Tag: Issue 11 May 2012

New and Selected Poems

by Gig Ryan

Giramondo Press

2011

ISBN 9781920882662

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

New and Selected texts are increasingly popular with well-established poets and are, in fact, a good way for readers to gain an insight into their manifestos and technical development. This is particularly so in the case of Gig Ryan, who, as a poet, is judiciously enigmatic and always one step ahead of her readership. In this collection, Ryan has put together her choice of landmark poems from her previous five books and added a section of new poems written since then.

In her first collection, The Division of Anger (1980), appear most of the hallmarks of Ryan’s technique and avant-garde approach to her subject matter − the metaphysical similes, the fractured syntax (resisting any kind of predictability) and the almost complete absence of lyricism. Clichés and worn-out tropes are mockingly undercut. Nowhere is this more evident than in the iconic “If I Had A Gun,” which concludes the selection from this book.

Ryan’s similes in her early poems rely on shock value and violence, sometimes unerring in their aptness (“His sincerity clacking like chainmail”; “His eyes/ romantic as aluminium strewn against a sea-wall”), sometimes bizarre (“the water lies down like a saint”; “worries like a tablet”), but never willing to be ignored. At times this full-on technique may irritate, threaten to overwhelm the reader with its close-packed mixed similes, but bombardment may well be the intention, or at least the outcome, as in the poem “Getting It”:

He kisses, his pale guilt blowing
like a flower. You’re luxurious, unsure.
Your eyes opening like telescopes
on a clean brain.
You’re so silly in the kitchen, like a new appliance.         
(p.5)

More complex, and equally effective, are similes that merge into metaphor (“I will go down into the black water/ and peel its wetness back into the shore/ where it will shiver like a dress”). In later collections, Ryan uses similes more sparingly, often developing them into extended metaphors that control the poem as a whole.

The Division of Anger and the next two collections, Manners of an Astronaut (1984) and The Last Interior (1986), share a subject matter of inner-city politics, of sex, drugs and jazz, and an ‘angry’ take on conformity, further disrupting the comfort-zone of the reader. Dramatic monologues intensify the ironic stance of the poet/persona. In “The Buddha Speaks,” a serious message underlies the flippant exterior:

I have eliminated the possibility of pain.
The slopes are crawling with pain.
Any movement, after all, is futile,
so I have cut down on aid generally
and talked myself out of violent feelings         
(p.31)

In “Half Hill / Half…”, one of  the best poems in this section (Manners of an Astronaut):

The bars of the street go to the new next place
where your yearly emotion won’t come
and don’t hail me like letters. You don’t need to.
I mean, you’ve lined the walls and sucked drugs.

………………………………………………………………….

The world holds you in place like hairspray.
I walk home stoned, eating my favourite apple,
hearing birds fall out of trees,
super-conscious of walking.
How can you explain boredom in 10 minutes?         
(p.40)

The short selection from The Last Interior features a number of dramatic monologues utilising phatic ‘nothings’, clichés and conventional rhetoric, sometimes curtailed to emphasise the predictability of colloquial conversation. Likewise, the endings of poems are incomplete, not needing completion (“I mean, that’s not correct etiquette is it. If I/ could just find out the correct behaviour, the pattern,/ and learn it and learn it”; “My religion’s too strong in me, though he turned at the end,/ a gesture. He was that sort, you know,/ £5, you got roses./ the handsomest man I ever”).

Excavation (1990) shows a more measured and integral use of simile, a widening of perspective and a political component. Examples in this New and Selected text include “On first looking into Fairfax’s Herald” and “1965.” In the whimsical “Six Goodbyes”:

Surf music seeps from the separated father’s flat
A madman in the lane shouts nothing
The walls shudder with the traffic
The Government doesn’t know you from a bar
I plug my ears with wax to hear the sirens
Every second weekend his kids invent a yard
between stumps of furniture, a tin shed and a gate
The fridge is tanked with frost                                        
(p.69)         

In poems like “Napoleon,” “Penelope” and “Achilleus,” historical and legendary figures begin to make their appearance, albeit in modern guise, exploding the conventions/pretensions of love and its conformities. In later collections, there’s a shift in the functioning of such figures. “Electra to Clytemnestra” and “Ismene to Antigone” (from Heroic Money), while relying on a similar approach, together provide a balanced argument on the subject. The new poems “Ismene” and “Antigone,” the imagistic references increasingly double-edged (“your wine-dark car turning in the drive”), contrast attitudes of the two sisters to the ‘truths’ embedded in their mythologies.

The collection Pure and Applied, which won the 1999 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, is strongly represented here, believed to be Ryan’s best book to date. Again we come to grips with dramatic monologues, ironised by representational handling of  the subjects’ own rhythms of speech and confessional stance. In “London Saver,” for example:

probably Istanbul or Spain the guys’re divine
There used to be an eleven but they’ve all pitched off
into Outer Mongolia or something She throws the fags
It was lashing everywhere when I clicked the tickets
deciding on a country                                                             
(p.84)

And in “Eating Vietnamese,” “This restaurant’s divine They’re refugees/ Asians are beautiful don’t you think, quite hairless/ She wore apricot chiffon There were kids everywhere/ So demanding” (p.106). “Interest Rates” is even more savage in its revelation of personae through self-delusion and banal diatribe:

 ‘I used to be like you, full of icy self-regard
but life monotonously catches up and culls you
and all the others’ Things begin to glow
like your own house, car, and love’s equivalent
You get sick of being alone and raddled, and he’s a real pet
…isn’t he? So I buckled under, got a richly job
and I’m, you know, fulfilled. Before that it was just a covey of unrealistic aims
Everybody told me.
He dusted me off
who had once been lost
Now it’s solid, tangible
The baby’s like cement to me
Otherwise the million things I wanted every cider brick
I’d be just drifting or immersed’                                               
(p.104)                              

By contrast, “Two Leaders” returns to the authorial voice, exposing these easily-recognised  political figures with considerable contempt. The pièce de résistance, however, is the title poem “Pure and Applied,” denouncing the news media in different styles and voices.

Heroic Money, shortlisted for the 2002 NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry, seems stylistically a bridging text between what has gone before and what is to come. Poems evince the characters of the ancient Athenian world but also continue to take in contemporary cultural constructs. “Eurydice’s Suburb” (pre-empting, perhaps, Adamson’s lambent “Eurydice in Sydney,”  though located differently) is an assured portrait:

The wings of home enfold you and lock
under the city’s poisoned coronet or halo
You gaze at the supermarket’s petrified food
and respond like a zombie to the past’s ghosts
and semblance of meaning                                        
(p.133)

“Profile” gives us an exposé of the poetry world in dramatic monologue form, some of the details of which may suggest an aspect of self-mockery or, at least, a well-trodden path :  

‘I started out with a frayed and urgent lyric
I suppose it was a comparative poverty
then learning appealed to me, though the past scared
then the Orpheus poems
a sort of self-commentary
You’ll see in my second book how I’ve
tackled national themes                                                
(p.140)

When we come to the new poems, there’s considerable continuity, both of theme and style. Some of the poems appear to move in the direction of new lyricism (“The Last Spring”, “Ismene”, “Antigone”), until the reader is confronted with the way they function to explode stereotypes, “illustrating a cliché.” There is more inter-textual wordplay (from poets, proverbs, legends, nursery rhymes), and many opportune similes and metaphors. With surreal and unsettling imagery, the poem “Iphigenia” both evokes and dismisses a nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It is worth quoting in full:

Ships slinged in low elastic waters knock
who chug you to the altar
where old blood crumbles.
Orange fire tassels air.
You look out from the coast
back when twisting horses rise…
and clay figurines scout on your shelves
or back, lost geraniums shimmered August
and then expunge, then ‘fluey tenants later, then tied between two screens
your binary presence more real than soft dawn
when ritual tatters
and reversible names converse over the galloping maps.

Her teary pillar shrives a velour sea.
Your hair tacked with daphne and myrtle. Birds creak, a charmer −
nett bridegroom, mock stag −
to keeling ships, to dimple wind
coins close your eyes                                                                      
(p.197)

At the end of the collection, there is a brief page of notes, referencing a handful of allusions. At the risk of advocating the scenario of the poem “Profile” (“Later I was avant-garde/ You can read the accompanying text’s/ explication of process”), I  feel that a few more references might help the reader. Not too many, because in the end Ryan’s impact relies more on an apprehension of superb poetry than on textual exegesis.

MARGARET BRADSTOCK has five published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Her sixth collection, Barnacle Rock, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in 2013. Margaret recently edited Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to “settlement” (Phoenix, 2011).

 Another Babylon

by Vlanes

University of Queensland Press

ISBN: 978 0 7022 3896 3

Reviewed by NATALIE OWEN-JONES

Another Babylon is the first collection of Vlanes (or Vladislav Nekliaev); it was the recipient of the 2010 Thomas Shapcott Prize and its author has been a Brisbane-based poet since 2001. His Russian heritage and rich experience of languages remain an intriguing counterpoint to his poems: born in Astrakhan, Russia, he emigrated first to Athens and then to Australia and has an active linguistic life that encompasses not only Russian and English (and, as Jena Wodehouse says in her launch of the collection, he did not step foot in an English-speaking country before he was thirty), but Latin and ancient and modern Greek.

This counterpoint makes itself felt in the freshness, even slight ‘strangeness’ of Another Babylon’s combinations of language, rhyme and metre (I am thinking of the word in the sense of Heidegger’s Unheimlich and not as a marker of awkwardness). This is unsurprising in the case of a prolific and gifted translator and tends to give Vlanes’s poems themselves the particularly arresting air of translated poetry I have always found attractive. Ultimately this setting, whether relevant to the poems’ conception or not, leads us to the subtler complexities of a volume attuned to the treasures and losses of new homes found within the old, and the continual recreation of the ancient.

The poet’s ‘Babylon’ is a concept entirely placed, as he tells us in the closing, title, poem, within his body. Upon waking, the speaker says ‘by the breath in my lungs / I pump a cool gust over my Babylon’, and that ‘the pulsation of my awakening heart / populates my Babylon with shouting people’ (111). It is a gesture that refocuses the whole volume’s pervasive awareness of the body, and its exploration of the connections between the body, poetry and the statues, friezes and other physical remains of an ancient culture’s art and people that is one of the most fascinating strengths of this volume.

We encounter it first in ‘Mother bathing’, as the speaker looks

at the enormous plateaux of her hazel eyes
populated, like Babylon itself,
with garden-growing nations
where a nomad
need no longer thirst for home. (22)

A few poems later there is a different mother, yet she alludes to this same impulse. ‘Mother Tiamut’ is the Sumerian mother-goddess, half of whose body, after she was killed by Marduk, was used to create the earth, and the other half to create paradise and the underworld. In this, one of many portraits of artefacts in Vlanes’s book, Tiamut holds a pomegranate

while Time, her hungry cub,
bites off a piece
now of the fruit’s crimson
grainy pulp,
now of her vermilion fingers,
as the goddess smiles
and condescends
to sample absence. (30)

The spare, measured grace of this short poem is indicative of Vlanes’s style, which achieves a wonderful balance between a restrained, allusive classicism and the rich, visceral imagery of the body’s life and death. The collision in this poem between rock and flesh (echoed in its combination of structured brevity and pungent language) is a signature of this volume, repeated in many different situations and coloured by different moods. In ‘Men and monsters’, the speaker is playful; he visits the temple and looks at the ‘simple columns and friezes’:

The broad-eared twin brothers,
armed with an axe and a saw,
attack a lurid serpent
stretched all the way to the temple door.
So many strikes,
but the serpent lives on
rolling his chiselled eyes
and chewing a large moon.

He comes to a statue of a young goddess and, leaving offerings at her feet, a kiss on ‘her narrow toe-ring / made of streaky lazurite’, he says, [I]

…then dash out
and climb the hissing stairs
to help the twin brothers
or perhaps the serpent. (9)

In ‘Procession’ the speaker gazes at a frieze of a funeral procession:

A dead king on a chariot,
his face like a mountain valley
beaten by storm, swathed in evening mist.

This is more than metaphorical; we learn that the king is no longer visible on the frieze, only his female slaves walking behind the chariot, where they are ‘singing in unison’ and ‘pace in pairs / with slender flasks of poison’. It is a beautifully poignant image of loss and strangely, as Vlanes goes on to suggest, freedom:

You can also see
on the other side of this mortuary
a throng of freshly woven souls
stepping out of the plaster walls:

they no longer know who is king,
who is woman, who is a horse,
but cling together
and then burst scattering
over the sun-smeared grass,

while the procession continues
and women enter
through the eager door,
and the living sing louder
for those who sing no more. (100)

This picture of the endless procession of lives traversing the boundary of life and death is one example of how this threshold is echoed throughout his book in transformations of body and stone. I feel the presence of an Orphean impulse within many of Vlanes’s poems: he taps that animating principle of poetry that wants to bring the dead to life, to recover the lost. It is, above all, a belief in the power of poetry.

In the way this belief is often manifest in inanimate figures finding life, or new life, there is a parallel movement in his work of the ephemeral finding solid form and flesh calcifying into stone. In ‘On the roof’ the speaker imagines that

The raw tablet of my body
with writing pressed through it
bakes in the sun and grows hard:
soon nothing can be added

to the syntax of my veins and wrinkles (57)

In ‘A passage from Gilgamesh’ the ‘clay tablet’ drinks in the beauty of sunset, as the light ‘fills the wayward / depressions in the clay / with triangles of trembling cerise’, and leaves Gilgamesh ‘glowing on its own / now that the sun has gone’ (3).

This reciprocity in his work, between the world and poetry, and the alive and the ancient, expands to the relationship of heaven and earth through his recurrent vertical imagery: ziggurats, walls, mountains and trees are frequently central to the poems, as are the concepts of gravity and weight of heaven. In ‘The load of heaven’ the speaker’s reveries on gods and demons and ‘planets spiralling, ever steeper, / towards the dreary disk of the Sun’, make ascension to heaven seem a waiting accident:

I realise how much weight,
how much effort
it takes heaven
to keep me down.

And when I kiss
your moth-like fluttering eyelids,
it nearly fails.

His intriguing concern of where we humans belong, spatially, in the worlds of earth, heaven and hell, joins the play of gods and demons throughout the poems to express an awareness of the diametrical forces of creation not surprising in a volume so placed in the world of Sumerian mythology. In ‘A round bowl’, the inner wall of the large bowl is decorated with Sumerian creatures: ‘a green-tongued lion’ with ‘a mane / of jumbled lapis hairs’, a ‘frisky griffin’ with ‘thin feathered paws’ and ‘catfish fin’:

The animals stand still,
frightened by the outpour
of a clanging crystal
cascade of water
twined
with pitch black hair:

like good and evil
entangled
in a deadly knot,
rushing to create
a new world. (42)

So many poems in this collection have caught the air of myth. There is a self-contained quality, as if the poems belong in their recurrent images of bowls, asking to be returned to and gazed at again and again until what they are teaching us is learnt. Creating Another Babylon is an invocation of order, a coagulation of difference and randomness into the flesh of the written word and the body. And yet, this invocation knowingly fails, the poems realising that it is through the broken vases and statues eaten by time that life shines through. One of the most beautiful poems of the volume, so wisely chosen to be the first, places this lesson of mythology in entirely human terms:

From the unseen sea
my mother brought a crab
wrapped in a silken wave
that hugged him like home.

I remember the knocking
of his claws on the wooden floor,
his boisterous brown certainty
that the sea was behind the door.

For two days he roamed my room,
on the third he understood.
His twinkling pinheads
stared and stared at me.

I promised to carry him back,
where I did not know.
He waited, dry, in a pine box
for a year before it was lost.

The dragonfly-god took it away
and flew at once to the sea,
knelt in the lazurite sand
and wrenched off the latch.

I never knew
that it takes a death
and a broken promise
for a dream to come true. (1)

Dark Night Walking With McCahon

by Martin Edmond

Auckland University Press

Reviewed by MICHELLE DICINOSKI

On April 11, 1984, the major New Zealand artist Colin McCahon disappeared unaccountably in the Sydney Botanic Gardens.  McCahon and his wife Anne were visiting Sydney as guests of the Sydney Biennale when McCahon, then aged 64, disappeared during a walk through the gardens. He was found five or six kilometres away, disoriented and suffering memory loss, in a routine patrol of Centennial Park in the early hours of April 12. He carried no identification with him, and could not say who he was.  When he was taken to hospital, he was diagnosed as suffering cerebral atrophy, probably the result of his long-term alcoholism.

What happened to McCahon during those lost hours? Where did he go, whom might he have met along the way, and what did he see on this “dark night”? These are the questions that provoked Martin Edmond to write Dark Night: Walking With McCahon, a creative non-fiction account of Edmond’s attempt to imagine, through walking the same part of Sydney, McCahon’s lost hours. Edmond explains:

I thought and thought about it, and at some point conceived the idea of replicating that lost journey—not in search of authenticity, nor documentary truth, nor even simple verisimilitude, since all of these were by definition impossible. Rather I wondered if I could arbitrarily choose a route and along it find equivalents for the fourteen Stations of the Cross?
(21)

The Stations of the Cross is a representation, in fourteen parts or ‘stations,’ of Christ’s last hours, beginning with his being condemned to death, and concluding with his death and entombment. In churches, visual depictions of the Stations of the Cross become stations through which worshippers pass on a circuit of devotion. Edmond’s decision to try to encounter McCahon and map equivalents for the Stations of the Cross through this ‘arbitrary’ route is not itself an arbitrary choice: McCahon’s work engaged with matters of faith, though he himself was not religious—“not anything”, as he strikingly put it.

Dark Night is structured in four parts. The first, “Testimony,” describes how Edmond’s life has briefly connected with McCahon’s in a few instances. Most importantly, Edmond spent his childhood in a bedroom in which a McCahon painting hung on the wall. The painting fascinated Edmond even as a small child; his curiosity with the artist and his art has been lifelong. The second, and longest, section, “Psychogeography,” describes Edmond’s journey through what might have the route that McCahon took in his lost hours, a route which is structured around the Stations of the Cross and ends in Centennial Park. The third section, “Dark Night,” describes a night spent in Centennial Park itself, and the fourth, “Beatitude,” takes Edmond back to New Zealand in a kind of coda.  

As perhaps may be evident from this structure, Dark Night is ambitious, but it also meanders, in the sense that it is willing to follow and linger along the routes of a curious mind, however non-linear those routes may be. Initially, it seems that Edmond is setting out in pursuit of something, though what it may be is unclear. What the book becomes, however, is something else. Edmond produces a kind of meticulous account of a small stretch of a city, a detailed and sharply observed portrait of Sydney a decade into the 21^st century. It is a city of convenience stores and pubs, of homeless men sleeping in doorways, “each with his hands tucked between his thighs the way little children sometimes sleep,” of midnight parks in which the author claims to see the trees breathing.
 As he walks, Edmond also muses on a remarkable range of topics: his own father’s alcoholism, methods of crucifixion, how Torahs are constructed, the sex trade at the Wall, the development of Christian Science. When we roam with Edmond, we roam not only across the physical spaces of Sydney, but also more extensively through Edmond’s mind and the connections that he makes across time and space, between an older and a newer Sydney, and between his own life and McCahon’s, between the city and its people. He wonders about meaning, and connection, and creativity, and about faith and its absence, and how they affect lives generally, and McCahon’s life and work in particular. 

The structure of the book is shaped by its author’s range of interests, by his musings, and also, inevitably, by the impossibility of resolving his questions about McCahon. As Edmond himself remarks, quoting from a Pasternak poem: “To live a life is not to cross a field.” Edmond has worked as a cab driver, and his range of knowledge and his way of telling stories—picking up here and dropping off there—in some ways reflects the episodic nature of that work. But this is a book that is walking paced, and seen from the footpath rather than the street. Edmond is a flâneur, a stroller of the city, a walker who seeks to know the mind of another man by walking, and by spending a long night on a park bench.
One of the book’s greatest achievements is its depiction of Sydney now, in a now that has inevitably already passed. Edmond records highly specific details: how much change he has ($27.75) after paying his train fare ($3.80) to the city, the schooner he buys (Reschs, $5) at a pub (The East Sydney Hotel), and the discussion about the tenth Doctor Who, David Tennant, that takes place as he orders, the prints on the pub’s walls (Magritte, van Gogh, Cartier-Bresson). He describes churches, homeless shelters, excavation work, convict graffiti, contemporary graffiti, prostitutes, taxi drivers, revellers emerging from a gay club at dawn. His depiction of himself can be just as precise: he carries with him on one of his journeys “a thermos of black coffee laced with St Agnes brandy; a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich; a banana; a tin or Café Cremes, ten small cigars of the vanilla-flavoured variety called Oriental”—along with warmer clothing and two different translations of St John of the Cross’s poem “Dark Night of the Soul.”

Dark Night is a serious book with extensive research behind it, as can be expected of a work that is, at least in part, a biography. Edmond has written across a range of genres, including screenplays and poetry, and his exacting care for language is quite delightful. His descriptions of places are particularly striking, as when he writes of visiting a friend in an art deco building, Mont Clair, on Liverpool Street in Darlinghurst in the 1990s:

the air inside Mont Clair was cool and smelled strange, like embalming fluid or formaldehyde; a wan yellow light fell across the dark varnished wood from deco lamps high up on the walls and the vacant concierge’s booth always felt inhabited by some phantom interlocutor. The lift clanked and sighed in protest as it hauled me upwards and my reflection in the mirrors with which it was lined always looked vaguely corrupt if not actually demonic. The other residents in the building were rarely seen and, when spotted, seemed pale and affrighted …
(75-76)

And so Edmond takes us there, through Sydney past and present, and all its ghosts, in search of another kind of ghost. It is what we can see—a remarkable city, a fascinated and fascinating writer—that makes the lasting impression. McCahon, the brilliant artist, is a fugitive here, as perhaps he was in life. But what Edmond finds in his pursuit makes for a memorable portrait of a city and a man —not the man who came to Sydney in 1984 and was lost, but the man who came a quarter of a century later and tried to understand. 

 
MICHELLE DICINOSKI’s memoir Ghost Wife will be published by Black Inc. in 2013. Her poetry collection Electricity for Beginners was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award 2011, and she was awarded a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (Poetry) in 2012-2013. She lives in Brisbane.

Coda For Shirley

by Geoff Page

Interactive Press

ISBN 9781921869303

Reviewed by LYN HATHERLY

What a shame that light verse is currently not the most popular genre. For Geoff Page’s new book Coda for Shirley is playful, intriguing and beautifully constructed. This verse novel makes you wish that other poets might ‘Bring Back Scansion! Bring Back Rhyme’ as it does its best to persuade readers and other poets to share Geoff Page’s love of formed verse and the music that accompanies it. Geoff himself it seems has much in common with the gentle and ironic tutor who taught Shirley:

to master my tetrameters,
avoiding, with more stringent pen,
the doggerel of amateurs.                               (p.8)

Since these verses never lapse into doggerel, or waste words, they are both stringent and nicely astringent. Perhaps Geoff Page, like Whitman has found:

that free verse wafted off a little;
rhyme stayed closer to the ground.                (p.5)

This verse novel follows on from Geoff Page’s 2006 verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza, and like that book it’s amusing to listen to as well as to read. It must have taken Geoff some time to get the metre and rhymes right, and I’m sure there were times he was tempted to give up the struggle. Finally, I think the effort is well worth it since these satirical tetrameters managed to fix themselves in my mind as mnemonics and stay there echoing through my dreams and days, entertaining me long after I’d put the book down. Geoff Page might be modest but this book is an immodest celebration, of love and poetry and joy, as well as a further addition to the definition of Aussie culture. As an example, his view of life in a nursing home is as darkly irreverent as it is comic:

Each day comes and each day goes,
the next exactly like the last
with all the shipwrecked sprawled in chairs,
thinking only of the past,

a small Titanic, if you will,
with one great iceberg up ahead,
our buoyancy half-gone already,
the lookout, in a deck-chair, dead.                 (p.29)

His older readers may not be reassured but they are amused. This latest verse novel also confirms the fact that this award winning writer is ever prolific, since he has now published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann.

Except for Lawrie Wellcome who appears in Coda for Shirley only in memory, the characters from that previous verse novel carry on in this new narrative, one that is again unique in theme and narrative style. Each member of the cast is memorable and sharply drawn and the situations and antics in which Geoff Page involves his characters are fun to read or hear (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmsniQUuDKw ). His stars may not be young, but I appreciate the way they remind us that uproarious life and love and sex do go on after 60 or 70 or even 80. The memory of Shirley’s affair with Lawrie and his caresses wafts musically throughout this book:

that sweet cadenza to his life
a duet only love can sing –                 (p.4)

Geoff treats his characters tenderly and with affection so they charm or intrigue their readers. No euphemism here; the characters are all too honest, human and multi-dimensional.  Shirley, ten years on from the first verse novel, is still witty, passionate and insightful in regard to herself and those people she loves. The action in Coda for Shirley revolves around her final will or coda and the way, in life and after death, she is determined to enforce her wishes on her daughters, Sarah and Jane. It was these errant progeny who tried to undermine her relationship with Lawrie, her great love, while Sarah’s children, Shirley’s grandsons, supported that relationship. There’s irony in the way she settles her possessions and those who inherit them. The book begins with Shirley’s voice, idiosyncratic and always amusing. She sets the scene, reminds us of past events, and introduces the other characters. While she may concur with Geoff Page about matters such as rhyme and metre, she’s very much her own woman.

Coda for Shirley has three sections and three sets of voices and each tells one version of the story and gives a response to Shirley’s coda. The book begins affectionately and directly and with some mystery:

Dearest daughters, Jane and Sarah,
You’ll read this only when I’m dead.
I’ll leave it with my cheerful lawyer
who, with her very well-trained head, 

has seen how things might be arranged
when I am truly ‘done and dusted’,
about what goes to whom and who
might, at the end, be truly trusted. 

The language seems clear and unambiguous but there are layers and certainly a hint of what’s gone on before. ‘Trusted’ gives a firm ending to the stanza but it’s also quite suggestive. And I like the collusion of ‘cheerful’ with ‘when I’m dead’. It does set a tone for the book and its author’s attitudes to life and death. The poetic lines of the first section reverberate through the second as Shirley’s dearest but unsympathetic daughters, Jane and Sarah, come to grips with their loss and their mother’s wishes:

The funeral was bad enough;
their mother’s poetry is worse,
reciting all their ‘failures’ via
the rigours of accented verse. 

There’s some resolution in the moment when they finally accept that perhaps Shirley’s affair with Lawrie Wellcome may have been more positive that they previously wanted to believe. I like the way Geoff Page takes time for transformations and affirmations in this verse novel: 

They stop a moment; both are smiling,
There’s not a smidgeon of chagrin,
They strike their glasses once together.
‘Here’s to Shirley’s “year of sin!”’ 

The characters from the third section who take the novel into the future are Shirley’s grandsons Giles and Jack. In the previous verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley,  they were sent by Sarah as shock troops to remind Shirley of her grandmotherly duties. Even as teenagers they were smart enough to see that love is not only more important, it had made Shirley happy and more beautiful. Now, having retreated from their parents expectations of ‘law and med’ they are working, each in their own ways, to improve the world. They seem to be as clear-sighted as Shirley and to have been blessed by the terms of the coda that so annoyed their aunt and mother:

‘Correct,’ says Giles, ‘but in proportion
it’s mainly down to Grandma Shirley.
She left her money straight to us,
not worrying about how surly 

such a move would leave her daughters.
She knew how it would leave them numb,
those two up-market girls of hers –
one of whom is still our mum.                       (p.74)

So the book begins with mystery then sings and plays through three generations before it ends with joy and hope for the future. There is whimsy and rhyme and rhythm but also irony. There is death here but it not tragic and comedy overcomes any negative moments. Geoff Page’s character studies are, as Peter Goldsworthy remarks, ‘scalpel-sharp’ and his characters are always entertaining. They made me want to go back and read the first and connecting verse novel: Lawrie & Shirley. Geoff’s second verse novel is satirical and can, at times, show us life’s shadows. But it is such fun to read. Coda for Shirley is a celebration of life, love and a distinctly Australian way of speaking and thinking.

Speak Now

Edited by Victor Marsh

Clouds of Magellan

ISBN 978-0-9807120-9-4

Reviewed by FIONA McKEAN

As Australia is currently poised to answer the question of whether it will say “I do” to same-sex marriage, it’s difficult to imagine a more topical publication than Speak Now, a collection of essays and creative non-fiction pieces on the theme of same-sex marriage. Since Speak Now was published in October 2011, the Queensland Parliament has passed legislation recognising same-sex civil unions—a compromise between marriage equality and lack of relationship recognition—and the first of these have been registered. Comedian Magda Szubanski has come out on national television for marriage equality, and the Australian Labor Party has changed its policy platform in favour of same-sex marriage. And two of the contributors to this volume, Elaine Crump and Sharon Dane, have dined with Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the Lodge to argue for marriage equality. Debate is intensifying, rather than diminishing. So what does Speak Now bring to the table?

Speak Now is a wide-ranging collection of 35 different essays, memoirs, and personal responses to same-sex marriage. As the content is truly eclectic—varying widely in stance, genre, and style—the entries are organised in alphabetical order by surname, rather than grouped thematically. This makes for something of a “lucky dip”. Michael Kirby’s foreword and Victor Marsh’s introduction provide an appropriate entrée, echoing as they do the most clearly recognisable division—between the more formal, academic and legal essays and informal personal accounts. Marsh’s introduction is particularly welcoming, and reassuring to any readers who might fear the presence of earnest, 90s-style oppression-speak in the pages that follow. After all, weddings are supposed to be fun!

The academic essays are uniformly well-researched, but vary in degree of accessibility. Wayne Morgan’s history of relationship law reform excels at the latter, and is logically structured and clearly written. He demonstrates how legal protection for all relationships in Australia has evolved over time, and how formalising same-sex unions builds on these previous reforms.

In “Christianity, Marriage, Love and Friendship”, Michael Carden provides a detailed historical analysis of marriage and marriage-like rituals, including adelphopoiesis, a formalised recognition of friendship. He examines the roles of patriarchy and capitalism in marriage before advocating a renaissance of friendship rituals, rather than adherence to a narrow construction of marriage.

Academic and activist Dennis Altman dryly questions whether gay people should rush to “buy into the myth of monogamous marriage, whose record is generally not inspiring” (5). Ryan Heath offers the confronting statistic that, on a global scale, “ten times as many countries imprison their citizens for homosexual activity than allow them to marry” (74). In an essay that blends personal experience with research, he uses such statistics to warn against apathy for those who question whether “enough” equality has been achieved, and invites personal involvement.

I can’t remember which Australian politician declared it was the personal stories of same-sex couples that finally altered his stance in favour of marriage equality, but I suspect he’s not alone. It’s in the unique stories of individuals—and the capacity for empathic connection they invoke—that potential for change exists. And it’s the personal accounts I connected to most strongly in this collection. To an extent, these were reminiscent of those in the seminal Word is Out: Stories of Some of our Lives. Decades have passed since its initial publication, but its power lay in the revelation of simple details of the everyday lives of lesbians and gay men. And it was the differences in these stories, rather than any monolithic representation of “gayness”, that enabled readers to identify with their narrators and demonstrated varied ways of living gay lives.

So, too, with Speak Now. The personal stories are narrated by same-sex partners, parents of same-sex children unable to marry, helping professionals and marriage celebrants, and vary as widely in tone and stance as the essays. The very title of Deb Wain’s contribution, “I Got Married, Some Can’t. That’s Not Fair” is both striking and succinct. She is similarly unsparing on religious objections to same-sex marriage:

There are a number of things that the bible says and there are a number of ways in which to quote the bible itself in rebuttal to these arguments. I’m not going to even bother doing this here for the simple reason that Australia has a secular government… The bible has no legitimate place in this argument. (236)

The tone of the personal recollections ranges from Deb Wain’s pithiness, to the sincere—Luke Gahan’s “The Ins and Outs of Marriage (and Divorce)”—to the slightly satirical, as in Tiffany Jones’s “Tying the K(NOT)!” Gahan retains an unwavering dedication to a romantic ideal of marriage, despite a same-sex divorce in his twenties. He speaks of the pressures he experienced in his marriage from both within and outside “the gay community”—from some of the latter, a lack of recognition and acceptance; from some of the former, pressure to accept infidelity and act as some sort of marriage movement martyr or role model. Gahan’s story explicates the reality beyond the fairytale, and debunks the notion that the fact a same-sex relationship may end invalidates formal recognition in the first place.

For me, the two outstanding pieces in this anthology are Donald Ritchie’s “Customs” and Michelle Dicinoski’s “How to Grow a Lawn”. Both are beautifully written accounts of marriages recognised in Canada, but not in the authors’ home country, Australia. Ritchie allows himself to hope that he may receive a positive response to his marriage from a Customs official, or at least recognition: “in that moment I think it may be different this time” (203). But this does not eventuate, and Ritchie observes “somewhere over the Pacific, at thirty-nine thousand feet, I lost a husband” (204). Similarly, Dicinoski retains hope despite the distinctly unneighbourly response of her neighbour, Bob, to news of her marriage. For these writers, gentle humour and controlled use of metaphor accomplish what browbeating never could.

Regardless of the diversity of their stances, none of the contributors seems to wholly oppose same-sex marriage. I found myself agreeing with Michael Kirby in his foreword (xxiv) and fellow reviewer David Allan that the collection might have benefited from the inclusion of some of these contrasting viewpoints. But readers may have been exposed to enough reductio ad absurdum arguments along the lines of “same-sex marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs” outside these pages to be relieved not to be meeting any more here within them.

According to the Speak Now blog, the collection has been criticised for the fact that “it doesn’t speak with one voice on the issue of marriage and that politicians could be ‘spooked’ by the proposal of polyamory expressed by some of the contributors”. But to me, this editorial risk-taking is one of the strengths of this collection. It exemplifies the principles of parity and inclusion that underline the push for marriage equality. To speak “with one voice” might be politically expedient, but it risks enforcing a new, albeit non-heterosexual, orthodoxy. The editor has chosen instead to embrace and celebrate the multi-faceted realities of people’s lives and heterogenous perspectives. To do otherwise would reinforce the misconception that the diversity within these pages somehow stands outside of—rather than is synecdochal of—human experience as a whole.

Because this collection is so eclectic—with variations in genre, exact topic, and approach—it would have benefited from an index. This is not a book to be read straight through. Rather it is one to dip into, put aside for rumination, and dip into again. As the personal pieces often introduce concepts expanded upon in the academic essays, an index would help to explicate these links. For example, Deb Wain’s assertion that marriage “as a concept and social construct … predates the Christian church” (236) could be cross-referenced to the essays expanding on this concept. For those interested in further reading, an index or select bibliography would also help to locate passing references to secondary sources in some of the essays.

The danger with a collection such as Speak Now is preaching to the choir—that it will primarily attract an audience already receptive to, and interested in, same-sex marriage. But the book’s diversity of voices prevents this. Victor Marsh’s admission of his own change of heart in his editorial introduction is not only disarming, it’s canny. By acknowledging his own shift in perspective, he opens up breathing space for readers to do the same.

Speak Now documents an array of different attitudes and approaches to same-sex marriage at a pivotal time in Australian political life. It will make a valuable contribution to queer historical scholarship in Australia. For the newly out or curious, it showcases some of the varied possibilities for living a queer life.  Speak Now deserves a wide, enquiring readership. I hope it finds one.

You can access the accompanying blog for Speak Now at http://speaknowaustralia.blogspot.com.au/

Works Cited

Adair, Nancy. Word is Out: Stories of Some of our Lives. Delacorte Press, 1978.

Allan, David. Rev. of Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Ed. Victor Marsh. GayLawNet 20 November 2011. <http://www.gaylawnet.com/ezine/books/speak_now.htm>

“Wendell Rosevear Speaks Now”. Speak Now. http://speaknowaustralia.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/william-rosevear-speaks-now.html

FIONA McKEAN is a postgraduate student at The University of Queensland.

Australians love to venerate and immortalise their outlaws as heroes, seeing rebelliousness and the concept of a ‘fair go’ as part of their cultural identity.  Men such as Ned Kelly, Mad Dog Morgan and Jack Doolan have been celebrated in both film and song for sticking it to the authorities and battling for the ‘little man’ but two other non-white figures going back to the first days of colonisation have until recently flown under the radar: John ‘Black’ Caesar, a black African who was Australia’s first bushranger and Pemulwuy, an almost mythical Aboriginal warrior who led the indigenous resistance against the fledgling British settlement.

It comes as a surprise to most Australians that there were 11 black men on the First Fleet in 1788.  Caesar was one of these.  His journey probably began in Madagascar.  Taken as a slave to work in the fields in Virginia in the United States, he became one of the hordes of slaves to take refuge behind British lines in the American War of Independence.  After the defeat of the British in 1783, a fleet carrying many runaway slaves and black loyalists fled to Nova Scotia.  Caesar, thought to be 14 years old at the time, was one of them.  The Minerva then took him to England in the same year, joining an estimated 9000 other slaves who had also left America.

Even though London was unquestionably the world’s greatest city and for some the streets were paved with gold, for most it was an unforgiving place full of danger and vice.  For most of the former black loyalists the situation was dire and some, like Caesar turned to crime to survive.  In 1786 in Kent, he was convicted of stealing money and soon was in the Ceres; a fetid, disease ridden prison hulk on the Thames.  This was merely a precursor to being chained between decks for the trip on the Alexander to that outpost of the Empire, Botany Bay.   

It is impossible to know for certain which black was in the initial work party at Botany Bay, but with Caesar’s imposing stature and immense physical strength (he was thought to be the strongest convict in the First Fleet) it wouldn’t be far fetched to say that he was one of the men sent ashore to try and carve something from the black sandy soil.  Aboriginals from the Eora tribe who met the party must have not only been confused by the white convicts and marines in their strange garb  but also by a pitch black man in the self same get up talking the same language as these otherworldly creatures.  Finding Botany Bay not to their liking the entire fleet moved north to Port Jackson a few days later.

From our vantage point of history it is difficult to comprehend but in terms of European civilisation the First Fleet literally had nothing and the 732 convicts with their inadequate tools had to start from Year Zero.  The rules they worked under were simple and brutal.  Anyone caught stealing would hang.  If they didn’t work, they didn’t eat and anyone trying to enter the woman’s tents would be shot.  Of course this last rule lasted about as long as the ink took to dry and one officer in a letter home to his wife recalled that the woman’s camp soon resembled ‘whoredome’.  The rations supplied to the convicts for their back breaking tasks were too little and in a couple of months were further reduced.  Quite simply, for a man of Caesar’s size the rations were not enough and as noted by the man who would soon to become his nemesis, Marine Captain David Collins, Caesar was always ravenous. As such, Caesar’s first infraction in the new colony was when he was accused of stealing four pounds of bread from the tent of another convict.  Although the surviving records don’t show Caesar’s punishment it is safe to assume he was tied to a tree and given 100-300 lashes.  On this occasion it is also likely to assume that still swinging from the same tree that Caesar was tied to was a 17 year old youth who had been hung for stealing bread.  The savage parameters of the new colony had been set but did little to stop the settlement sliding further into hunger as crops and animal rearing failed and dysentery and scurvy raised their ugly heads.

In April 1789, in what was to become a pattern, Caesar appeared in court for stealing.  This time he wasn’t flogged but received a much worse punishment as his sentence was increased from seven years to life.  Seeing a lifetime of punitive brutality and hunger stretching before him, Caesar made the first of his escapes.  With a stolen musket and cooking pot, Caesar ventured into the great unknown beyond the settlement but was captured shortly after, weak with hunger and offering no resistance. This time, Caesar was sentenced to death. 

The evocative alleged last words of Ned Kelly ‘Such is Life’ now feature on tattoos and on Eureka Stockade flags co-opted by drunken louts on Australia Day, reinforcing Kelly’s status as Australia’s folk hero of folk heroes.  Caesar’s nonchalant reply on sentencing should also be duly celebrated but problems of translation may hinder this.  He told the judge, “if they should scrag him he would quiz them all and show them some gig at the nubbing cheat, before he was turned off.”  A loose translation of this convict argot was that he would play a trick on the executioner and get a laugh for both he and the crowd before he was hung.  Judge Collins, who at various times called Caesar  ‘ a wretch’, ‘a mere animal’ and ‘insensible alike to punishment and kindness’ did not want Caesar to become a symbol of convict resistance, something which may have eventuated if the proposed execution was turned into some sort of theatre.  Instead Caesar, who was not averse to hard work was sent to work in chains on Garden Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour, from where the settlement’s vegetables were supplied. 

Even though he was allowed to supplement his meagre rations with what he grew Caesar again escaped in December 1789 after convincing sympathetic guards to remove his chains.  Taking a canoe and a week’s worth of provisions he headed into the interior, stopping only to steal a musket from the settlement.  He roamed for six weeks until he was recaptured suffering from severe spear wounds.  Various accounts have been put forward as to how he had come to be speared; from his own unlikely tale that he had been trying to drive a lost herd of cattle away from Aborigines back to the settlement to the idea that he had tried to integrate himself with the Aborigines but had committed a cultural error and was cast out.  The most probable cause was Caesar (who had no ammunition for his musket) would descend on Aborigines when they had anything on the fire, swaggering and brandishing his musket.  The Aborigines who had no idea that Caesar had no ammunition and knowing the power of the weapon, scattered.  That was until he lost his musket and was attacked.  Again given the sentence of death, he was sent to hospital to recover until fit enough to hang.  

Probably realising at this stage it was far easier to get rid of Caesar (in a geographical sense), he once again escaped the noose and in 1790 was sent to far away Norfolk Island.  On Norfolk, with the incentive of more freedom and food Caesar  threw himself into his work and took a wife, Anne Poore.  Making a good go of it, Caesar worked his one acre plot for three days a week, providing not only enough for himself but also his family which now included a baby daughter.  Even so, not all was rosy on Norfolk Island and circumstances were again conspiring to change the trajectory of Caesar’s journey.  When soldiers from the New South Wales Corps (a body of men whose self penned motto of profits over glory attracted a less than desirable bunch) replaced the Marines on the island they demanded land of their own as well as women.  Being a law unto themselves, their demands were taken very seriously and to avoid bloodshed, ‘trouble makers’  like Caesar were sent back to Sydney in 1793.  His family was not permitted to come with him.

During the time that Caesar had been on Norfolk, Pemulwuy had also put himself on the British hit list by spearing John McIntyre, one of Governor’s game hunters.  The spear (used by the Bidjigal clan of the Eora peoples) had been designed to cause a slow and painful death with barbs meant to come off when the spear head was removed from the body.  A reprisal operation took place (interestingly led by another black convict, John Randall) which was supposed to capture Pemulwuy and bring back the heads of another six Aboriginal men.  This grisly operation was an utter failure with no Aboriginals found but Pemulwuy was now too, a marked man.                

A distraught Caesar arrived back in Sydney with the settlement careering towards starvation.  The only thing not in short supply was alcohol, which like most saleable items was controlled by the New South Wales Corps.  Almost as if he had come full circle, Caesar again absconded and following the same pattern was caught and flogged unmercifully.  But like a scene in ‘The Proposition’, Caesar, with flesh hanging from his back and the flogger wiping gore off the cat of nine tails after each stroke, refused to buckle telling Collins that ‘all the flogging in the world would not make him better’.  In the eyes of the other convicts Caesar’s acts of defiance as well as his swift turn of phrase gained him an almost legendary standing amongst his fellows.    

Pemulwuy and the Eora had also become a bigger problem as the settlement spread from Sydney and Parramatta, further encroaching on Aboriginal land and chasing away more game.  In a series of co-ordinated attacks, Pemulwuy’s gang (which included a couple of Irish runaways who helped with information about the settlement and military tactics of the British) raided settlers farms stealing ripening crops and provisions.  The British put these raids down to the Aboriginals having taken a liking to corn, not giving the Aboriginals credit enough for an organised coherent strategy designed to get them out of their hunting lands.  The attacks pushed the settlement to the brink and the British responded by retaliating harshly.  Pemulwuy responded in kind and dead were left on both sides in a series of gruesome attacks and counter attacks.  For a time it looked as though the raids and guerilla tactics would prevail as amongst the British there was talk of abandoning prime farming land and looking for new sites.  One can imagine the British wondering who was the biggest scourge to the new settlement, the Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy or the incorrigible Black Caesar. 

This was especially so when Caesar escaped ‘honest labour’ again.  This time, however he was more successful as like other bushrangers after him, he was able to get arms, ammunition and supplies from the growing number of ex-convict settlers who sympathised with him and his stand against oppression.  Nor was Caesar the only runaway and soon a ragtag gang had formed around him.  The legend of the first Australian bush ranger had been born.  Although death would be the only thing that would make Caesar ‘acceptable’ to the British authorities he achieved a notion of acceptability when he clashed with Pemulwuy.  The swirling miasma of history has obscured the reasons for this clash (some have suggested that Pemulwuy and Caesar had joined forces) but the bloody conflict left Pemulwuy severely wounded with a fractured skull and musket wounds.  At first, the rumours that filtered back to the settlement stated that the feared Aboriginal warrior was dead, cheering the authorities no end.  Judge Collins still considered Caesar as a ‘savage of a darker hue, and full as far removed from civilisation,’ but having removed one of the obstacles to the success of the colony sent word to Caesar that he was ready to cut him some slack.  Caesar from bitter experience had become inured to the broken promises and savagery of the British laughed off the offers and continued on his newly found bush ranging ways.  Caesar’s continued defiance and resulting embarrassment to the authorities led to other offers of conditional pardons but Caesar, echoing villains past and present sent back word he wouldn’t come in or be taken alive.

In January 1796, an official notice was published which made every scoundrel in the colony sit up and take notice.  ‘Whoever shall secure this man Black Caesar and bring him in with his arms shall receive as a reward five gallons of spirits.’  As alcohol was more plentiful than food and more important than money this large reward attracted more than its fair share of bounty hunters.  As  time went by and Caesar was still at large, his legend and celebrity grew until every crime in the colony was being attributed to him and breathless reports built him up to almost invincible proportions.  Alas, this was not the case and on the 15^th of February 1796 at Liberty Plains west of Sydney Cove, Black Caesar was shot down in cold blood by an alcoholic ex-highwayman, John Winbow who may have been part of Caesar’s own gang.  An unflinching Collins when hearing the news of the death of the first icon of convict resistance wrote, ‘thus ended a man who certainly during life could never have been estimated at one remove above the brute.’             

If the British thought getting rid of Black Caesar would calm things down they were sadly mistaken as in February, 1797, a fully recovered Pemulwuy managed to attack the small outpost of Toongabbie, five miles west of Parramatta.  With many of the Eora nation’s sub groups attracted to his cause, much of Toongabbie was burnt and ransacked as it became the first town in the new colony to be taken by the indigenous peoples.  Even though this attack sent shivers down the spines of both settlers and authorities alike, it was nothing like March of the same year when the stronghold of Parramatta was attacked in what became known as the ‘Battle of Parramatta’.  Much of the town’s population retreated to the military stockade as many of the farms and houses on the outskirts were hit in the audacious attack.  Fierce battles broke out with losses on both sides.  Much to the authorities embarrassment, this ‘riotous and primitive savage Pemulwuy’ managed to take the town briefly before he was felled, shot seven times.  He was captured and taken to a hospital, near death. 

Pemulwuy, amongst his own people was known to be a ‘clever man’, that is someone associated with being able to harness supernatural powers.  His escape from jail only emphasised these claims as after all how could a severely wounded man in leg irons, get away.  To the Eora, the explanation was simple, he had turned himself into a bird and flown away … The white settlers, some already half believing the rumours that bullets couldn’t kill him (they somehow passed right through him) and that he could be in several places at once became even more skittish after Pemulwuy recovered and resumed his attacks.  This time, his main weapon was a terrifying ally that his people had used for millennia, fire.

Burning down crops and the areas surrounding farms, Pemulwuy sowed seeds of terror and again pushed the settlement towards famine.  Wheat Protection Squads were set up but Pemulwuy changed his tactics again, letting the men protect the crops as he attacked the homes, terrifying the women and children.  Soon, the Protection Squads were useless as the men refused to venture far from their terrified families.  Added to this, the bushrangers Thomas Thrush and William Knight were thought to be in cahoots with him.  Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until late 1801 (and after 11 years of resistance) that Pemulwuy’s name was recorded in an official document  ̶  a sign perhaps of the whitewashing of history that occurred after his death.  The all powerful New South Wales Corps seeing their profits being snatched from them with the continual attacks and fires around Parramatta and its prime farming land, responded in kind.  Every known Eora campsite was to be attacked and anyone found there, killed.  Massacres of children, women and the elderly followed.  Already  decimated due to an outbreak of influenza, the indigenous Eora teetered on the brink of extinction.

Coupled with this was the staggering reward put on Pemulwuy’s head: 20 gallons of spirits, free pardon and two suits of clothes.  In June 1802, Pemulwuy ‘The Rainbow Warrior’ (so called because he wore the various colours of the distinct groups that made up the Eora nation) was shot dead, his head cut off and sent to England for ‘scientific’ purposes.  Even his enemies had to acknowledge, ‘although a terrible pest to the colony, he was a brave and independent character’.  His son Tedbury continued the fight until, he too, was killed in 1810. 

Although being seen as a heroic figure by the Aborigines, Pemulwuy has also gained recognition in the wider community: a suburb in Sydney was named after him, as well as a park.  Prince William, on a recent visit to Australia was presented with a petition to have Pemulwuy’s remains brought back to Australia.  One can hope that these are the first steps in acceptance being gained by a true Australian hero.  Hopefully the same can also be said of his one time adversary, the giant Black Caesar.