Books by Melissa Bellanta
From the true-blue Crocodile Hunter to the blue humour of Stiffy and Mo, from the Beaconsfield mi... more From the true-blue Crocodile Hunter to the blue humour of Stiffy and Mo, from the Beaconsfield miners to The Sentimental Bloke, Australia has often been said to possess a ‘larrikin streak’.
Today, being a larrikin has positive connotations and we think of it as the key to unlocking the Australian identity: a bloke who refuses to stand on ceremony and is a bit of scally wag. When it first emerged around 1870, however, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theatres. Crucially, the early larrikins were female as well as male.
Larrikins: A History takes a trip through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920. Swerving through the streets of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Australia’s first larrikins, including bare knuckle-fighting, football-barracking, and knicker-flashing teenage girls. Along the way, it reveals much that is unexpected about the development of Australia’s larrikin streak to present fascinating historical perspectives on hot ‘youth issues’ today, including gang violence, racist riots, and raunch culture among adolescent girls.
Papers by Melissa Bellanta
Journal of Australian Studies, Dec 1, 2010
... 546; Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia, University of New S... more ... 546; Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1995, pp ... SMH, 8 October 1890, p. 6. The young married women arrested were Florence J. Stewart nee Fletcher, Amy Walburn nee Reynolds, and Mary Moore ...
Fashion Theory, Jun 30, 2023
Australian Historical Studies, Feb 16, 2023
Australian Historical Studies, Apr 3, 2017
This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Au... more This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Australia. The focus is on men at the vanguard of this new fashion: namely, bankers and sharebrokers in New South Wales’ gold-mining towns during a gold rush between 1871 and 1874. The rise of business dress offers us insight into the surprising extent of male interest in fashion in late-colonial Australia – and fresh perspectives on the history of Australian masculinity, class and consumption as a consequence. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 17, 2023
Gender & History, Aug 27, 2022
This article explores the social and gender history of ‘tropical whites’ – all‐white men's su... more This article explores the social and gender history of ‘tropical whites’ – all‐white men's suits worn with pith helmets in tropical societies colonised by European powers – between c.1900 and 1939. Focusing on two northern Australian ports with multiple connections to Asia, the article shows that tropical whites helped to sustain inequities of race, gender and class in the colonial tropics. The fashion did this by helping to produce hegemonic masculinity in the region. Tropical whites served this function by symbolising racial whiteness and imperial mastery, but also because of their material dimensions: who made and maintained them, and the bodily influence they exerted on their wearers. Underlining the embodied dimensions of hegemonic masculinity, the article explores the multidimensional relationship between menswear and power in the Australian tropics; at the same time showing that racially subordinated men transformed aspects of the fashion for their own ends.
Eras, Jun 1, 2002
Irrigation has long occupied an important place in dreams of Australian development. It has also ... more Irrigation has long occupied an important place in dreams of Australian development. It has also frequently been promoted in evangelical terms. Between the 1880s and 1930s, for example, irrigation was pushed with the zeal of a religious crusade, presented as part of a Biblical tradition tracing back to the Garden of Eden. In this paper, I explore this extraordinary rhetoric within the irrigation movement. I argue that the main reason for irrigation's incendiary appeal was the desire to reconcile two contradictory desires: on the one hand the desire for a 'God-given' world of agrarian community, and on the other the desire for a 'man-made' industrial society. In attempting to harmonise these divergent desires, the notion of the millennium was highly significant, as it suggested that a wonderful new earth could be created in continuity with the old. Throughout this exploration of irrigation rhetoric, I take issue with Ian Tyrrell's True Gardens of the Gods(1999). Tyrrell suggests that irrigationists were primarily concerned with a movement to 'renovate' the Australian environment, expounding the merits of small-scale agriculture and economic organisation. In so doing, however, he overlooks the role played by dreams of environmental mastery in irrigation promotion. Ultimately, irrigationists were concerned with the creation of a new society based on rationality and science, not on the restoration of an 'old world' agrarian environment.
Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Oct 24, 2014
The Sentimental Bloke was a hugely popular multi-media phenomenon in Australia during the First W... more The Sentimental Bloke was a hugely popular multi-media phenomenon in Australia during the First World War and early interwar years. I explore the work as a heterosexual "masculine romance": a love story expressing heterosexual romantic feeling from a masculine point of view and in a self-consciously masculine way. The Bloke phenomenon demonstrates that "ordinary" Australian men were more interested in certain forms of romantic popular culture than previously allowed. It also points to the fact that avowedly masculine constructions of romantic feeling were emerging in this period in response to criticism of elaborate Victorian-era expressions of romance on the one hand, and of commodified approaches to romantic love on the other. This point has implications for romance studies, which has paid little attention to the concept or even the possibility of masculine romance. In Australia, there was an insistent emphasis on plainness and straightforwardness as the hallmarks of a sturdily masculine approach to romance in the 1910s and 1920s. My hope is that this discussion will prompt other romance scholars to consider the particular inflexions given to masculine constructions of romance in other localities in the same period.
Sydney University Press eBooks, Nov 1, 2008
Cultural & Social History, Jan 25, 2022
ABSTRACT This article aims to extend the ways in which the experiences of Australia’s Second Worl... more ABSTRACT This article aims to extend the ways in which the experiences of Australia’s Second World War civilians and returned servicemen are understood, through a close reading of four men’s suits. These suits reveal a dynamic wartime sartorial transformation that was shaped by cloth and workforce shortages, government intervention and social pressure, patriotic consumption, masculine duty and dignity. The suits shine a light on the cultural meanings of home front masculinities when men were marked by their clothes, drawing a line between men’s attentiveness to their dress and their concerns, anxieties and desires.
Fashion Theory, Aug 1, 2017
Fashion Theory, May 4, 2019
Journal of Australian studies/Journal of Australian studies (Print), Mar 1, 2024
Extempore, May 1, 2009
... Extempore. Volume 2009 Issue 2 (May 2009). White Australia and Sonny Clay's Colored Idea... more ... Extempore. Volume 2009 Issue 2 (May 2009). White Australia and Sonny Clay's Colored Idea: The Story of an Ill-fated Tour. Bellanta, Melissa. Abstract: The first jazz performance of Sonny Clay in 1928 following his arrival in Sydney aboard the SS Siera is highlighted. ...
M/C Journal, Apr 1, 2008
Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Maje... more Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43).…
Palgrave studies in the history of childhood, 2016
On a Saturday night in 1887, 13-year-old Mary Ann M., a resident of the inner-industrial Sydney d... more On a Saturday night in 1887, 13-year-old Mary Ann M., a resident of the inner-industrial Sydney district of Waterloo, paid a visit to Paddy’s Market. After winding past the sideshows and colourful stalls, the sound of bands and the calls of vendors, she ended up talking with a group of ‘larrikin’ youths in the streets outside. ‘Larrikin’ was a colloquialism used throughout colonial Australasia in this period, most often in Sydney and Melbourne. It described participants in an urban youth subculture based around loose-knit street gangs known as ‘larrikin pushes’ or ‘mobs’. Composed of young people of both sexes aged between their early teens and early 20s, the larrikin subculture was characterized by a hectic enjoyment of popular entertainments, street-smart dress, burlesque humour, a love of pugilism and clashes with police. It was also characterized by sexual activity, including group acts of male sexual violence towards women.1
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2014
Journal of Australian Studies, Mar 1, 2008
... of civil society and citizenship in white men's countries, 18901910&#... more ... of civil society and citizenship in white men's countries, 18901910', in Gunilla Budde, Karen Hagemann & Sonya Michel (eds ... See chapters by Fahey and Hellier in Patricia Grimshaw, ChrisMcConville and Ellen McEwen (eds) Families in Colonial Australia, George Allen and ...
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Books by Melissa Bellanta
Today, being a larrikin has positive connotations and we think of it as the key to unlocking the Australian identity: a bloke who refuses to stand on ceremony and is a bit of scally wag. When it first emerged around 1870, however, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theatres. Crucially, the early larrikins were female as well as male.
Larrikins: A History takes a trip through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920. Swerving through the streets of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Australia’s first larrikins, including bare knuckle-fighting, football-barracking, and knicker-flashing teenage girls. Along the way, it reveals much that is unexpected about the development of Australia’s larrikin streak to present fascinating historical perspectives on hot ‘youth issues’ today, including gang violence, racist riots, and raunch culture among adolescent girls.
Papers by Melissa Bellanta
Today, being a larrikin has positive connotations and we think of it as the key to unlocking the Australian identity: a bloke who refuses to stand on ceremony and is a bit of scally wag. When it first emerged around 1870, however, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theatres. Crucially, the early larrikins were female as well as male.
Larrikins: A History takes a trip through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920. Swerving through the streets of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Australia’s first larrikins, including bare knuckle-fighting, football-barracking, and knicker-flashing teenage girls. Along the way, it reveals much that is unexpected about the development of Australia’s larrikin streak to present fascinating historical perspectives on hot ‘youth issues’ today, including gang violence, racist riots, and raunch culture among adolescent girls.
When one considers the rationale Bongiorno gives the work, however, his decision to produce it makes sense. ‘The question of how societies organise sexuality’, he tells us, is ‘a fundamentally social and political one… The legal regulation of sex has determined whether people went free… or to the gallows. Even in fairly recent times, what governments, doctors and churches have done, or not done, has influenced whether people lived or died’ (p. xv).
As this makes clear, Bongiorno is interested chiefly in the way that sexuality has been officially treated and publicly imagined in Australia over time. Given this, the book’s title, The Sex Lives of Australians, implying a focus on everyday and private life, is in some ways a misnomer. Presumably, though, it was chosen on account of the work’s mission to reach readers beyond the academy – to highlight its aim to be lucid and concrete, avoiding the tendency to scholarly catechism (‘thou shalt pay homage to Judith Butler and Michel Foucault’) that characterizes some of the literature in the field. The book also, at any rate, offers plenty of revealing glimpses into Australians’ actual sex lives over the course of its 350-odd pages.
Overall, Bongiorno offers a sobering assessment of official attitudes to, and treatment of, sexuality in Australian history. The country’s perceived vulnerability as a small outpost of British settlement proximate to Asia had a lot to do with this. It allowed the idea that sex should operate in the service of the state to gain unusual power in Australian society. In the early days of settlement, sex was viewed as necessary to make colonization of the continent possible; by the turn of the century, it was regarded as imperative to counteract the declining birthrate and preserve the future of the British race. It was for this reason that concerns about white women’s use of contraception gained such prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, and that health authorities felt justified in pressing abortions or contraceptive devices upon Aboriginal women as late as the 1970s. It was also for this reason that Australian society has had particular difficulties with the relationship between sex and pleasure.
There is necessarily something lost in a work covering the whole period since 1788. The last chapter in particular seemed thin to me. I would have liked Bongiorno’s perspective on the rise of ‘raunch culture’ and its relationship to earlier manifestations of sexual precocity among young Australian women; if not also the new accessibility of pornography via the internet. Rather than discuss these things, the last chapter dealt chiefly with the backlash against homosexual activism in the 1980s and 1990s.
Obviously, though, a work of the comprehensiveness of Bongiorno’s Sex Lives cannot do everything – and what it does, it does extraordinarily well. The stand-out chapter for me was the one entitled ‘War and Peace’, dealing with the Second World War and 1950s, perhaps chiefly for its thoughtful, source-rich and highly effective demolition of myths about 1950s sexual innocence. Bongiorno also manages to convey the complexity of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ with ease in the following chapter.
The whole work, in fact, is a case study of how to convey complexity and scholarly debate without sacrificing readability. In the process, too, it has allowed Bongiorno to draw on his expertise in political history and to extend it in surprising ways.
The Sex Lives of Australians: A History, by Frank Bongiorno, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2012, 352 pp., ISDN 9781863955676 (pbk), $32.95.
Boredom is the Enemy, however, is such a work. It explores the creative and intellectual lives of members of Australia's armed forces at times of war. It looks at what servicemen and women read, listened to, wrote, sang, and watched, either on the stage or via other forms of media. This indeed makes it a novel enterprise. It also allows Laugesen to offer insights on Australian culture at large rather than just on servicemen's responses to war. One could in fact describe Boredom is the Enemy as a history of reading, of the reception of entertainment and media, and of popular culture, as easily as one could call it a history of war. As Laugesen says in her opening gambit: “This is the history of an audience, or to be more precise, a history of numerous audiences that came together in the context of war during the twentieth century” (1).
Though the First World War occupies centre stage, Boredom is the Enemy also covers the Second World War and Vietnam War. This makes it an impressive feat of research. In relation to the First World War alone, Laugesen explores soldiers’ songs, memoirs, private papers, and programs for films, concerts, drama, and variety shows. She also explores the efforts on the part of bodies providing education and recreation to members of the armed forces: among others, the Australian Army Education Service (AES), the Red Cross, the Young Men's Christian Association, and Salvation Army. She further considers the experiences of Australian POWs during the Second World War, highlighting the extraordinary importance of creative and intellectual endeavours to these men's survival.
I have to say that I have some reservations about how this work was framed. Both its blurb and title focus on military boredom—on some of the things soldiers did to endure it, and the efforts of authorities to manage it. This, in my view, is too limited. As I have already noted, Laugesen's work does much more than tell us about what servicemen did to deal with boredom or keep up morale. Along with the contribution it makes to histories of reading and the consumption of popular entertainment, it offers insight into masculine mentalities, the history of emotions, and the growth of mass culture over the course of the twentieth century. For example, Laugesen charts the rise of radio as a focus for servicemen's leisure time during the Second World War. She also points to the relative decline in the significance of reading by the time of the Vietnam War.
My feeling is ultimately that Laugesen needed to be bolder about the way she communicated the broader cultural significance of her work. There is a lot of careful detail and discussion of particulars offered in Boredom is the Enemy. To ensure that the full import of her endeavour receives its due, however, she needed to be less careful and more audacious about signalling its scope and originality. That said, the labour of research and the range of scholarship brought to bear on this work make it valuable as well as novel. I recommend it to scholars of media, popular culture, and masculinity—as well, of course, to historians interested in servicemen's experience of war.
“Boredom is the Enemy”: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond, by Amanda Laugesen, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2012, 310 pp., $98.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781409427322.
McKenzie's basic point is that everyone was ‘on the make’ in the so-called age of liberty, whether they lived in a Yorkshire mansion or spent their time in irons in the colonies. By adding accounts of the anti-slavery and anti-transportation movements, however, she makes her narrative into considerably more. The anti-slavery campaign affected the Lascelles in Britain, while the anti-transportation movement affected the convict impostor in the Antipodes – but both movements were linked by a rhetoric concerning the rights of British freemen and the prestige of Empire. The fact that the age of liberty's classic rhetoric about rights was profoundly concerned with Britain's imperial interests is thus underlined.
It sounds ambitious, and indeed it is. A Swindler's Progress has a bulging cast of characters and switches between analyses of British and Australian politics at breakneck speed. Although written for a lay audience, my advice is not to read this book with a hangover, for you will certainly find yourself struggling with the names and facts and abrupt shifts of location. You will also find yourself bamboozled if you try to skim read. Among much else, there are discussion here of the 1807 Yorkshire election, the Peterloo massacre, convict insurrections in the Hunter Valley, and Governor Bourke's attempts to curb the excesses of the jumped-up New South Welsh ‘gentry’ towards their convict assignees. As I can attest, however, the effort to keep up with this kaleidoscopic narrative is repaid in the pleasure one feels in its interconnections once the names and the dates fall into place. It is also repaid in the breadth of knowledge one acquires about the ‘age of liberty’, and with it an appreciation for McKenzie's ingenious mode of transnational history.
If I have one point to cavil with this work, it is the fact that the world it describes is so mean. It is indeed a world in which everyone is on the make, in which greed and an unseemly jockeying for position reign supreme. Very occasionally, one gets a sense that life then could be more than this. (There is a lovely portrait of the English politician, Viscount Milton, and his wife Mary, who evidently shared a companionate marriage as well as political convictions during the 1807 Yorkshire election). The rest of the time one feels stuck in a universe in which Hogarth meets Mansfield Park: one in which vicious cruelty and finely-grained status anxieties combine in bleak symphony. Whether it is possible to argue for a credible alternative vision of the period I will leave to others more qualified than myself to determine – but certainly it would be hard to find a vision rendered with such energy and éclat as A Swindler's Progress.
A Swindler's Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty, by Kirsten McKenzie, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, 344 pp., $34.99 (paperback), ISBN 978174223110.
Lords and Larrikins is in many ways an exquisite diatribe directed at the cocktail of prejudices and insecurities which have allowed – and still allow – certain actors to be deemed suitable for leading roles in Australian theatre while relegating others to the role of low player. It covers the history of Australian theatre from the construction of the first Theatre Royal in 1830s Sydney to ‘the great Hamlet controversy’ among Melbourne theatre critics in the 1860s, on to the rapscallion vaudeville of the 1920s and the explosion of Australian drama and comic theatre which took place in the 1970s. An enjoyable air of invective infuses Leahy's prose, whether she is discussing the fawning response to Lawrence Olivier's Australasian tour in 1948, or the continuing disadvantages suffered by actors of working-class and non-white backgrounds in Australian theatre today. Leahy's work is also a sustained love song to the low player: the mischief-maker or ‘larrikin’, to use Australian parlance. Best exemplified by the vaudeville comedian-turned-radio and film star, Roy Rene, she argues that the larrikin fool has occupied a position of extraordinary potency in the Antipodes. Since everyone Down Under has been affected by the cultural cringe, the fool's mockery of high pretensions has provided cathartic delight across the social spectrum.
One of the most valuable aspects of Leahy's work is that it demonstrates the significance of theatre for Australian culture writ large. There is still a reluctance to recognize this among non-theatre historians and publishers in Australia, and my big hope for Lords and Larrikins is that its value will be recognized outside theatrical circles as well as within them. This is a book which should be set reading in courses on gender and cultural studies and Australian history as well as devoured by anyone interested in the history of high and low playing, Shakespearean performance and Australian masculinities. Each chapter bulges with fascinating characters, focusing on actors who have played Hamlet and the Second Gravedigger respectively over the years. Animated by Leahy's spirited and sometimes acerbic prose, Lords and Larrikins is also that rare and happy thing: a historical work that is not only instructive and politically relevant, but also a sheer pleasure to read.
Lords and Larrikins: The Actor's Role in the Making of Australia. By Kath Leahy. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2009. Pp. 246 + 20 illus. AUS$34.95 Pb.
University of Queensland Press has decided to frame Revolving Days as a national treasure. ‘Among the finest examples of the Australian lyric’, its back-cover blurb proclaims. A quote from the distinguished Courier-Mail is added: ‘The collection is nothing short of a gift to the nation's literature’. Malouf's poems need nothing of this old jingoism, redolent of the Red Pages or commentary by Tom Inglis Moore. They take us to places of being more diverse, more intimate and wild than nation-speak can account for. There are poems about growing up in Brisbane and living in Sydney, yes – and also about rain, snow, stars, moonflowers, angels, dreams, sex, Tuscany, Horace, and A Critique of Pure Reason. To read them is to discover new climes, to visit old ones in a defamiliarising way, to exult in the possibilities of imagery and word-play – to remember, in short, why one should read poetry, and especially this poetry.
As Malouf writes in his preface, most of Revolving Days is organised in rough chronological order. This gives the collection a loose autobiographical shape. Part I begins with his youth in Brisbane during and after the Second World War; Part II the 1960s, when he was teaching in England; Part III the 1970s in Sydney; and Part IV the years since, ‘moving back and forth between Sydney and a village in Southern Tuscany’.
For an historian (as I am), this appears at once as a sensible way of organising the work. It was the right one to choose, I think, as it makes the collection feel easy to navigate. For the historian, too, the first poems have an obvious appeal. Malouf writes about the fox-furs his mother sold to women with G.I. escorts when he was a child, about the tropical ground torn up for suburbs soon afterwards, and about the epiphany he had at the age of nine, realising that the War was real. Later, too, there are poems about what it felt like to turn thirty, and then what was like to move beyond thirty, and live in Tuscany.
There is something seductive about the glimpses of personal narrative that emerges from reading Revolving Days cover-to-cover. Over time, however, one increasingly gets the sense that it is misconceived to read it in this linear way. As Malouf says in his preface, ‘moving back and forth – in time and memory’ is a great part of what his poetry is about. (Not for nothing is the book called Revolving Days). And as such, perhaps the truest way to read this work is against the chronological grain.
Ultimately, it does not matter how one reads Revolving Days. What emerges regardless is a meditation on historical consciousness, on the constant presence of the past in the now –
From centuries
off, out of the reign
of one of nineteen pharaohs,
a planet's dust, metallic,
alive, is sifted down,
hovers in a bright
arc upon your cheek.
Malouf writes about dead friends and lost lovers, about the way they still live on for all of us. And he also brings us to the still-wondrous realisation that the material world and our imagination of it are intertwined.
Not all the poems here strike a perfect note. Those about music from Typewriter Music have a certain pomposity to my ear. Full of references to Beethoven and Schubert, ‘Ode One’, ‘Ode’, and ‘An die Musik’ are written in an oddly irritating, slightly stodgy first-person plural. But to read the rest of Revolving Days is an extraordinary experience. Subtle, wry, melancholic, even excoriating at times, here is an example of a lyric that does not need to be Australian to be compelling to read.