Robert Adamson and the Spirit of Place

I was saddened to hear last week of the passing of Australian poet, Robert Adamson at the age of 79.

Adamson was a force in Australian poetry, part of the ‘new poetry’ push in the 1960s and 1970s and edited New Poetry magazine for fourteen years. By the time I came across his work, in the early 1980s, he was well established as an important voice in Australian poetry.

Personally, I was particularly drawn to the spirit of place in Adamson’s work, the belief in the importance of the ‘local’ that I have found so often in writers I admire, particularly in his case, the Hawkesbury River region. His writing about landscape and birds has been something I’ve enjoyed most in his work.

This week, after the news, I pulled some of the Adamson books from my collection and re-read some of those poems. I also re-read his memoir of prose and poetry, Wards of the State. They remain impressive work, grounded in the real world, but ‘fishing in a landscape for love’

Selected Poems (A&R, 1978)

The autobiographical memoir, ‘Wards of the State’ (A&R, 1992)

‘Waving to Hart Crane’ (A&R, 1994)

‘The Golden Bird – New and Selected Poems’ (BlackInc 2008)

Living Beside the Sea

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about my relationship with the sea, and why I haven’t written more about that, in an overt way. The sea, and its associations, imagery and sensations, is in a lot of my poetry, but I’ve rarely written specifically about what it means to me to live near a vast body of water.

I was reminded of this again, today reading a blog post The Sea and the Soul on the Marginalian site and by earlier reading that’s sat with me, most recently, Joseph Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea and Rachel Carlson’s The Sea Around Us

I live on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, Australia, a beautiful place that sits between two bays; the vast dish of Port Phillip Bay, locked in with a narrow and dangerous entrance with Melbourne at its head and the narrower, more tidal, Western Port Bay with its mangroves and reefs that are open to the south-west swells from Bass Strait and where I spent a lot of time surfing.

I’ll often say something off-hand like I couldn’t live away from the water, but I think I really mean it, but what does it mean to be near the water like this? It is something more than the ease and convenience of being near the sea that’s happening here? I remember reading one writer (Roger Deakin?) pondering what difference it might make for a person in England growing up on a chalk landscape like the South Downs, as distinct from a place of limestone or something else.

The philosopher Denis Dutton has argued in Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology that people around the world have an intrinsic appreciation for a certain type of landscape — a grassy field with copses of trees, water and wildlife — because it resembles the Pleistocene savannas where humans first evolved:

Beyond a liking for savannahs, there is a general preference for landscapes with water; a variety of open and wooded space (indicating places to hide and places for game to hide); trees that fork near the ground (provide escape possibilities) with fruiting potential a metre or two from the ground; vistas that recede in the distance, including a path or river that bends out of view but invites exploration; the direct presence or implication of game animals; and variegated cloud patterns.

I’m not sure this explains the sea, or dangerous places like mountains, that are fundamental to some people.

A while ago I was reading the harrowing accounts of the carnage of war in John Keegan’s The Face of Battle while on holiday in the beautiful landscape of Augusta, by the sea, in Western Australia. The contrast between the two worlds: the evoked horrors of the Somme in World War I and the sheltered estuary I was reading in, full of sea birds, big light-filled sky and reflected calm, could not have been more profound. After reading of the terrible realities of war it was physically calming and somehow restorative to walk out into the light and the sounds of the ocean.

This weekend I walked beside both bays on sunny winter mornings. At Mt Martha, Balcombe Creek was over-brimming after the rain last week and about to spill into Port Phillip Bay. At Somers, on Western Port Bay the next day, Merricks Creek was flowing clear and cold into the milky sea.

Balcombe Creek and Port Phillip Bay

Balcombe Creek, Mt Martha, 9th July 2022

Somers Beach

Derricks Creek enters Western Port Bay, 10 July 2022

Does any of this explain what the sea means? Or what it means to live beside the sea and not beside a great river or a mountain? Not really. Except that it does mean something and does matter, somehow.

The (100) things that sustain us

I’ve followed Austin Kleon’s blog for a while now, and have a copy of his book Steal like an Artist, which even made my 2012 Book of the Year Final Lists, on my stack of references for core texts about remaining creative.

This week, he released his exhaustive (and exhausting!) list of things that sustained him through the wild, pandemic year of 2020′ 100 Things that Made My Year. It includes things like making collages, re-mixing Peanuts comics, making music with his family and the black-out poetry that first grabbed my attention about his work.

It inspired me to think freshly about the things I enjoyed and sustained me through a challenging year. I often do summary kinds of lists of the year (the year in numbers) and, of course, my favourite books and music of the year, but Kleon’s eccentric, introspective list made me think again about those almost invisible things that makes life livable.

One of the ones in my 100, if I can manage that many, is living by the sea. There’s something about being able to walk to the edge of something, to find that thing that borders and shapes and defines and restores.

Now, for the next 99!

Abandoned Picnic Places

On my walk this morning, along the bay near Safety Beach, I looked away from the sea for a moment, and there was a picnic table half-hidden in the ti-tree. A concrete picnic table, and the stump foundations of the benches that must once have been located along either long side. A forgotten little object, never important even on the day it was built, and mossy monolithic concrete now.

But, for me, there’s always been something about these lost and abandoned places. I’ve written about this before; on Abandoned Picnic Places, Buried Things and The Lost Highway but for some reason they still move me somehow: the transience, the hopefulness, the idea, I’m not sure. I do think that there’s something particular about the picnic place too; that families, or couples, or friends sat here by the sea, in moments that are long gone now.

I stopped, took a couple of quick photos and walked on. But the image stayed with me for the rest of the day. One day someone constructed this. I’m reminded of that lovely imagist poem by T.E. Hulme:

Old houses were scaffolding once
and workmen whistling.

On Philip Martin and criticism

I was talking to my Year 12 Literature class this morning about Heart of Darkness, its initial critical reception and the polarising re-evaluations since, by Achebe largely, and others as well.

It’s a part of the course called Literary Perspectives, that I initially had lots of reservations about (can we just stick to the text) but I’ve actually enjoyed teaching it and seeing familiar texts in new light.

Later, as I was looking online for post-colonial and feminist readings I thought of a conversation I had with the poet and teacher Philip Martin a long time ago. Martin taught me at Monash University and I’ve written about him here before.

On this occasion we were talking about the value of critics and I think I said that I liked it when a critic said something that I’d thought or felt, but said it in a way that I never could.

He considered that and replied that, sometimes a good critic can make you see or feel things that you could never have thought of yourself. I liked that answer, and I liked teachers who do that too.

All this made made me think again about Martin and his work. I’m the proud owner of three of Martin’s books, but they’re hard to find, and there’s not much available online.

There is an interview from In Other Words: Interviews with Australian Poets by Barbara Williams available onlinefrom Google Books and a brief biography of Martin on the UNSW site as a guide to his papers. It reads:

Philip John Talbot Martin was born in Richmond, Victoria on the 28 March 1931. He was educated at Xavier College, Kew, 1937-1950, and graduated with a B.A. from the University of Melbourne in 1958. Prior to his teaching career Martin worked at the Titles Office, Melbourne, 1953-1956, and as a Publication Officer at the University of Melbourne, 1956-1960. His teaching career began, firstly as a Tutor in English at the University of Melbourne, 1960-1962, followed by a position as a temporary Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, 1963. In 1963, he returned to Melbourne as a Senior Lecturer in English at Monash University where he worked until his early retirement due to ill health in 1988. During his teaching career he was also a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam in 1967, Visiting Professor, University of Venice in 1976, and Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota in 1983. He was a member of International P.E.N., Fellowship of Australian Writers, Association for the Study of Australian Literature, member and former Chair of the Poet’s Union of Australia, Melbourne Branch, 1978-1979 and 1981-1982 and Amnesty International.

From 1962 Martin was a frequent broadcaster of poetry and features on Australian and overseas radio. He read poetry in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Hobart, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Yugoslavia, England and the United States, and conducted several poetry workshops. He began publishing poems as a student at the University of Melbourne and his poems, articles and reviews were widely published in Australia, Europe and the United States in journals and anthologies. He broadcast both as a critic and poetry-reader, and wrote the scripts for several television features produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Martin’s publications include:

• Voice unaccompanied : poems (1970)
• A bone flute (1974)
• From Sweden : translations and poems (translated by Martin, 1979)
• Strava : poems on Attila and the Huns (photocopied from Southerly and published by the author, 1980)
• Directory of Australian poets 1980 (edited for the Poets Union of Australia by Philip Martin … 1980)
• A flag for the wind (1982)
• Shakespeare’s sonnets; self, love and art (1982)
• Lars Gustafsson (translated by Martin, 1982)
• A season in Minnesota : poems (1987)
• Lars Gustafsson : the stillness of the world before Bach (translated by Martin, 1988)
• New and selected poems (1988).

Philip Martin died in Victoria on 18 October 2005.

I remember Martin as a gifted, articulate, generous teacher who surprised me by revealing that poets really did live in the world.

Some scans from my books of his are below

The cover of A Bone Flute (ANU, 1974)

A Flag for the Wind, 1982

My copy signed by Philip

Back cover of A Flag for the Wind

The cover  of New and Selected Poems (Longman Cheshire 1988)

Acknowledgments

Back cover with brief biography.

‘Bequest’, the final poem in A Bone Flute, and fitting farewell.

Walking Discovery Bay

There’s much to be said, and has been written, about the virtues of walking in nature. I’ve written about it myself, read about walking, and it’s something that I’ve always connected with writing.

This holiday break I spent a few days walking sections of the Great South West Walk, a trail in south-west Victoria that’s been developed over the last twenty years. We walked bits of it, day-walks and nothing too arduous, but memorable nevertheless.

Two things resonate me now that I’m back at home: the site of an wedge-tailed eagle making its way along the dune-line. We stopped and watched for whole minutes. There’s a poem coming, though I doubt I can outdo Hopkins’s The Windhover, which was in my mind over and over as I watched.

And, the long walk along the wild ocean beach of Discovery Bay. In the distance the sky was getting black and blacker, surely a storm was coming, and the white of the surf became almost luminous. In four hours on the beach we saw no other human beings.

You can see more of my walking-related posts HERE