hardwired to think of my accomplishments in terms of greatness. Three that come to mind have been incredibly encouraging: my first published poem; shortlisted twice for the Newcastle Poetry Prize; my manuscript Blacking Out and other poems named runner up in the 2014 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

8. If you had an hour with one Australian poet - living or dead - who would it be?

Dorothy Porter: I would love to talk about Akhenaten.

9. Where will the future take you?

My first poetry collection, Bend River Mountain, an anthology with Robbie Coburn, Nathan Hondros, Rose Hunter, Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Michele Seminara, will be published by Regime Books in 2015. I’m taking my time with another project. I’m looking forward to this year’s Queensland Poetry Festival. Really, I’ll be happy if I can continue to do what I love: write, edit, read.

CRUX #5 - BENJAMIN DODDS

The work of Benjamin Dodds never pulls punches. If late firebrand and painter Adam Cullen had been a poet, he may well have been Benjamin Dodds. Both artists love throwing the filth and beauty of life in our faces. When reading Benjamin's poetry we feel wonderment and edginess in equal measure. Everywhere the reader looks there is dark humour, poignancy and stark imagery. Benjamin is often interested in unravelling the many contradictions within Australian men, something I find fascinating. And of course, there is a search for the divine, or at least something than can lift us from the mundane. Like his contemporaries Sam Wagan Watson and Aidan Coleman, Ben is fiercely economic with his language - this is why I love his work. Many verbose poets could learn from his editorial skill.

Benjamin resides in Sydney, where he teaches primary school students. He grew up in the NSW Riverina. His work has appeared in many publications including The Best Australian Poems 2014, Mascara Literary Review, Bluepepper, Harvest, Cordite, Blue Dog, Southerly and Antipodes: Poetic Responses and Earthly Matters, a chapbook poet Carol Jenkins assembled for National Science Week in 2010. His first full-length collection, Regulator, is out now with Puncher & Wattmann. 

                                                                              *

What was there before poetry?

Nothing. Poetry was there in the movement of the first motes of matter and we’ve been tracing its path ever since we learned to make our mark on cave walls, paper and now in digital zeroes and ones.

Would you ever return to the NSW Riverina to live?

An entire universe of childhood and adolescence is back there somewhere between the yellow lawns and weedy irrigation canals. My immediate family left the Riverina at the same time I moved to Sydney to study. I travel back every few Christmases with my parents to visit relatives, but I don’t think I’ll ever live there again. It feels too much like the past for me to plan any futures there. I must miss it on some level, though. I saw a photo of a Murrumbidgee River beach recently on Instagram and experienced a surprisingly intense longing to be there again and to dive in.

Tell me about your work with the NSW Department of Agriculture years ago.

It was my first job straight out of high school. There’s an agricultural research station just outside Yanco and they were offering a traineeship as a laboratory technician. I met some amazing individuals and took part in some fascinating science over what became three years. The majority of my time there was spent in the rice section, but I also moved through the soy and entomology sections and eventually became a fruit fly officer. The work was a really interesting mix of white lab coat and test tube stuff and a great deal of sampling and harvesting on trial sites all around the Riverina. I got to be Igor on some days and Old MacDonald on others. One of the weirder memories of my lab assistant days is of being trained to count the microscopic hairs around a fruit fly’s anus to determine its species. It was a bizarre, but important job. The day I counted one too many hairs (or was it one too few?) resulted in an emergency road trip to the head office in Orange to confirm and declare an official outbreak of European fruit fly. Exciting times!

Why did you get into primary school teaching?

Well, I became a primary teacher by way of first becoming a secondary teacher. My two teaching areas are English and Italian. I taught in a high school setting for a while and didn’t really fall in love with the job. I travelled and worked outside education for a bit and only returned to it when I saw an advertisement for an Italian teaching position at a local primary school. After teaching Italian for a few years, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to work as a regular class teacher. I’ve since been reaccredited as a primary teacher and it’s fantastic. I think teaching is a particularly vital profession. Who else in society, aside from parents, can have such a positive and lasting effect on young minds?

Were there many challenges associated with penning/assembling Regulator?

Yes, there were quite a few. Not so much with its penning, but certainly with its assembling. Because some of the pieces had been around for so long, I was very close to them. I couldn’t really get a true sense of which ones played well with others. Not through a new reader’s eyes in any case. I tried different permutations with my partner, a close friend and then fellow poet Stuart Barnes. They were all very insightful, particularly my mate Stuart, who was essentially the unofficial editor of the whole collection. In the end, I went with a bit of my own judgment and a bit of theirs and divided the book into four sections: Regulator, Human Awe,There’s No Putting Them Out and Perfectly Normal Sons. The first loosely gathers together the poems dealing with the Riverina, the second brings together (also loosely) the pieces dealing with science and nature, the third contains poems that I began to realise were a bit on the darkly paranoid side and the fourth section touches on sexuality.

What does it mean to be a poet in Australia today?

What a tough question. There are so many types of Australian poets and poetry. Sometimes it seems that the job of the Australian poet is to wilfully alienate, but then there are so many more instances of Australian poets perfectly capturing a moment, an idea, a feeling or an angle through clear, exquisite and enduring language. This is not uniquely Australian, of course, but our poets can really hook us in ways that are specifically adapted to our particular wavelength of experience. Our best poets know who we are, for better or worse, but aren’t limited by identity.

What do you want your audience to most take away from your poetry?

Another really tough question! I know that I hold myself to a very high standard when I write a poem. I guess this means I want the reader to experience the best of me, work I’ve sweated over. Ultimately, I hope they take from my poetry a sense of mood and encapsulation. Somebody once told me that one of my poems expressed something that they’d always felt, but never known how to put into words. I don’t think a poet could ask for a better review.

Where to from here?

I’m working on a new project at the moment. Mostly in my head, not yet on the page, but its various parts are starting to swirl together and coalesce into what I hope it can be. I find it really hard to find solid chunks of writing time lately. Not because I’m too busy, but because modern technology seems to sap my creative energy and swell to take up so much of my ‘spare’ time. Sometimes I curse the internet, Netflix, my iPad and the infinite amount of other distractions available to us today. Maybe that’s where to from here, weaning myself off distractions and using the freed up time to write more! I’ve got a week away planned for the next school break. Just myself and my writing away from it all.