Post
by Stephen Whiteside » Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:08 am
One of the problems with attempting to draw a line in the sand like this is that you then have to decide where to put the line. It raises interesting questions, both temporally and geographically.
Geography first.
Take a poem like Lawson's 'Faces in the Street'. This is set in the city of Sydney, as I recall. Would this poem therefore fail Valerie's criteria for inclusion as 'bush verse'? I don't know. Just a question. How about 'The Captain of the Push', also by Lawson?
I can see problems with Paterson, too. 'The Man from Ironbark' is set in a country town. Can a town be regarded as the bush, or not? Is it a question of population? Or does it come down to distance from the nearest capital centre, or regional centre? Is Ballarat still the bush? What about Geelong or Wollongong? How about Bairnsdale? Again, just questions.
Even 'Clancy of the Overflow' could be problematic. Although Clancy is in the bush (or at least he used to be - nobody knows were he is now!), the narrator is in the city. So it could be argued that the poem is actually set in the city, and does not therefore qualify as 'bush verse'. The only part of the poem that relates to the bush is in the mind of the city-bound narrator. IS THIS GOOD ENOUGH?
Dennis' 'Sentimental Bloke' is set in the city, and most of the events related in 'Ginger Mick' do not even occur in Australia, so presumably neither of these books can be classified as 'bush verse'. Mind you, Dennis wasn't really a bush poet anyway.
Next we come to time.
At what point did the era of the 'bush poets' come to an end? Can we safely say around the end of World War One?
This would allow Dennis to just scrape in by the skin of his teeth, although he has already disqualified himself by virtue of both location and general style.
Finally, is Paterson really a 'bush poet' after all? It could be argued that his rhyme and metre was far too polished, if bush poet is to have similar connotations as, say, 'bush lawyer' or 'bush carpenter'. And Lawson wasn't really a poet at all. Wasn't he primarily a writer of short stories? And he didn't live in the bush by choice. He preferred city life, and only went out to Hungerford because a canny newspaper man paid him a lot of money to do so.
It's tricky this whole question of defining 'bush poetry', it's very tricky.
On the other hand, of course, if we accept the ABPA definition, it's really quite simple.