Midday Horizon
I'm trying to do a feature for Radio National about the Australian literary landscape and how it has changed since the writing of the 1890s.
It's an interesting task: Who are the most significant writers of an Australian landscape consciousness? If we start with Lawson and Paterson in the 1890s .. who's next?
Miles Franklin in the early 1900s. The new nationalists like Xavier Herbert in the 30s. Poets like Judith Wright, Robert Gray and Les Murray. Populist writers like Ion Idriess. Any ideas people?
I like this poem of Philip Hodgins - Midday Horizon
... A big mob of sheep is moving to the left
breaking up and catching up
in slow eddies like a lava flow.
Seen through the hot distorting air
clear flames seem to be tearing off the mob.
A man is walking sheep-slow behind them.
From where you are
his shape is continually being modified
as if he were walking through different dimensions...
The man stops
and a low piece of him draws right away this time.
It must be a dog.
1 Comments:
I reckon you've got to use some Frank Moorhouse:
"He said on the telephone that he would be using a German solid-fuel stove in the bush.
'I'll put your father on,' his seventy-year-old mother said, and he pictured them passing the telephone between them, and he heard her say to his father in a very audible conspiratorial whisper, 'He says he is going to use a German sold-fuel stove.' His father came on and said the German solid-fuel or any-nationality-fuel stoves were banned.
What he didn't say to his father and mother was that he intended to have camp fires regardless of the fire bans. He was now forty and could damn well light a fire, legal or illegal, if he damn well wanted to."
Frank Moorhouse - Forty Seventeen
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