Australia and Canada: A Comparison

TRADITION AND THE LONG SEARCH

Canadian and Australian writers need to be aware of the tradition behind the work they are producing, thereby giving their work the rounded dimension of continuity without which no literature can be mature. This awareness is necessary whatever the merits of the earlier products of this tradition. -Ron Price with thanks to Northrop Frye, The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979 to 1990, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1993, p.149.

A literature written by Baha’is
began to emerge, as the Faith
itself began to emerge from
obscurity, with that revolution
in 19791. This poetry was part
of a dramatic explosion in
Canadian and Australian
literature beginning in the 1960s,
possessing, now, an imaginative
coherence that helped in the fight
against passivity and paralysis
of will in the midst of a hell of
frenetic activity that blocked up
creative power and identity in
some mass Americanized
marketman and a long history
of silence and endless space--as
we searched through loneliness,
diffidence, uncertainty of direction
and a divided consciousness toward
a sense of self, history, beyond the
tyranny of distance and the long journey
to the centre of our psyche in one world.

Ron Price
9 October 1996

1 Roger White’s Another Song, Another Season was published that year.




CONTEMPORARY MODERN

Of the many currents of contemporary modern poetry in Australia I have selected Bruce Dawe’s poetry and particularly his book of poems No Fixed Address, published in 1962, as the starting point. This title is taken from one of his first poems, written back in 1954, by the same title. It is a suitable starting point for 1962 was the year when this pioneering venture got its start. By the time I began writing poetry seriously there were, arguably, 40 to 50 years of a tradition of the colloquial to build on, to help me on my way.-Ron Price from information in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, Geoff Page, University of Queensland Press, 1995, p.2.

They started to say it differently,
to use the colloquial, the vernacular,
the everyday stuff as early as 1962,
if not before, when I had started my
pioneer life, quite early.
Had many fixed addresses.
I counted them once:
37 in twenty-five towns.

You had been writing for some time
with that ‘No Fixed Address’
the first that I knew about:
that one who in solemn state
lies garlanded in gin,
part of a poetic legacy
that takes us back to the beginning
of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The whole world started to change its spots
in that ninth stage of history when, coincidentally,
I entered the field. And now I’m trying to say it
using the new form, wave, style, humour, normality
of the ordinary, unpretentiousness, highest spirituality.
A late starter, building on thirty or forty years
of other writers of contemporary modern.

Ron Price
9 December 1995