Undulating Separate: Locality and Nation in the Poetries of John Anderson and Lisa Bellear

Abstract

As Troy Bramston writes, ‘By the end of 1992, [Paul] Keating had asked Australians to think about their history and their long-term future more than any other prime minister had. He was giving voice to a new nationalism for Australia at home and abroad.’ Politically speaking, this national ‘reorientation’ away from supposed cultural ties to Europe was partly reliant upon a strengthened relationship with North America as well as Asia (437); but a ‘new nationalism’ was being activated in the culture: what Anne Brewster terms a ‘new political imaginary’ that, ‘positions indigenous and non-indigenous people in a space of co-existence and co-habitation, where hierarchy is replaced with a sense of the coevalness of contemporary indigenous and non-indigenous modernisms’ (‘Brokering Cross-racial Feminism’ 218). A significant example of this is John Anderson’s long poem, the forest set out like the night. It was published in 1995, the year before Keating’s defeat as Prime Minister. Between the terms of Keating and Howard there emerged a constant public discourse about cultural identity. Lisa Bellear’s collection of poems, Dreaming in Urban Areas was published the year of Howard’s 1996 election win, and stands out as a voice of its moment. This essay considers these books together, against the background of their political era: not as historical artefacts, but rather, as works that try to act upon local and national culture through language. In light of growing commentary on, and contribution to decolonised poetics, this discussion suggests how that tension between the two books takes on a new, timely significance.