THE PAULINE GROUP A Literary Society SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949 – 1955 Edited by Julian Woods Read online

THE PAULINE GROUP

  A Literary Society

  SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949 – 1955

  Edited by Julian Woods

  FOREWORD

  The few pieces of prose come early in the series and discontinued, one imagines, because of the amount of work for the member producing the stencils.

  One venue, as I recall (and it would have changed over the years) was a rather shabby room in Macquarie St. in a building no doubt long since giving way to high-rise city flats for barristers and business men. It was certainly at 151 Elizabeth St. in July, August and September, 1952. Roger Milliss recalls that some meetings in the 1950s were at St. Paul’s College.

  I guess most of the poets were of the Arts Faculty and knew many, if not all, of the fellow members in their particular undergraduate years. I have been unable to discover the origins of the Pauline Group and even in 1952 the origins were unknown to most members apart from a vague connection to St. Paul’s College. One may guess the originator was Bill Belson but that seems doubtful he being probably the first compiler of the meetings and copying them for distribution.

  The bundle of faded and torn roneoed sheets that comprise what remains of the Pauline Group from its first meeting on the 5th of April, 1949 until it (apparently) petered sometime in 1955 came into my possession from Keith Free in 2013. From the dilapidated cardboard cover, Bill Belson, then of 33 Roslyn St. Kings Cross, it seems, was the first keeper of the file and probably roneoed the copies for the first meeting and (one supposes) many subsequent ones. Roger Brown passed it to Jeff Miles who was the editor in 1952, full of enthusiasm to the extent of producing many copies of David Haig’s famous poem, Impotence: “If I could grasp the gambit of my life …” - and distributing them in the quad at the foot of the Old Fisher Library stairs. Keith Free, at Sydney University, some time in 1954 then took over. Subsequent editors were Manfred Mackenzie, and Colin Black. After that I have no information. Manfred MacKenzie was either in charge or received the manuscripts later and at some time in the decades since, copies from 1954 and 1955 went missing before they came back to Keith Free’s keeping.

  On re-typing these poems into a computer it became clear what a large amount of work the editors put into each issue from the several contributors, the cutting of stencils, running off copies etc.

  There was further clarification of origins, yet more puzzles from the St. Paul’s College historian, Alan Atkinson. Six Pauline Group contributors only were on his College files, Jim Lance, E.H. Manchester, T.W. Horne, Bill Moriarty, Dave Rutherford and John K. McLaughlin. Yet apart from the last named all were born in the 1920s and left the College before the manuscripts came into existence in April 1949. In addition none were Arts students. One may assume that earlier meetings, if any, took place with poets reading their own works, at the College and the readings not collected.

  All of us are in our seventh or eighth decade so I decided to turn the series into a book before death or decay, with no further research. Several in my years in Arts are deceased, John Croyston, Marie Kuttna, Sue Vacchini, Robin Pratt and Dick Appleton. Dick Appleton was never an actual student. Colin Black disappeared decades ago, as it were, in Hamburg. In latter years, Lex Banning, who died in 1965, would attend a few meetings and assert criticism that never discouraged. Another prominent poet, Vincent Buckley, was a guest attending during his Sydney visit in either 1955 or ’56.

  Among the missing issues I recall a Canto of Dick Appleton’s of similar form to those of Pound’s. Also at least one translation from Rilke by Colin Black.

  To my surprise we are looking at a collection sixty and more years old. One has to imagine what an editor would see as an historical collection and the changes if he were doing this in 1913 looking at poetry from the early 1850s - to secure a non-personal perspective of time. Apart from anything else the collection records the concerns and styles of the undergraduate poetry of the time and the influences and fame of different masters of the period such as Eliot and Auden, Pound etc. as well as the Romantics, even back to Milton, on individuals. Dick Appleton was obsessed with Ezra Pound and the influences of Whitman, Sandburg, Hart Crane, e.e.cummings and others may be seen. Such is youth. I have kept the punctuation as it occurs noting how carefully colons and semi-colons were used in those days.

  If by chance this collection comes to the notice of anyone, to the authors themselves, to descendants or friends, with more information, and especially if the lost issues come to light, I would bring out another edition. As for me, curiosity and nostalgia has been satisfied.

  On contacting me at my address copies may be ordered for $20 a copy including postage.

  Julian Woods

  Pumpkin Creek

  491 Williams Drive

  TARAGO, NSW 2580

  16/11/2013

  FOREWORD TO THE ONLINE EDITION

  Since the limited edition of the Pauline Group collection of poetry, published in 2014, more information about the Group’s history emerged researched by Alan Atkinson, the Historian of St. Paul’s College, Sydney University. Even more interesting and important came his singular discovery of the great educator, Wilhelm Reichnitz, long forgotten, who initiated and fostered poetry and prose in the College magazine, The Pauline and spread its coverage beyond the College into the wider community.

  As may be read in Alan Atkinson’s article following, this German prisoner-of-war, Wilhelm Reichnitz, had been interned in Great Britain in 1939 even though enthusiastically integrated into English life and an anti-fascist. In two years he stimulated and transformed many areas of College life. He was one of the 3,000, mainly German Jews, fleeing Nazism, interned and sailing in the prisoner ship the Dunera to further imprisonment, “for the duration,” as the saying was to Australia. After the war he and many others stayed on and became so important in Australia’s cultural life. Would we had accepted fifty such Duneras and their cargo.

  Some assumptions in the original foreword need revising. In particular the guess that most of the poets originally were of the Arts Faculty. The majority, it seems were not. Such was the prestige of poetry till recent years. In the 1950s members of the Pauline Group believed that its activities were limited to university students and graduates but this too is an error as Rechnitz wanted coverage to be Sydney-wide and even Australia-wide. Members had assumed that the first roneoed batch of papers in 1949 accompanied the founding of the Group. Meetings and readings by Pauline students, with selected poems published in The Pauline, started earlier and continued concurrently. Thus the name, the Pauline Group. The list of Rechnitz’s other impacts on college life is astonishing in such a short period.

  As yet the missing issues from 1954-55 have not turned up so perhaps this spread on the Net may get results.

  I am indebted to Josephine and Katy Woods for the stimulus and expertise necessary for this edition.

  Julian Woods

  12/9/2015

  WILHELM RECHNITZ AND THE ST PAUL’S COLLEGE LITERARY SOCIETY

  Wilhelm Lorenz Rechnitz was a German Jew with a doctorate from the University of Berlin who fled his country in about 1934 to escape the Nazis. He was a linguist and philologist and in Germany he had been editor of the learned quarterly journal, Bibliotheca Philologica Classica, published in Leipzig. And translated classical plays for the Leipzig’s Old Theatre. In England he looked for work with the British Academy but found nothing except part-time school teaching and some Latin tutoring. He made contact with the poet A.E. Housman, a keen classical philol
ogist, and, as a man of deep spirituality, he was sufficiently impressed with his new home to undergo baptism in the Church of England.

  This did not help. As a German, with the outbreak of war Rechnitz was interned and, in 1940, he was deported to Australia on the Dunera, together with nearly 3000 others, most of them German Jews, the vessel being designed to carry 1600. By one account the Dunera was “an overcrowded Hellhole” and Churchill himself called the whole episode “a deplorable and regrettable mistake.” Nevertheless, in Australia Rechnitz was again interned for the duration of the war. (Our current policy of imprisoning men and women who flee persecution is older than it might seem.) On release, he taught briefly at the Brotherhood of St. Laurence training centre in Melbourne and then at St. John’s College, Morpeth, before he was taken up by the interim Warden of St.Paul’s, Maurice de Burgh Griffith, who appointed him resident tutor in Classics and German from the start of 1946.

  The Pauline of that year noted that Rechnitz had also started to do “valuable work in sorting and cataloguing the College libraries”, or in other words the mass of books which had been stacked for some years in the Fellows’ Common Room, the Bone Room and elsewhere. Rechnitz divided the volumes into a “Students’ Library” and a “Fellows’ Library”. The Fellows Library was set up in the Fellows’ Common Room and its holdings were surprisingly numerous and valuable. Rechnitz was not only a man of unquenchable spirit, he was also the College’s first learned bibliophile. The rare and hitherto unnoticed publications which he unearthed included a Roman Missal printed in Bavaria in about 1480, a Legends of the Saints, from Cologne, 1485, and a volume of Canon Law from Lyon, 1517. Print itself (movable type) had been invented only a generation or two before these dates.

  Rechnitz spent two years in College and he made a deep impact. His interest in languages was encyclopedic, and he saw beneath each language he studied into a world of spirituality and ideas. He saw all communities in that way, including the College itself, and his interest in Anglicanism was interwoven with his interest in the subtleties of English and Englishness. Maybe it is no coincidence that A.E. Housman’s famous work, The Shropshire Lad, contains verse rooted in English soil and tradition, as well as being democratic, romantic and melancholy. Rechnitz seems to have echoed this attitude.

  The men at Paul’s appreciated Wilhelm Rechnitz. His valete in The Pauline noted with wide-eyed admiration that while “the Doctor” had been among them he had written “various academic books about anything from Anglican churches to German primers” plus a couple of novels (one of them a detective story), as well as poetry in English and German. He was “a notable character”. He was ready ”to talk with anyone,” it said. He was full, of life, “and will never be forgotten for his unrestrained laughter at a (recent) General Meeting … which disorganized things for a considerable time”.

  Rechnitz appreciated them too. He was credited with “discovering in certain men artistic ability which neither they nor anybody else knew it existed [sic] and encouraging it in those who already suspected it did exist”. For “artistic” read “literary”. In his first year, early in Trinity (second) Term, Rechnitz established the St. Paul’s College Literary Society, which was designed to draw out original writings by students, beginning with a meeting on the 14th of August in the Common Room. These were poetry-reading sessions, and good recitation, by the author or someone else, and were highly valued. Even at this early stage there were hopes of extending the Society beyond the College, “so as to include the University, authors of the city, of the State and even of the Commonwealth”. Rechnitz, or perhaps it was only his enthusiastic followers, aimed to make a mark on Australia.

  Rechnitz’s main supporters hardly needed drawing out. In the previous year, Edward Manchester, a medical student, had been one of the editorial committee responsible for an “obscene” issue of Honi Soit (12 July). Another man, Max Thomas (Arts and Divinity), had edited the 1945 Pauline, and in it had published verse by fellow-students and Rechnitzians, Andrew Clayton (Law) and Jim Lance (Medicine), Clayton sometimes using the pseudonym “Strepsiades” (the anti-hero in Aristophanes’ “The Clouds”). Lance more modestly called himself “L”. In 1946 Manchester filled the Pauline’s editorial chair and Clayton and Lance were both on the committee, with Clayton taking over as editor in 1947. Clayton and Max Thomas seem to have been the student convenors of Rechnitz’s Society during 1946-47.

  The Society focused, so Clayton said, on attempts in the style of “New Verse”. Poetry survives from this time written by Lance, Manchester, David Rutherford (Vet), Bill Moriarty (Science) and Terry Horne (Medicine). Moriarty’s “Posterity?” was probably one of the first to be performed at the Common Room meetings:

  As slowly as the cheerless twilight falls

  I gaze in vague uneasy fear

  On mighty summer’s ruined glory;

  The failing light might mourn the year.

  And tearing out of the icy north,

  The wind assaults the frozen soil

  And howls thro’ broken limbs a dirge

  To a thousand years of useless toil.

  Above, the steely cloud and grey

  And ragged the clouds in terror flying:

  While the pallid moon looks down, timeless,

  A dead world above the dying.

  Whatever the quality of the poem, it might suggest that “New Verse” as the College understood it, had more to do with Romantic Englishness, or at least the northern hemisphere, than with the literary nationalism so far favoured among Paulines. The literary critic and poet Tom Inglis Moore, who had lived in the College as English tutor and Sub-Warden 1932-34, had helped the tone hitherto. John Russell Roland, who was to be a poet of some celebrity, had used the same style in his student verse, 1942-44.

  Now, post-war, the College mood was devoid of nationalism. Now, it pondered ancient things caught up in the present – earth-bound eternity and existential helplessness in the passage of the years (Housman with a touch of Eliot, if such is possible). A new familiarity with Roman missals half a millennium old might have helped, but Rechnitz himself must have made some such impression. He arranged the program and chose the poems. As another example, take Dave Rutherford’s “Stone Walls”, one of the few such pieces that referred to living in College:

  Sandstone walls, grey walls,

  Darkened in the dust of time,

  Stand firm in storms

  Are softened by the rains,

  And bleached in sunlight.

  The enveloping ivy and green creepers

  Hide the strength of man-made walls

  And give them contours and shadows.

  Shadows on the stones,

  As clouds make shadows on the fields;

  Friendly are these walls, green coated walks

  Which enclose us in our sheltered life.

  As with Moriarty’s “Posterity?” this poem was considered good enough for recycling some years later.

  These authors were all Paul’s students, but by the Society’s second year “by far the greater bulk” of contributions came from beyond. Two students at Wesley College distinguished themselves: Bill Belson, who was unusually prolific, and Werner Stern, whose “Elegy on a Dying Author” was said to be the best item that year. It no longer survives, but another of Stern’s poems (“Brother are You Coming?”) shows the same preoccupation with the power of passing time:

  Walk on

  Your narrow strip of wet sand.

  No matter how big your feet,

  No matter how quiet your beat,

  The waves will rise,

  And smooth out your path;

  And the road will be flat again

  For those that follow.

  It is not clear what happened to Stern – the road he walked himself is quite smoothed out – but Belson was afterwards well-known on British radio as a social psychologist. The only other poet named at this stage was Winsome Latter, who for some years had been deeply involved with the Jindyworobak school of poe
ts, and who had a son nearly ready, as she hoped, for College. In Michaelmas (third) Term a recital of the group’s best work was held at the University, but poor acoustics limited success.

  Rechnitz was one of those keen educators who argues almost instinctively with his peers and superiors. He and the new Warden, Felix Arnott, did not agree, and he departed late in 1947 for Torres Strait, to take charge of St. Paul’s Mission School on Moa, a school founded many years before by Henry Newton, a Pauline Bishop of New Guinea. He was to spend most of the rest of his life there, working on the translation and preservation of Indigenous culture, including music. He was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1954. His papers, which survive in the State Library of Queensland, are a detailed and extremely valuable record of the life of Torres Straight Islanders, as ever, interweaving language, culture and spiritual life. He lived for a time on Murray Island (Mer) and Eddie Mabo must have known him. Certainly Rechnitz’s work echoes in the High Court’s Mabo No. 2 judgment from 1992, where Indigenous mystery finds its fruitful counterpoint in European learning.

  At the same time the Society also lost Clayton, Manchester, Moriarty and Thomas. Having fallen away towards the end of 1947 it was renamed “the Pauline Group”, in order to sound less exclusive to Paul’s, and over a series of four meetings there was some slight revival “to a well-nigh respectable number”. Presumably Jim Lance and David Rutherford, the only Pauline poets left, were the convenors. Certainly Rutherford, now treasurer of the Students’ Club, published several poems that year in The Pauline. For both, this was their last year in College, and from the end of 1948 the connection with Paul’s seems to have come to an end, though the name “Pauline Group” remained.

  Of the Pauline poets named in later life Clayton became a senior partner in his father’s law firm, Clayton Utz, and Mayor of Woollahra, and he continued, doubtless, many-faceted and unpredictable (the verdict of The Pauline). Max Thomas became Bishop of Wangaratta and later Warden of his old College. Moriarty was also ordained but he was better known as a distinguished meteorologist. He became a member of the World Meteorologists Organization’s working group on urban and building climatology. Manchester was a radiologist. Jim Lance was a Professor of Neurology at the University of New South Wales, a senior figure in the World Federation of Neurology and, in the end AO. Rutherford, who had grown up on the land, went back to it, and was chairman of the Orange Farm Management Group, vice-president of the Molong Historical Society and president of Cudal P&C.

  A new series of meetings of the Pauline Group began on 5 April 1949, with Bill Belson, now living at King’s Cross, as convenor. Previous experience had proved the need for the audience to have copies of poems on hand during readings, to compensate for inexpert presentation, and roneoed sheets survive from this point. It is said that the Pauline Group sometimes met at the College during the 1950s. If so, that might be explained by a happy coincidence of events 1952-53. Jim Lance returned to College, as Sub-Warden, and was presumably still interested in verse. Also, the literary critic R. J. Wilson was tutor in English. Wilson achieved several revolutions in College, according to The Pauline, one concerning food, the second, aeroplanes and the third books (he got men “to read things and talk about things in a reasonably serious, reasonably intelligible and not-too-plonking fashion”). Thirdly, Tom Heath, poet and architect, was editor of the magazine. Heath’s later career as an architectural theorist proves his remarkable imagination. The Tom Heath Gallery at the Queensland University of Technology is one of his memorials.

  Finally, there was Roger Hargreaves – his conversation (“omniscient, amusing, and obscene”), his acting with the Mummers (drawing “reluctant admiration” from the Sydney Morning Herald), his research hopes (a thesis in Anthropology, never written, on “The Sodomite in Society”), and his poetry. The last included a chanting, gothic piece that Tom Heath took for The Pauline, called “Nursery-Rhyme for Dr. Edith Sitwell”.

  Deep anvils clanging in a dead dark sky

  Deal doom to the dull dust, deathly dry

  etc.

  Hargreaves is one of those members of the College who has now, to all effects, disappeared without trace. If any of his work was read to the remnant of Dr. Rechnitz’s group, the record therefore is silent – again, the sand is quite smooth.

  Alan Atkinson

  (Thanks to Professor Barry Spurr and the Reverend Professor John Moses for advice and to Julian Woods for the original inspiration.)

  Photo reprinted with permission of Alan Atkinson, Historian of St Paul’s College, The University of Sydney.

  AUTHORS

  In order of first appearance:

  Reba Ginsburg

  Roger Challis Brown

  Gwen West

  Bill Belson

  Lionel J. Pierce (Pearce?)

  Judith (June?) Hartnett

  Winsome Latter

  Norris Devir

  Jim Lance

  Roger F. Brown

  Neville Kirkby

  F. H. Burns

  E. H. Manchester

  B. O’Sullivan

  T. W. Horne

  Bill Rush

  Bill Moriarty

  Gerard Hamilton

  Norreys de Vere

  Gunnar Icoocson

  Roger F. Brown

  Leon Stemler

  Garth Everson

  Ian Dunlop

  Rex Ingamells

  Werner Stern

  Diana Burton

  Dave Rutherford

  Claire Binns

  John W. Phipps

  Wendell Simmons

  O. Sperling

  Bill (W. R?) Richards

  C. J. Nommensen

  Athalie Fenton

  Ian I. S. Stacy

  Jeffrey Miles

  David A. Haig

  Marie Kuttna

  Ruth Hansman

  S. Green

  John Croyston

  Robin Pratt

  Julian Woods

  Roger Milliss

  Pacita Moore

  Judith Forsyth

  Manfred MacKenzie

  Susan Vacchini

  Keith J. Free

  Judith Rayner

  Colin Black

  Richard Appleton

  Terry Driscoll

  John Greenstone (sic)

  Jeremy Nelson

  John K. McLaughlin

  Barrie (?) Gillman (W.B.F.G.)

  The Pauline Group, 5 April 1949

  IMPROMPTU

  Reba Ginsburg

  Hinting of the moonlight and of laughter in the rain:

  Wisps of jacinth veiling, a love song told in vain;

  Transient, enticing, like the shadows whipping free

  Before the taunting wind-god on a molten gale-swept sea.

  Fragments of a memory, pure cadence of grief

  Mingled in a melody, that (touching once the brief

  Bright moment of eternity, ruby-warm with fire)

  Brushed now a swallow’s wing against a dead desire.

  LAMPS BEFORE DAWN

  Reba Ginsburg

  The night is purple with the softness of pansies

  Leaning golden-eyed on the wet grass;

  Still, and tremulous as a lover:

  Unwilling, hesitant, yet on catching a breath

  Of the morning, rising to meet him

  Life a mist… …

  In the distance, lamps glow sullenly,

  Angry hearts of light, burning in impotent rebellion

  Against the coming of the dawn.

  LUTANA

  Roger Brown

  This is our burden,

  And perhaps our victory,

  That with the puny

  We must achieve the great.

  The struggle for comprehension

  And for mastery seems triumphant,

  But blinds us with uncertain victories;

  We are bewildered

  And confused by happenings

  Stemming naturally from ourselves

  In the a
ssuredness of our pride.

  The bright air will not be courted

  With slide rule and barometers;

  Will flirt, perhaps,

  Will show a fleeting acquiescence,

  But is ever fickle.

  And put it thus, that laws of wind and weather

  And the tall-piled clouds

  Overlook the factor

  Of the smallness of man’s power

  Against a vast sky.

  Remembering, we make unwritten truce

  With the air;

  But, in the depths of our uncertainty,

  When that truce is broken

  We may defend, but not attack.

  The sea takes back its own;

  So too, the air

  Will snatch a life,

  Hurling the smoking wreckage

  Of plane and pilot earthwards.

  Torn and twisted dural

  On a lonely hillside,

  Charred bodies; are these

  The price of flight?

  QUIET RIVER

  Roger Brown

  He sat on the grass beside the river; sat down to think things over. The river was brown and very still, and there were a lot of things to think about. There were ducks on the river, swimming contentedly among the reeds, and occasionally they gave a queer mournful cry, though he could not see why a duck should be so sad on a river as brown and lazy as this one. But then perhaps ducks were like that, even if they didn’t have anything to trouble them. Some of the ducks had bright feathers; he had seen some like that once before, but they were in a round stone pond, and he was eating an apple and he threw them a piece. There were pieces of biscuit in the water, and they would not eat the apple. Someone laughed, and said they were too well fed, but he wasn’t sure whether it was that or not, though it was very nice apple. It was quite a big piece that he threw in, and it floated away to the middle of the pond. Perhaps the ducks found it afterwards and ate it. Some people had too much to live for; they did not know which to choose. They were angry then sometimes, angry with themselves and everyone else. But these ducks were contented, and the river was brown and very still.

  The grass was soft, and the clouds were gathering in the east. Perhaps it was going to rain, and the grass would be wet, and the ducks would disappear among the reeds when the rain was heavy. Though perhaps ducks like to stay out in heavy rain. Weather for ducks.

  There was a flurry of spray and beating of wings; two ducks were fighting, squabbling over some piece of food. The other ducks took no notice of them; they were too busy just being sleek and contented, and after all, why should they take any notice when the river was brown and still, and only the ducks themselves made ripples across it? They were quiet again now; the trouble was over very quickly, but his trouble was not like that. It had come so slowly and imperceptibly that he had not seen it, but he knew now that something had come between them. Something that neither of them could explain, but very real. He knew he loved her as he had not been able to love her before, but he could sense that he had lost her now, and that she was gone from his life as quietly as she had entered it. Only the memories of the silly lovely things that they had done together would remain, and soon they would be lost in the rattle of the city trains and the sly looks and stupid laughter of the girls at the office.

  They had sat by the river once before; there ere no ducks then. Perhaps they went away in the winter, or it might be that they were round the bend in the river. It had rained then, but it was pleasant misty rain, and her hair was bright with shining points of rain. But only when they were going home and her hair sparkled under the glare of the street lights. Her hair was beautiful; he could not say why, but it was part of him to know that it was beautiful. She should be sitting there beside him now, and it would begin to rain, and her hair would sparkle with diamond points of rain, and they would stand under a clump of trees until the rain had almost stopped. But she was not there, and he could feel the rain coming, and smell the fresh sharp smell in the air. Soon the wind would come and it would begin to rain; a light mist of rain would blow across the river like a swift shadow, and he would stand under the trees, until it had stopped, but he would stand there alone; she would not be with him. And then he would walk back across the thick wet grass to the bridge, and wait for the bus. It would be getting dark then, and even now he felt hungry. The ducks were gone; at least he could not see them. Perhaps they were hungry too and had gone home, which was absurd, because their food was all about them, and they did not need to go home when they were hungry.

  He was sitting on the grass and he was hungry, and he wished that he was at the little shop near the station, where they had often had tea together. It had to be near the station, because she went by train to have drawing lessons; on Monday she would go into the city to the art school there with some of her work and perhaps she might win one of the scholarships to the art school. They had missed their bus one night and had walked to the station, and she had said that if she won a scholarship they would both be working in the city. The art school was not far away, and it was next to a clothing factory with a big neon sign outside it.

  It was as though they had never been strangers, and as if they had never met, for they had no need to meet, they had known each other always. There had been a time when he did not know her, but it seemed a long time ago and was not really a part of his life. He did not know how she had come into his life, but she had been there, and he was content. Other people fell into love, or drifted gradually into love, but for them there had been no need, for it was as though they had always loved, and their lives had been linked so that they might find each other, and be content, for it had always been so.

  He could feel the wind pour down from the cold hills now; the river was dulled by tiny ripples dancing across it, and then he saw the ducks again, swimming in regular array like a convoy of ships. At home he had a model of a sailing ship, but he had been too young for the Navy all through the war, and his father said it would be better for him to work in the city now. Perhaps his father knew best, but it was a very fine model of a sailing ship, and he had often been sailing in a dinghy with a friend from school. But he would not have met her if he had joined the Navy.

  It had been quiet by the river, and she was quiet and gentle too and not like the girls at the office. He wondered if he could ever really know one of them, and whether there was anything to know at all underneath their smart talk and manner. But they were just girls from the office, and she had become a part of himself in his life, and of his understanding.

  It had been, and now was not. It had come just as everything else had come, and he could feel now that it must end as inevitably as it had begun. They had not quarreled, as the ducks had fought and quarreled for food, but he knew that she was gone as surely as he had known that he loved her when she had first come into his life. He had thought that it was impossible, and he found now that there was something against which he could not fight in her going. Rain was falling over the town, and a few drops fell on his coat and lay there glistening. The ducks were still there, and they looked a little forlorn, and he was sorry for them, though he could not have said why.

  It was raining quite heavily as he picked his way across to the shelter of the trees, and then he saw her coming across the grass, and he knew that he had been wrong. Her white shoes were muddy and they stood underneath the trees until the shower had passed, and he knew that she had never really gone away. He did not envy the ducks now; he saw them swimming near the bridge and then they disappeared among the reeds. They walked back across the bridge, saying nothing, for there was nothing that needed to be said in words, and the rain sparkled in her hair.

  Take such a night.

  Take such a night as this,

  When streets are shining

  Under the lights, and leaves are dark

  On branches heavy with rain; when

  Clouds aflicker with hot lightning

  Mark the passing of a summer storm;

>   Forget all but the important things

  And those which do not matter:

  These are real.

  Let your eyes find mine with laughter

  In the living night, and let

  Forever and forever be a dream

  Which passes quickly, for a moment

  Is true eternity.

  FREEDOM

  Gwen West

  Silken thread patiently unwound,

  And caught from branch to branch of tree

  Extended

  Floating softly on the morning air;

  Intricate pattern like a lacy shawl

  All glistening in the morning dew

  And waiting …

  A tiny insect, pausing lightly,

  With fluttering wings is caught. Its flight

  Is ended.

  Yet not alone it waits its sad demise,

  For soon the web is filled with other wings,

  And waiting hidden in the covering leaves,

  The Spider!

  With pity filled to set them free,

  I raise my hand to reach and break

  The web.

  But covering all, the long grey shroud

  Is floating silently away -

  A large black spider cheated of

  Its prey.

  Thus life unfolds before me now,

  As I reflect how once was I

  As free -

  Now caught and held by silken thread

  And slowly pining. The web is slashed…

  And I the Human fly, am I

  Set free again?

  LONELINESS

  Gwen West

  When I awake lonely in the night,

  And all the fearsome passions awake in me,

  Which I must wrestle with alone -

  No Holy Comforter, No splendid vision

  To calm my fears:

  I am alone!

  Who shares my joys and waking hours,

  When fresh from having gained some grand achievement,

  A sharp exultant joy possesses me?

  There’s none to share!

  And in my grief,

  Who knows the penitent tears I shed alone,

  When friendship’s broken or loved one dead?

  I pass along without my God -

  Alone!

  WITH THE LOSS OF MY TRIBE

  Bill Belson

  When I awake from the bells ringing,

  And the turning of wheels,

  And the beat of machines,

  And the weeping of hearts -

  The in the chill I do arise,

  I shall go down to the sea and walk out,

  I shall go deep in ground.

  When I awake from the throw of the wind

  And the husk of the tree,

  And the lights on the water dancing in my gaiety -

  When I awake from these -

  I shall go to the stars.

  I can only say,

  In the shreds of my tribe

  That there is no sea hill

  And no high crag

  That has such air as I breathe now -

  That has its chill.

  Can only tell

  That in the tumult of things falling down on me,

  That I still stand

  Gaunt in huge solitude,

  A pygmy flickering in the myriad stars.

  Can only say

  That with my gunya gone

  And the city in dust,

  That a cold wind dwells in me,

  Twining round in a sort of cruel glee.

  And me!

  Me, I exult and sing:

  Dusting leaves and cathedrals off my hands,

  Sobbing in the heart,

  Lost in the brain.

  Me, I exult and sing!

  FROM “CAFÉ CHARACTERS”

  Bill Belson

  This fellow had a most peculiar way of drinking tea. I would say he ate it. All the way down to the corners of his mouth, all the way down from his ears, long wrinkles ran. For he chewed his tea right back to his ears. Been doing it for years… He had a kind of double action – a kind of making sure that nothing went down un-thoroughly masticated – un-thoroughly – chewed. In the warm swirl, in the pressurization of tea, this chaste old fellow ate his tea from ear to ear.

  THIS IS THE SMILE

  Bill Belson

  This is the flush of young flesh,

  This is the smile;

  How long it will last,

  How long a heart will smile,

  I do not say.

  But this is true:

  That warm eyes

  And exulting hearts

  Have a way

  Of fading.

  Time bears such ashes on its tide -

  It bears away such smiles.

  A STONE IN THE WAY

  L.J. Pierce

  ‘Tis early morning yet

  But the mason is at work:

  Tap tap tap tap

  On the stone.

  There is a hammer swinging,

  A chisel’s ringing,

  There is a rock defying,

  A man replying.

  He leans to what he is destroying

  Like a lover with a loved one toying:

  But the eye is calculating

  At the chisel’s mating.

  ‘Tis not the sun your angles warming,

  ‘Tis the fierce bleed of a vulture storming.

  And ‘tis no shaping into beauty

  But performing of a daily duty.

  You are in the way of the factory workers,

  Making the energetic into shirkers,

  With a flare in imagination

  Of turning you into a new creation.

  You make the girls reach the office past nine,

  And the housewife miss the line,

  The student disregard the book:

  Meddling no business mind must brook.

  SACRIFICIUM

  Judith Hartnett

  I want to lie on the edge of the universe,

  On the purple rim of the world,

  With the moon’s heavy orb on my ankles,

  And a tangle of stars in my hair:

  With the blue of the sea to swathe me,

  A cluster of songs at my throat,

  A girdle of floating laughter,

  And my wrists tied down with dreams.

  But there, while seas of silence

  Past me ebb and flow,

  A tall and reticent arch-priest

  His altar shall prepare;

  And when the pulse of throbbing time

  Has caught its beat

  And stopped:

  Then with his knife of faith,

  Slow-cutting deep my body,

  Sensuous and tired,

  He’ll draw from there

  With fingers mystery-tipped,

  My quivering, eager soul,

  And to the earth return it,

  A restless of beauty,

  Renewed and undefiled.

  And when he has finished with the sacrifice,

  And I lie like a shell at his feet

  He will lift me with arms of thunder,

  And over the rim of the world

  Into infinity’s depths, he will toss me

  With moon’s heavy orb on my ankles

  And a tangle of stars in my hair.

  The Mad-girl’s Song to Plebas

  I looked for you over the world my love;

  I waited and watched by the sea:

  I hunted the hills and the plains, my love;

  I knew you were waiting for me.

  My ear caught your voice in the wind, my love,

  My throat felt the touch of your hand;

  My body was waiting for yours my love,

  When the spring lay abed with the land.

  And now I have found you alone my love;

  But the weeds are wound up in your hair:

  Ah! Why are your lips so blue, my love,

  And your skin so p
allid and fair.

  Your eyelids are closed and so calm my love;

  There’s a film of sand on your brow,

  And where on your breast I would lie, my love,

  A sea-shell is nestling now.

  And now I am sure you are dead, my love,

  I knew it would have to be so.

  I’ll lift you up close to my heart my love,

  And down to the sea we will go.

  And when the chill moon shall arise my love,

  And shine on the skin-smooth sand,

  I’ll walk from the sand to the sea, my love,

  And sink with you, hand in hand.

  REHABILITATION

  Winsome Latter

  Little one …

  the bubbled laughter

  running from your lips

  like water from a vessel overturned,

  spills itself

  within the desert of my mind,

  and springs to life

  the seeds of faded years.

  Your joyous sounds

  reach out beyond the edge of time

  and echo back

  in surge of thought …

  my youth.

  In drifting mood I touch,

  across the waste of war-spent years,

  the golden dreams that once were mine.

  Laugh on, O baby girl …

  as through your fluted voice, I grope

  in anguished doubt,

  my weary aimless way

  to hope.

  The Pauline Group, 29 June, 1949

  THE FARM

  L.J. Pearce.

  Inland the black soil becomes red and the cloudy sky cloudless: blue like oiled steel it spreads a merciless dome like a blade over the earth: an ironical blessing. There is no rain here to milch the earth into loam as it lies along the sea. It is a flat hard strand; and through it runs the dry hard channel of the road to the north that carries despite its still waterless red stare a trifle of the flotsam of men occasionally against the defended island of a farmers home.

  He blows through the wall of trees unnoticed, whose slender traceries of boughs like vines trellis their leaves down to earth where, dumb in the shade a bird stands, and but replaces a curled foot at his passing. The shade aggrieves him. Unnoticed, the pagan flowers, nursed on his sacred water, with their full eyes and bright faces, and perfume haven for bees, as he bends past, in his chink eyes and fore vision of the all dispensing matron, the farmer’s wife.

  His rags are like ears about him. He is not perspiring. He has lost his water and is hard like the road he travels along, and where his joints work, like stones, brown and unscratched by the sun, on the bank of his pillow.

  A glance at the house and he knocks at the door. Now, at the oilcloth he bows to the thick tea, while the aproned bosom within lights with love that can pay its debt to mankind with adroitly packed meals for the rough mouth without. His pack grows round in her hands. The tea swills the road down his throat.

  There beauty in the great garment of trees that the distance wears that only the eagle sees. There is beauty in the wide flock of sheep that dribbles corrosively over the pipy grass that only the farmer sees. There is beauty in the Pepper tree in the garden only the hand sees. He picks the small green berries with the tips of his thumb and finger and rubs the hard pips in them free and slippery between them and smells his fingers, and believes that it is the only thing that blesses him here.

  The young horses are in the hands of a young teamster. They are afraid of him because he doesn’t mind it, and even believes it good for them to hurt them. They never know when such a belief is coming over him; and so, out of fear, they go before him. That does not prevent their feeling proud, and prancing like the nags of princes, out in the rays of the dawning light, through the gates of their coming home; or their including him in their liking of air, that he gulps down with a yawn to expand with the joys of the dazzling day.

  All day long their feet will pursue the uno’eturned earth. And one from afar, turning after half a day, will see the hill-side transformed like a face by the burning sun. With the sun on their heads, he behind will relent, and make a fire on the earth with some sticks that once carried food to the high flung billows of trees. Nose bags are slung with the chaff and sweet oats after the gulps drawn out from the trough filled from the well by the lad.

  A ritual path in three stems is trodden by the hoops of a cart and the shoes of a horse every day, when the sun unclasping the morning, exposes his fierceness, like a lion, his cubs and mate dropping behind him. The hand’s in the cart with his bum on the edge, which a bump makes wipe off the dust from the vanishing wheel. He feels the sun on his back and the leather of reins in his hand, and looks at the sky in the west that’s blue like a painted sky. Rooks rise out of the red earth. Shallow depressions are cracked as though by a personal earthquake, showing they are wont to hold a lens of water. The horse is agog till the sheep visions rise, when with slack reins he stops.

  The hand is thinking of the snouts of the sheep and the countless lips lifting to rifle the bin he is going to replenish. He looks at the couple of bags and smiles with delight for the big share of oats he carries for them, the sheep, who are so loathe to be frightened when a thin stream of fat oats crawls into their dish of thin chaff.

  Now there’s returning with eyes o’erlidden and low. The sun’s down already with darkness pursuing. The tramp is tasting the stuff in his bag with the city above lighting up. The hand, with a book, waits for the supper bell to ring. The teamster lingers in the stables with its tent flap of stars, brushing with nerveless arms the flanks of his horses, and the smell of the teeth-milled oats allaying his hunger.

  TRUTH

  L.J. Pearce

  My enemies are my father and mother;

  If I could charm them with my song,

  If I could stop their thrashing me

  And their fighting one another,

  I should be able to go to the party and dance,

  And singing and talking would never lie vain.

  I should be able to welcome the stranger

  Brought to my spot in the country by chance.

  SONNET

  L.J. Pearce

  The earth in sifting mote on mote away

  To bring pure beauty into common clay,

  Transmuting mould to mould and form to form

  Through fish and bird and beast till man be born,

  At last her spheral fingers drop aside

  From woman’s race her last content and pride.

  But ere she has been idle long, she dreams

  Of still surpassing what the highest seems:

  But not with newer races can she make

  Her highest dream of beauty image take.

  They would it break. One soul from out the old

  Must be informed with all the vision told.

  You were the form earth found to be most kind

  To take the imprint of her highest mind.

  THE CENOTAPH

  Norris Devir

  This cenotaph;

  This list of names of men,

  Whose lives leaked out of them

  Through gaps of wounds man-made;

  Whose leaking lives delayed

  Enough for those to pray who prayed,

  For these to curse who knew no prayer;

  Or grab black handfuls of mud

  Made from the dust and their leaking blood,

  And fling it angry in the air

  As far as the weakened arm could throw.

  Some died and did not know.

  There are some whose lips

  Were stopped by their own death-spew

  Manning the sunken battleships,

  A futile, naked crew;

  Or lolling about on the floors of the deep

  They roll and roll in restless sleep

  As smooth tongues of water lick them,

  Too deep for nibble teeth to pick them.

  It is a hard death to die,

>   Breathing water instead of air,

  To feel the sponge of lung swell in the chest,

  And the heart fumble, like lips, in despair.

  Men’s hearts have stopped with fright

  When in the searchlight’s pointing stars

  Their plane lurched sideways in the night

  And plummeted out of the air.

  Body functions vomit

  When the air opens up its mouth

  And sucks the victim down,

  In spinning spiral descent.

  Cramped in crumpled cubby-holes

  They simply sit and wait,

  Till the ground leaps at them, and death

  Bangs like a door in the face.

  There was a mother who learned at the door

  That her only son was killed at the war.

  No selfish tears start from the eyes

  Like blood from a sudden wound;

  Her grief went deeper than tears.

  She shows no outward sign of having bled

  But rapier words stabbed her somber heart;

  Her mind fluttered and fumbled with faces,

  Each one in smiles or sadness, her son.

  And her lips that smiled are dead.

  There was a father who guessed the worst

  But disbelieved himself, fearing the truth.

  His mind went uttering idiot words

  Flicking on and off like sparks;

  He did not try to understand their meaning,

  Thoughts would age him mind and heart.

  The truth seeped through his shallow barrier;

  It was a slow thrust that pierced his heart

  But deep, but deep to the core.

  And blood turned grey in his veins.

  There was a wife whose loss seemed vague

  Till the days stretched into weeks and months.

  The bed beside her grew cold like a corpse;

  The hollowness in her room took shape,

  Had being, and breathed; but did not sleep.

  She was eager to answer the door

  In the hope that there was some mistake;

  She kept her rings on here widowed hand,

  Still wedded to dust and a name.

  There was a child who did not understand.

  These casualties of war

  Cannot bandage up their wounds

  And stop the naked bleeding;

  Their scars are on their minds and hearts,

  Cut by words and missing faces.

  There is a hollowness where someone was,

  Who was uprooted by the sudden rush of metal

  Through the yielding flesh white-hot;

  Or a blunt incision of blackness.

  They wait in empty rooms

  Hearing the ghostly shell of words

  Uttered again in their minds

  By tongues and lips that stopped and rotted away.

  They keep scraps of the soul alive,

  That was plucked from the body

  Or eased slowly out through their lips;

  They have given refuge

  To these vagrant scraps of mind.

  Their scars are slow to heal;

  They bleed again, like broken lips of wounds,

  When memory rubs rough fingers

  Along the length of grooves, to feel

  If forgetfulness has healed the gap.

  There is no cenotaph for them.

  REMINISCENCE

  Jim Lance

  In the years to come will our minds wander back,

  And amble through the passages of Time,

  Seeing dimly by memory’s flickering lamp

  Vague shapes revealed by the side of that uncertain track,

  And things forgotten, covered by the grime

  Of creeping years?

  And in some place of beauty rest at last,

  Some remembered valley where a stream

  Of reminiscence flows?

  Shall we find happiness hidden in the past

  Or see no pleasure, haunted in an empty dream

  By rising fears?

  And shall we search in vain for loveliness,

  Roam a life dusty and bare

  Where no flowers of beauty lie,

  Viewing life of no achievement, no success,

  Gaunt with hungry trees that will not blossom there,

  And they fly, bewildered, by

  A lake of tears?

  THE TOWN

  Jim Lance

  To the days all days are one –

  The same day played again

  Five times a week:

  The same trams in filthy noise,

  Tracks worn thin on wooded blocks,

  And moving roads, the swaying crowds

  Hot and sweaty.

  Paper boys, their faces hid

  By the tenseness of age,

  Clothes as dirty as their feet,

  Break raucous voiced –

  Trade their childhood for the mob’s pennies

  While yesterday’s papers flap in the gutter

  And the mob no wiser.

  PATTERNS OF EVENING

  Jim Lance

  Tree patterns forming in a tangled net of light,

  Falling with the shadows into spreading pools of night,

  As colours from the graying hills are lifted to the sky,

  The fires of sunset glimmer when the day is loathe to die.

  Cloud patterns forming, by the evening breezes tossed,

  ‘Til the afterglow has vanished, and its opal tints are lost.

  The sightless tide is rising, and the darkened skyline fills

  The last remaining paleness stretched out along the hills.

  ILLAWARRA

  Jim Lance

  She has a history hidden in her,

  Deep as coal in her rich earth;

  Hid so deep, grown so old –

  Fierce tales yet untold.

  Her stretching coast has formed a stage

  Where men might live and die

  Against a scene of splendid hills –

  A dam to hold the sky.

  The stage was bare when time was small,

  Quietly then, the story started;

  Nomads made their entrance first,

  Unknowing altars, unrehearsed –

  Then their families, then their tribes

  And generations more

  Made their camps and spent their lives

  Between these hills and shore.

  Through the years black men lived there,

  Named the mountains high above,

  Named the foothills spilling down,

  Named their camps but built no town.

  They left the forests as they were,

  They let the grasslands be,

  They were content to wander

  Where the mountains met the sea.

  One Autumn day a sharpeyed watch

  Saw “Endeavour” pass the coast –

  A god of winds was sailing there,

  A god of sea moved by the air.

  They could not know this was a sign

  The end had now begun

  Of simple life, by golden traces

  Harnessed to the sun.

  While Illawarra kept her secrets

  Intruders settled to the North –

  A prison built by a foreign hand;

  An ugly start in a new-found land.

  Each material was there

  To build a sordid nation –

  The lash and gibbet for its shield

  A gaol for its foundation.

  Illawarra saw her barriers

  Broken by exploring hands –

  The sunrise of another day

  In soldier red and convict grey.

  Thus opened up a chapter

  Of the happy and the cruel;

  The pioneer and the plunderer,

  The farmer and the fool.

  They stripped her graceful hills of cedar,

  Searched her pleasant slopes for coal.


  They came to live and stayed to die,