Poets From Australia

"…in the early stages, the whites were kept very effectively away from the Aborigines. And whites will tell you quite blankly, I’ve never met an Aborigine in my life, so how could they know about us, how could they feel for us? It was done deliberately. They didn’t want friends of the Aborigines coming out and upsetting the jolly old white Australian apple cart you know, rocking the boat."

"…I can’t afford the luxury of despair or pessimism. We still have to hope. We’re a timeless people, we’ve lived in a timeless land. We have suffered the invasion of two hundred years, and we’ll go on suffering. But we are going to survive…"

"—Writin an epic? —A novel. —What about? —A true story about smut and crime and poetry and life. About running from Love. —Groovy … You writing me in? —Nope."

"Australia, land of brazen scum. Come one, come all and get a sunburned bum."

"Busy livin all the poems I haven’t written."

"Poetry photographs parts of life and humanity that can’t be captured visually, at least in a literal sense. It dissects the hopelessness of being alive and makes it seem to develop meaning momentarily, even if it never actually does."

"Robbie Coburn quoted in Going Down Swinging"

"I really find listening to and reading the work of lyricists and songwriters as essential to my work as reading poetry itself. It is all poetry."

"Interview with Peter Minter-Overland literary journal 2014"

"I love the notion of brevity."

"Example of McBryde'short monstich poetry"

"I've always been intriqued by form."

"Interview with David Prater-Cordite Poetry Review 2004"

"The young girl stood beside me. I Saw not what her young eyes could see: —A light, she said, not of the sky Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree."

"Colonel Vaughn shot well. He bought us five hundred years."

"The old shepherd had died, or got drunk, or got rats, or got the sack, or a legacy, or got sane, or chucked it, or got lost, or found, or a wife, or had cut his throat, or hanged himself, or got into Parliament or the peerage—anyway, anything had happened to him that can happen to an old shepherd or any other man in the bush, and he wasn't there."

"If Federation — whether Imperial or of the world — should ever appear in a better light than at present there will be plenty of time to consider it. But for the present, let our colonies try to cultivate a still more brotherly feeling for each other, and the day will come when the sons of all the colonies can clasp hands and say truly, “We are Australians — we know no other land!”"

"Old Mathews drank to drown sorrow, which is the strongest swimmer in the world."

"When the school children of Australia are told more truths about their own country, and fewer lies about the virtues of Royalty, the day will be near when we can place our own national flag in one of the proudest places among the ensigns of the world."

"It cannot be denied that these colonies are bitterly jealous of each other’s position in the esteem of the English upper crust... We are told that Cain killed his brother Abel because he was jealous of the latter’s influence with the Lord, and we may safely assume that had Cain and Abel been heterodox there would have been no blood spilt between them. On the same line of reasoning, if Australians were to be Australians, or rather if Australians were as separate from any other nation as Australia from any other land, there would be no jealousy between them on England’s account. There would of course remain little friendly rivalries between the colonies, but these would only act as spurs to their common prosperity."

"In the New World, happiness is enforced."

"A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing."

"Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me."

"Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries."

"Language of the liberal dead speaks From the soil of Highgate, tears Show a great water table is intact. You cannot leave England, it turns A planet majestically in the mind."

"Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate."

"In Australia Inter alia, Mediocrities Think they’re Socrates."

"We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop's tongs – we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology."

"He never gave me a chance to speak, And he call’d her—worse than a dog— The girl stood up with a crimson cheek, And I fell’d him there like a log.I can feel the blow on my knuckles yet— He feels it more on his brow. In a thousand years we shall all forget The things that trouble us now."

"Question not, but live and labour Till yon goal be won, Helping every feeble neighbour, Seeking help from none; Life is mostly froth and bubble; Two things stand like stone, Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own."

"Onward onward! must we travel? When will come the goal? Riddle I may not unravel, Cease to vex my soul."

"Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave, With never stone or rail to fence my bed; Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave, I may chance to hear them romping overhead."

"Trust is absolutely precious, and its betrayal horrifies me. I do want readers to trust me. And yet I don't want to offer them a safe, predictable ride. The literary scene seems to be divided between "trustworthy" authors who give their fans a Big Mac that's totally unchallenging, and more ambitious authors who treat their readers with high-handed indifference. I want to earn the reader's trust while remaining unpredictable. I take the reader to some dark and emotionally uncomfortable places but never just for the sake of it. And I do care about how you're feeling on your journey. Many people have remarked on how readable and engaging they found The Crimson Petal despite its great length. That wasn't accidental. I thought very carefully about how to keep the reader intimate and awake."

"The main characters in this story, with whom you want to become intimate, are nowhere near here. They aren't expecting you; you mean nothing to them. If you think they're going to get out of their warm beds and travel miles to meet you, you are mistaken."

"What you lack is the right connections, and that is what I've brought you here to make: connections. A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family."

"Let's not be coy: you were hoping that I would satisfy all the desires you're too shy to name, or at least show you a good time. Now you hesitate, still holding on to me, but tempted to let me go."

"Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether."

"I've studied Ulysses in depth and still think it's a great and ground-breaking book, a brave and sincere trail-blazer — but also massively self-indulgent, baggy, and irritating. Joyce was a wonderful liberator, but his approach is dangerous for a writer to emulate, since he had a massive ego and was convinced that every word he wrote was sacred. Have you seen his annotated proofs? He scarcely ever deleted a word, just added screeds and screeds more stuff in the margins. He also believed that people should, and would, read novels with the same slow, studious pondering of every word and phrase that they bring to ancient scripture, which I think is a stupid thing for a storyteller to expect."

"Remembering how I planned to break the journey, to drive My own car one day, to have choice in my hands and my foot upon power, To see through the trumpet throat of vertiginous perspective My urgent Now explode continually into flower, To be the Eater of Time, a poet and not that sly Anus of mind the historian. It was so simple and plain To live by the sole, insatiable influx of the eye. But something went wrong with the plan: I am still on the train."

"Darwin's daughters have no tails, Yet a reminiscent motion Agitates the lovely frails At the seat of amputation. Charles called Eve and Adam lies And denied the garden state, Yet the gait of Paradise Could not wholly liquidate."

"No hunter of the Age of Fable Had need to buckle in his belt; More game than he was ever able To take ran wild upon the veldt; Each night with roast he stocked his table, Then procreated on the pelt. And that is how, of course, there came At last to be more men than game."

"Quaking muscles in the act of birth, Between her legs a pigmy face appear, And the first murderer lay upon the earth."

"Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind: He took her in his arms and there and then Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind, Began in joy to found the breed of men."

"Her bulk of beauty, her stupendous grace Challenged the lion heart in his puny dust. Proudly his Moment looked him in the face: He rose to meet it as a hero must; Climbed the white mountain of unravished snow, Planted his tiny flag upon the peak. The smooth drifts, scarcely breathing, lay below. She did not take the trouble to smile or speak. And afterwards, it may have been in play, The enormous girl rolled over and squashed him flat; And as she could not send him home that way, Used him thereafter as a bedside mat."

"And her five cities, like teeming sores, Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores. Yet there are some like me turn gladly home From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find The Arabian desert of the human mind, Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come, Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there."

"With Mr Smythers to think was to act. He was not a man who believed in allowing grass to grow under his feet. His motto was "Up and be doing—somebody.""

"He lived in comfort, not to say luxury. He had champagne for breakfast every morning, and his wife always slept with a pair of diamond ear-rings worth a small fortune in her ears. It is things like these that show true gentility."

"The truth is that he is a dangerous monomaniac, and his one idea is to ruin the man who owns him. With this object in view he will display a talent for getting into trouble and a genius for dying that are almost incredible."

"The hard, resentful look on the faces of all bushmen comes from a long course of dealing with merino sheep. The merino dominates the bush, and gives to Australian literature its melancholy tinge, its despairing pathos. The poems about dying boundary-riders, and lonely graves under mournful she-oaks, are the direct outcome of the poet’s too close association with that soul-destroying animal. A man who could write anything cheerful after a day in the drafting-yards would be a freak of nature."

"He always looked sartorially like a colonel of cavalry who had just left Tattersall's Sale Ring with a field-marshal after having bought a steeplechaser."