* * * * *
They say that, when Abraham Lincoln had seen Walt Whitman, he summed
his impression in the emphatic “This is a _man_.” That is what one
feels in reading the verses of Western Australian writers—“This is
a _man_.” The work of the tribe of pseudonymous writers in Western
newspapers—especially _Kalgoorlie Sun_ and _Perth Sunday Times_—the
work of “Bluebush” and “Dryblower,” “Crosscut,” “Prospect Good,” and
the rest—is the most virile and the most original poetry that has been
made in Australia since the Commonwealth began. “Here’s manhood,”
I say, and “Here’s Australian manhood.” For vigour and versatility
the East at the moment has few writers to rival this little Western
comradeship.
The East has more refined writers, more cultivated and more artistic
writers; but not more manly writers.
Poetry is a man’s work if it performs a man’s deeds. When, on the
night of 24th April, 1792, Rouget de l’Isle tramped his lodging-house
room “with a head of ice and fire” to compose “The Marseillaise,” how
many deeds were his exultant verses worth! How vainly he himself would
have fought to achieve the feats of swelling valour to which his art
inspired others. In a literary aspect the words are little more than a
rant:—
“Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!”
But this rant, as Carlyle says, when added to the stirring tune, “will
make the blood tingle in men’s veins; and whole armies and assemblages
will sing it with eyes weeping and burning, with hearts defiant of
death, despot, and devil.”
The vigorous Western Australian verses that I praise are of that kind
and approximate to that standard. They are written in peace, and cannot
gain the hottest of mortal ardours, the exultation of war. But if there
were Australian war, here are the men to write our marching songs.
There is a literature of art, and there is a literature of humanity.
The one kind does not exclude the other; the best poetry is human in
impulse, artistic in expression. Yet inevitably, as verse is written,
there are found writers with a languid pulse whose finest effects are
gained by a decorative use of language, and opposed to these are the
writers who use the oldest rhymes, the oldest rhythms, to give impetus
to the messages of emotion that fly hot from their hearts.
This Western Australian poetry is often inartistic; it is often a poor
thing considered as literature; but how broadly and strongly it appeals
to our humanity! how graphic it is! how humorous or tragic! and how
natural! It is written, for the greater part, not from a head to a
head, but from a heart to a heart; and in its most effective passages
it has the same force of sincerity, the same truth of vision, the same
sympathy, that make the old ballads a precious possession, and that
have captivated thirty centuries with the stories and descriptions of
Homer.
There must be allowed, also, to the little school of Western Australian
writers, besides their vigour and vivacity, a real singing talent, and
no slight mastery of striking phraseology. Often enough their subjects
are commonplace, yet it is rarely that their treatment of a subject
is entirely commonplace. Almost always there is found a personal
touch that in its way and to its extent is a true style, and a style
effective to move the readers to whom it is addressed. It is said that
the Arabs are careful not to tread on any scrap of written paper lest
it should contain the sacred name of Allah. In the same manner I think
that every lover of poetry is careful not to contemn the rudest rhyme
that may contain a heartbeat. That is to say that every lover of poetry
is a faithful Catholic. He may like some kinds of poetry better than
others, yet he finds every kind a good kind—however stiffly or crudely
it succeeds in transferring its content of emotion. If it does not
hold and convey emotion, then it is not poetry, no matter how fine its
form or how famous the name of its author. I value this little wild
garden of verses the more because it grows in Australia. Doubtless, its
Australian appeal detracts from its quality considered as universal
literature; yet that detraction is balanced by the additional
attraction it has for readers here and now. I am not concerned to
measure out comparative credit, but only to emphasise the point that we
have here something that is worthy our credit.
The opinion offered, the attitude taken, follow after reading some
hundreds of representative Western verses. The merit of those verses is
to be found in the impression one receives from the whole—an impression
gained from many patches of gold that shine in the quartz. An artist
may touch everything with mastery. These writers are not artists, but
men who utter the measures and rhymes that come to them often unsought;
they are poetical interpreters of life and manhood. Accept them in that
guise, and they need no justification from another’s hand: they justify
themselves.
John Philip Bourke, who wrote for _The Sun_, Kalgoorlie, scores of
stanzas that ring harshly or melodiously, but that ring true, has set
down his page of Western history over the signature of “Bluebush.”
Between East and West his honours are easy; for he springs from the
East, but it is the West that has inspired him. He was born in August,
1860, on the Peel River Diggings, New South Wales; he was born with
the wandering blood. At the age of seventeen he sold his first reef to
Clarke, of Gullandaddy station, for £600; then for seventeen years he
settled down as a school teacher. In 1894 he went West and roughed it
on the mining track.
He was pretty consistently lucky in making small “rises” of from £200
to £1000 (with a “record” of £1,250), but he never handled a wingless
coin. His old Hunter River stock was mostly of Irish blood: does that
account for a free hand and a blessing on a generous heart? Yet until
his death he faced the world with a roguish eye and with bright and
dark years of experience to write about. He died at Boulder, W.A., on
13th January, 1914.
_The Sun_ praised him justly. “He was a writer of verse that appealed
to everyone by its rugged force, its fertility of ideas, its truth and
the spirit of human sympathy and true mateship which permeated every
line. Straight as a gunbarrel and unfaltering in his denunciation of
all that savoured of the mean, the paltry, or the unjust, Bourke was
the whitest and the most lovable of men. Gifted with a keen insight
into human nature and unlimited power of happy expression, he was a
staunch friend and a true mate, and no man on the fields was more
personally popular.”
What did Bourke write? The verse that appeals to wanderers, to reckless
men, to men who have fought and lost, fought and won, fought and wasted
their winnings in all the ways of all the earth. Wasted? Not all
wasted; not most, it may be.
What is a purse? A thing to scatter free.
What is a talent but a gift for joy?
What is life’s lesson? To live heartily
To man’s utmost, like a happy boy.
It is a doctrine that must be preached cautiously; yet it is the best
doctrine of all. So many people miss life by not grasping it; in saving
other things they spend life itself: and at the end there is pity for
those who cannot say “_Vixi_!” Let Bourke express himself:
I have no wild desire to sing and sing
Or kneel at Nature’s feet, and be her mummer.
Poetic fancies are not rioting
For liberty, like prisoned birds in summer.
No thoughts, like maiden hair, climb round and cling
To rhyming roosters writing on a thrummer;
But frowsy devils, round the camp to-night,
Suggest alone the commonplace and trite.
There is no bubbling spring within my clay;
I hold no lyrics straining at the tether;
My bones would drift right into blanket hay
If it were not such rough financial weather.
I’d never pen a par, or lay a lay,
Or deck ambition’s cady with a feather
If I could clutch a whisky piping hot,
A plate of hash, a pension and a pot.
But Bourke does himself injustice. His is a strain of toiling life once
again made vocal—the real truth of real toil, as it may happen, as it
has happened to thousands who have struggled “to gain from the West
her glorious golden prize”—and who have gained and have squandered,
or have died struggling, or have “gone out on flukes,” as Bayley did,
“with the new life just begun.”
Got no time to ruminate! Got no time to read!
Got no time to foller on! Got no time to lead!
Got no time to stoop and pluck the daisies by the pad!
Got no time for triflin’, for hobby-horse or fad!
Got no time to pass remarks! Got no time to write!
Got no time to sky the wipe—only time to fight!
Only time for graft and grind, dog and dough and dust!
That’s the tune the music plays—scratchin’ for a crust.
From such a life as that stanza depicts, almost inevitably men turn
to intoxicating liquor for consolation or for oblivion. Any reader of
Western verses must see first how large a part liquor plays in life,
and secondly, how large a part of that life, that life in the desert,
in the sand, in the wilderness, can only be assuaged by liquor. Bourke
writes:
What’s the use of sittin’
Dry as blessed chips?
What’s the use of spittin’
Through our corn-beef lips?
What’s the use of drinkin’?
Well, that ain’t so clear
To my way of thinkin’—
Let us have a beer.
“A Drunk’s Defiance” is a human plea. But Bourke urges the other side
still more strongly—“No more verses in praise of wine!”
Shirking the fight that a man should fight,
Dodging the joys that a man should know,
Scorning the breath of a plumed thought’s flight—
Down with the swine and the husks below!
’Tis thus we reap from the seeds we sow—
Hearts grow withered and locks grow white,
Dodging the joys that a man should know,
Shirking the fight that a man should fight.
There are keen sight and shrewd sense underlying Bourke’s verses. There
is sentiment, too, intermingled with pathos, in many places—as in “His
Letter from W.A.”
It’s scarcely six months since I left Cooranbean,
But seems longer than all of last year;
The moon ain’t so bright and the grass ain’t so green,
And the sky, somehow, isn’t so clear.
Oh! I’d give all their towns to the very last brick,
And the mines with the forchins they yield,
Just to hear the old ripple of Cooranbean crick,
And the rustle of corn in the field.
And “Her Letter” came back:
You mind the moss rose that grew over our gate,
Our old gate where we whispered “Good-bye”?
Oh, how often I go there and wonder if Fate
Has one blessing a girl’s wish could buy—
I am wearin’ a bunch in your favourite dress,
With the flounces and streamers of blue,
And though p’r’aps it is silly, I have to confess
I am wearin’ my heart out for you.
Is that not a sympathetic expression of honest feeling, of true
affection, that has gone out thousands of times to “the boys in
the West”? In pieces like “Old Bill Bates” the note of mateship is
struck; the note that has been the keynote of so many Western lives
linked in the hearty give-and-take comradeship of two men—two bound
closer, almost, than husband and wife, by long-shared years of effort
together. “At Bummer’s Creek” warrants all that has been said of the
manly virtue of Western poetry—and is there anyone who has worked with
men who has not found Dave’s mate?
We two were fitted, j’int for j’int,
And toiled and starved and spreed,
But one’d watch around the stump
When t’other one was treed,
The same when Luck was in full bloom
As when she run ter seed.
That is not refined poetry; but it is essentially poetry; and let us
never forget that all the refinements of life spring from precisely
such realities as are illustrated by this humble “battler.” That a lady
from whose body and mind every speck and thought of defilement are
kept, may walk sedately down the shady side of St. George’s Terrace,
some such man as Bill’s mate must have sweated crudely in the region of
Kalgoorlie. The fancy is far-fetched, but it has a real basis; a large
part of the burden of civilization is borne by “humble battlers;” and
it is to the breed of these “battlers” that we look for civilization’s
defence in the day of challenge. Let not the flower despise its roots.
The lines for “Our Goldfields Spring” are outspoken:
For here you are thus early soiled and tanned
A sorry subject for a verse creator,
A damned inverted pewter in your hand,
Some draggled immortelles around your crater.
They speak, somehow, of drought, and dust, and sand,
And summer’s hell that’s waiting for us later,
And flies innumerable and small black ants,
And several thousand other irritants.
“Beer is Enough” is another piece full of racy virtue, expressed with
perverse ingenuity:
Beer is enough. Let Love roost on his perch,
And coo and coo his breath away at will—
The bride in orange blooms—the ivied church—
The two-roomed kipsy sheltered by the hill—
Sweep them aside and fetch the frothing bowl
To warm the cockles of one’s inmost soul.
Beer is enough.
Or take this sardonic expression of the doubt of Love:
There’s a new chap born in the world to-day,
And an axe laid close to the root of doubt.
When I hear you speak in that soulful way
Of a love to last till the stars go out—
But Mignonette!
Will you love me yet
When the duns come in? ... ’Tis an even bet.
Will your faith still shine when the world grows grey?
When the Autumn comes, will your heart grow sere?
Will you wear the smile that you wear to-day
When you wear the hat you wore last year?
Many such stanzas may deserve to be called coarse. A man can defend
them and enjoy them, because they are not vulgar; they are not affected
or insincere; they express the primitive man as he is found—under more
or fewer layers of veneer—in every other man who is worth a woman’s
salt. The work of John Philip Bourke must be taken now and then with a
good deal of salt; but it holds the meat and mettle of manhood.