Hell and After - Les Murray

HELL AND AFTER 

Four early English-language poets of Australia 

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY LES MURRAY 

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You prisoners of New South Wales Who frequent watch houses and gaols A story to you I will tell

'Tis of a convict's tour to hell. from Francis McNamara, 'A Convict's Tour to Hell' 

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before Europeans built the first Australian cities, Francis McNamara described the infernal one, populated by his tormentors. Sentenced in 1832 to seven years' transportation, he defied the brutality of the penal system and his witty, rebellious poems laid the foundations for a new Australian poetry. 

Les Murray's anthology of four early Australian poets reaches back in time from Fivefathers, his collection of five Australian poets of the earlier twentieth century. Hell and After contains substantial selections of the work of McNamara (1811-1880), and three poets from the second half of the nineteenth century. 

The social reformer Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) grew up in the bush and her poems are vivid evocations of colonial life. John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942), a poet of great lyricism and humour, spent most of his life in poverty as a manual labourer, and Lesbia Harford (1891-1927), was a radical activist who worked as a factory machinist and servant. 

Reading these extraordinary poets is to experience a culture in the process of creating itself. 

Murray observes

I have written elsewhere that for the first sixty or more thousand years of human culture in our country, poetry ruled everything; prose only arrived with the First Fleet in 1788. The sacred law of the Aboriginal people was deeply poetic in concept and expression. It was unwritten, and carried in the memory of initiated people down the generations. None of the myriad sacred songs of the land were attributed to known human authors. They were made by the ancestral creator spirits themselves, and formed part of the very body of such spirits, as did the natural sites in which the holy ones dwelt, the dances that honoured and expressed their stories, the paintings at the site and on participants' bodies, and even the devotees themselves during cere-monies. Incarnation is everywhere in Aboriginal religion, and it is by no means wholly a thing of the past. A lesser category of poetry, secular songs composed for enjoyment or comment, is still also practised wherever the tribal languages survive. It is usually known in Aboriginal English as `rubbish' poetry or `playabouf poetry, terms more affectionate and less derogatory than they sound. In line with the strict ban on naming the dead, at least for many years after they have passed on, most of these songs and their authors used to vanish from memory after a lifetime, but now some examples and their poets do get remembered, at least in Balanda (European) publications. The Honey Ant Men's Love Song edited by R.M.W. Dixon and Martin Duwell (University of Queensland Press 1990) is a particularly inter-esting sampler of such poetry, from groups all over Australia. Balanda readers will have realised that all Western poetry outside of holy scripture is `rubbish' verse in Aboriginal terms. Sacred ritual texts can be sampled, but are best approached in standard books of reference in which the native mate-rial has been printed with the formal approval of tribal authorities. 

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