Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #11/thyla11f-mlbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
the Dog Rock by Miriel Lenore
(Wakefield Press, Adelaide, SA, Australia, 2004, ISBN: ISBN 1-86254-666-5, $19.95)
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Miriel Lenore's latest collection of poems is essentially a family history, documenting (and, when this is not possible, imagining) the life of her great-great-grandmother, Sarah. Sarah, her husband Tom, and their three children escaped the hardships of Sussex in the 1830s to emigrate to Australia, where they settled on the western slopes of New South Wales' Great Dividing Range in the shadow of 'the Dog Rock'. Lenore's imaginary voice for Sarah is both well-modulated and believable in tone and accent, so that the reader feels we 'know' her, as we share in the trials of rearing thirteen children (and losing three, tragically, in one month). |
We also find her living with a husband with an over-fondness for alcohol (which he then forsakes for a career as a Methodist lay preacher, which seems to be just as much of an addiction and creates its own difficulties), through to widowhood and old age, still on the land where they first settled. There's a satisfying continuity in knowing that Sarah's descendants still farm this land today. Descriptions of natural features, such as trees and plants that survive in Sarah's garden, also provide a bridge between the generations.
Sarah's story is not unusual - though certainly less colourful than narratives about those who arrived in Australia in chains - but what raises this poetic narrative out of the territory of ancestral history only of interest to immediate descendants is the poet's documentation of her own process of discovery as she travels, not only to the original property, but also back to the villages in rural Sussex where the story begins. In tracking down documentation and actually visiting places such as the church where Sarah and Tom married and had their children baptised, and the places where they lived and worked, we are privy to a returnee's impressions of land, villages, and physical structures whose connections to the narrator are firmly rooted in the distant past.
Although some local historians and genealogists are unfailingly helpful to Lenore in her quest for information, others are irredeemably haughty, and dismissive of a mere 'colonial' daring to come back to the Old Country and imposing her Australian egalitarian values on a society still dependant on notions of class and succession to hold it together. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the narrative, and highlights the notion that emigration causes irrevocable change over generations that makes it impossible to 'go back'.
'[T]he morning walkers climbed the rise
and stopped to talk
I suppose I started it - I usually do
but they were ready to rest
we talked routes and travels and farming
until I said:
why didn't the peasants revolt?
why do aristocrats still own it all?
a microsecond changed the mood
one man said I knew nothing about land
nor the value of large estates
Australians he added were culture-less boors ...' (colonial, p.28).
An Englishman would rarely even think to ask such a question.
Although many individual poems stand out - for example, I particularly liked "devilish" (p.105) with its description of Sarah's 'startling eyebrows', and the poems dealing with Tom's Pauline conversion and subsequent commitment to Wesleyan doctrine, creating 'hot-beds of old-fashioned Methodism' designed to keep 'the papists' out (p.74) - it is as a complete text that the Dog Rock really comes into its own. The voices of the past mingle with the poet's contemporary concerns and understandings, creating a meditation on ancestry, emigration, succession, and the spiritual and physical qualities of land, and how these things commingle to create the type of society so many Australians of Anglo-Saxon origin live within today.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2006)
I Next I
Back I
Exit I
Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) | |
