The piece utilises leitmotivs throughout. The first is the repetition of elements from the title, then the more general tropes of inebriation and death. Dostoyevsky is known for his psychological insights and his writing of the chaos of real society. The attribution of Dostoyevsky's gaze to the spirits in this piece makes their perspective the primary lens through which the reader views modern Australia; it also lends the spirits the role of commentator and observer. Death in the piece occurs in opposition to the position of "the living" (line 8). It also occurs in the two repeated elements of the title: "wake" and "skeleton dance". The skeleton dance evokes ceremonies like the Mokoy, in which dancers painted white teach children to have respect (a wary respect) for the spirits of the dead. In turn, the "wake" conjures up the catharsis of a good party after a burial. The latter is a European tradition, the former an Aboriginal one. Death and chaos are thus shown to belong equally to both cultures.

In their own ways, both the "wake" and the "skeleton dance" keep death from taking hold of the living. The opening of the piece places the blame for the loss of traditional Indigenous spiritual practices on "western rationality" (line 5), with the alcohol issues this leads to when the "dwindling souls fenced in by assimilation" (line 9) seek alternatives in the pubs, as the "drinking holes of the living" (line 8). However, the rest of the piece looks forwards and backwards to a more ancient fear: the universal fear of chaos and death. When the wakers stop their dancing, and the boneman his, and when the last trickle of belief has bled out of the country, then chaos triumphs. More than a call to remember "the old ways", this poem presents a nuanced memory of more than colonialism's evils. As Anne Vickery notes in her analysis, in this piece "judgement itself may be problematic", as the proverbial line drawn in the sand (Vickery 2014, 3). Instead, the poem ties together the fates of both Indigenous Australians and the wider population of contemporary Australia.

Similarly to "For the Wake and the Skeleton Dance", "**White Stucco Dreaming**" (Smoke 17–18) paints a sardonic, yet not unloving, portrait of the Australian suburbs. Watson's suburb is a mixture of Indigenous culture and the surface image of the suburbs with their Saturday lawnmowers and summer sprinklers. This layering allows the mythical to equally occupy the same space as modern suburbia. Thus, those elements which sink into the background in everyday life become the focal point of this poem. The result is a heightened awareness of the permeability of what are too easily viewed as separate spheres, characterised simplistically as "Indigenous spirituality" and "white rationality".  However, because of the association between blackness and magic realist elements in the piece, the blackness of the tyres (which are painted white to create swan-shaped plant pots) no longer belongs solely to suburban white Australia. The tyre swans are part of the children's Indigenous identity in the piece. Of twenty-one uneven lines on the first page, seven use the word "black" (lines 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 20). In the poem, this merger of worlds becomes a new kind of dreaming and a new kind of poetics of place. It is a "white stucco dreaming" which brings together dreaming with the interiors of Victorian-era Australia, now the interiors of the working classes. The "white stucco dreaming" in this poem is not a specific piece of wall decoration. It is presented as a new kind of dreaming in general. This invites the reader to read it not as an isolated memoir, but as symptomatic of suburban Australia in general. The opening and closing lines form a frame for the poem: this frame re-evaluates words which would traditionally recall the uncanny, such as "dark of my mind" (line 1) and "insane" (line 21). Instead, these words become part of suburban childhood ideals.

It is the ice cream truck that sends the labrador insane in line 21, and the dark of the speaker's mind is a happy darkness. From the childhood perspective, the "white stucco dreaming" is a happy dreaming. What appears uncanny to the adult reader, such as the transformation of garden objects into animals, the darkness, and the insanity, are aspects of the comfort the children find in their "working class tribe" (line 9) and its blackness. The reader is thus forced into a layered perspective in which the child's reality demands equality with the familiar concrete jungle and lawns paved over the surface of this other place. Finally, the poem also questions the effect which the white stucco dreaming has, considering that architecturally, it brings Australia's colonial era to mind.

The ultimate symbol of (white) suburbia is the ice cream truck. Rather than the happy memories which open the poem, this potent symbol becomes a singer of siren "melodies" (line 19) which enter "little black minds" (line 20), bringing insanity to maybe more than just the family dog. Read in this light, the "bad paint job" on the "mutant swans" becomes a harbinger of what awaits these children culturally as they negotiate two narratives of place even in their own homes (lines 10–12). The political ramifications of this last aspect are brought into greater visibility by the way the police-gaze penetrates the children's homes in the final stanza:

Chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraudLaid across white stucco And mud cakes on the camp stove That just made Dad see black, No tree was ever safe from tree-house sprawl, And the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets, Peering into our white stucco cocoon, *Wishing, they were with us...* (lines 20–27, italics in original)

"**A Bent Neck Black and Flustered Feather Mallee**" (Smoke 36) complements the previous two poems in its layering and merging of spatial signifiers, taking an ironic position towards contemporary (sub)urban spaces with a clear postcolonial critique. In this piece, Watson deftly moves from the image of a bird as roadkill to the violent history of European colonisation of what is now Australia. This is played out in the microsphere of insect life on the bird's mangled corpse.

> deadened crow with eternal lockjaw a bent neck black and flustered feather mallee

not as gracious as a magpie neck bent into the wind and bitumen madness that claimed you scorched mark and tears fallen into the blackened tar and earth blood soaked earth through massacre war and plague (lines 1–11)

It is tempting to read the crow in this poem as representative of past colonial violence in Australia. However, Watson's detailed writing of the crow as roadkill evokes a sense of the present and of immediate experience for the reader. The different levels of time in the piece emerge from the present moment of viewing the crow, as do the various spatial levels. The speaker describes the crow in the present and how it became roadkill in the past, in a correct everyday use of tense and time structure. This means that when the tarmac underneath the crow becomes the focus of the poem, its description as "blood soaked earth through massacre / war / and plague" (lines 9–11) is felt as a present state rather than as a reference to historical events. Or rather, the earth is scarred by all the events which have played out up to and including the present, regardless of who the victims of violence were. Watson states that,

places carry scars. I always try to get that out in my poetry. There is one poem—every month I am one word closer to finishing it—which I started writing in a place called Barrow Creek, that's north of Alice Springs. It is where the backpacker murders happened. And an incredibly brutal massacre happened there in the early twentieth century. It is a really scary place. You feel the hurt of country there. (Watson and Magee 2015)

Although Watson is not referring to "A Bent Neck Black and Flustered Feather Mallee" in this comment, it is clear that place, as Country, experiences violence indiscriminately of how that violence is framed. Here, history is written in the land and seeps up through the tarmac in a literal sense, and creates a presence experience of multiple time layers. In this context, the dreamtime spirits are a living force, not idealised figures, and form part of the cultural-political landscape in Australia.

The bitumen in this piece is a borderland through which the "madness" of modern rationality merges with the Indigenous spirit beings "locked in the heat and tar" (line 20). The blood of both bird and war soak into the tar, but the exchange, linguistically at least, is an uneven one. Watson demonstrates the limits of the English language in representing the fallen and flattened bird, and by extension, everything it stands for. Rather than a single sign, the author presents the reader with a series of characteristics which are not normally related. The result is that one heterogeneous thing, the bird, is made of enough elements to create a narrative. This turns the roadkill into the story of the nation. The rejection of the rain by the war-waging ants connects the rain as a sign of transcendence in Watson's poetry to violence, showing the violence of the past and the present to be a barrier to a transcendence of the individual, thus preventing a connection to the multifaceted history of the land and other people.

Watson's description of the bird is spread over three lines. The first and the third encase the second in weak comparisons to English species: the crow and the magpie, which are birds of death and theft respectively. These two elements frame the fate of the dead bird in the second line. This bird is composed of the following attributes: a "bent neck", which recalls the gloom swans and mutant swans of Watson's suburbs; "black", which Watson uses to refer to his own Indigeneity; "flustered", which is such a banally human word that it becomes darkly comic in this context; and finally, "mallee", which is a kind of Australian scrub. In this one description of the bird, Watson combines the primary thematic concerns of the entire collection *Smoke Encrypted Whispers*. The black feather mallee simultaneously evokes past genocides of Indigenous nations in Australia, and the modern present of bitumen roads, with the roadkill they create in a never-ending repetition of this killing. It also highlights the limits that English has placed on the possibilities for speaking of those two ways of being in place and these two histories. The poems examined here merge contemporary (sub)urban Australia with Dreamtime spirits and the ongoing history of violence towards Indigenous Australians in one time and one place. In doing so, they destabilise dichotomies of 'White' vs. Indigenous Australia, past vs. present, sacred vs. modern.

### **The Writer's Voice in the City**

#### **"Fly-Fishing in Woolloongabba"; "The Writer's Suitcase"**

Language is not only made dumb in the face of the atrocities visited on Indigenous Australians. This limitation effects both the social voice of the poet and his personal artistic one. The following poems explored here, "The Writer's Suitcase" and "Fly-Fishing in Woolloongabba" may be read as explorations of the relationship of the artist to language and to his art. "The Writer's Suitcase" (Smoke 44–45) situates the acts of writing in the dark recesses of the mind, the night, and the natural world. At the beginning of the piece, the poet's language is likened to something living: it is an animal force capable of bleeding onto the concrete of the city. The act of bleeding transgresses the boundaries of skin, as well as those of the mind which contained its words, and the walls of the suitcase the writer held.

> it spilled out onto the bitumen like the bursting stomach of a consumed beast the writer's black suitcase bleeding onto the pavement where he fell for the last time and the black moths within escaped fled for cover in the light they'd been deprived of witnesses and prisoners unto his pain (lines 1–8)

In the fifth stanza, the flight of this poem becomes the flight of moths into a "light they'd been deprived of " (line 7). This flight retracts the initial promise opened up at the start of the piece, that of a connection to the world and the other through the transgression of physical and mental boundaries. Thus, the moth-thoughts of the poet's suitcase remain "secrets" even in the light.

> secrets into the wind onlookers gasping in shock the writer in a ball of terror his state exposed to the world (lines 9–12)

Secrets are by definition something unknowable. Were a secret to become known to another, it would cease to be a secret. Those with whom the poet's words should create a connection are themselves defined purely by their status as observers apart, rather than participants in the poet's pain. They are onlookers capable of sight and of gazing from the outside, but not of transcendent connection. The words the poet spills out into the world do not bring the subject closer to the absolute; they are merely engulfed by the city into which they are poured, disregarded and dying. This piece is as it appears. It is a pessimistic judgement on the ineffectuality of language, a self-reflective piece on art as nothing more than the "art in dying alone" (lines 23–24). Yet it does reach for more, even as it reflects on the futility of that endeavour.

The imagery of opening in a visceral way at the start of the poem continues throughout, despite the indifference of the city. Thoughts are "fleeing the open air / pages scatter amongst the breeze" as the poet dies (metaphorically), in which process his soul becomes external to his body (lines 18–20). The suitcase is "an external soul of tattered black cardboard" open to the touch. As the figure of the lover represents the muse in Watson's other poems, then the poems which the children here "laugh-off […] as letters of love" (line 30) in the final stanza contain that "little" piece of transcendence which is the possibility of a true connection, however small. This possibility could not be completely excluded in the assessment of stanza seven, which recognises that there is "little immortality to come of any of this" (line 13). Little immortality is not the same as none.

Rather than simply being symbols of transcendence in the form of the quotidian sacred, in this piece, the poems are transformed through the process of coming out of the suitcase and entering the world. The sacred here lies in productive change and transformation. It is not passively received but must be reached for. McCredden poses the question of the sacred's place in the "dehumanising history" faced by Indigenous Australians, finding Watson's answer in a "jointly political and spiritual openness to recognise history as constructed of human choices, human making and remaking" (McCredden 2010, 83). The sacred, then, is situated in the process of "remaking", which perfectly reflects the deeply embedded irony in Watson's writing, by negating the finality of the creative process of "making". Through the insertion of the "re", it creates an ever-postponed telos, with its sacred process continually begun anew as it reaches the limits of what can be reached through language. If Malouf's and Watson's respective ways of writing suburbia show nothing else, then it is that the Australian sacred must be transformative.

In "The Writer's Suitcase", the man's writings, in their escape from his "external soul of tattered black cardboard" (line 25), meet with a death similar to that of the man "in a bundle on the sidewalk" (line 28), and are "laughed off " in the end (line 30). However, in this end, they are no longer moths, or poems, or ideas, but "letters of love" (line 30). Though they are "discarded", the poet's writings have been transformed from an act of the mind, through the breaking open of the body in an act of sharing, into another written form; this time, a form which expresses the intimate connection of lovers. There is an irony here which points to the limitations facing language as a carrier of a meaning that might create a transcendent connection between people and the world. However, the piece also highlights the role of the reader in responding to the call of the poet's writings, even if it is an imperfect one.

As well as being a means of making these two ways of being in place visible to the reader, language or poetry also limits them, as will be explored later. This is, however, not solely due to the English language's connection to colonialism: Watson also engages in a more general exploration of the possibilities and limits of his art. The same holds true for the way he writes the city. The poems examined in this section all stem from Watson's first volume and focus on a problematic relationship between the land's first places and the ones paved over them. The way Watson mixes and merges the two is typical of this first volume, although he does continue to make use of it in later poems such as "Deafening Cold" (Love 61), where he depicts Melbourne in terms unfamiliar to non-Indigenous readers:

> I whispered an acknowledgement; my respect to the Kulin peoples, upon whose country I'd be landing. There are songlines here that sing as loud as the day the tramlines ripped through the Dreaming… (lines 1–4)

In *Love Poems and Death Threats*, which follows *Smoke Encrypted Whispers*, Watson becomes much more exact in his description of Indigenous places, writing of specific regions and relationships. The same coalescence of Indigenous mythology and contemporary Australian spaces is extended beyond the depiction of place. As previously examined, "Apocalyptic Quatrains: The Australian Wheat Board/Iraq Bribery Scandal" (Love 8–9) reflects this, as does "Bird-song of Imminent Death" (Love 16–17), which merges the cry of the Muk-Muk with the "blackhawks falling over Afghanistan" on the television news (line 2).

"Fly-Fishing in Woolloongabba"11 (Smoke 39–40) paints a far less nostalgic picture of Australian suburbia than had been presented in "White Stucco Dreaming". The poem is clear a critique of the ills in modern Australia, specifically its roads and drugs. Paying attention to the style and the context of Watson's other poems reveals much of how the situation relates to his poetic voice. The poem avoids lines with a complete grammatical structure. Instead, the reader is presented a series of successive images. The extensive use of the gerund is of particular interest in this regard:

> facing the mirror and having a shave in the near darkness after an evening of watching the wine disappear (lines 1–4)

In the first sentence, for instance, the use of the gerund appears to describe a parallel action in the past. However, the lack of a predicate instead lends the gerund the feeling of an immediate action, underscoring the experience of these images in the immediate present. The two main pieces of information which are left out of the grammatical structuring of the lines in this poem are the main action of the speaker in the first three stanzas, and the definition of the subject in stanza four, which is merely described as "it". The result is that the information which is left, and which therefore becomes the focus of the poem, is that which would otherwise blend into the background. This is in keeping with the tradition of the high value placed on the mundane in Australian poetry. It also has the effect of opening up the first three stanzas to make room for the reader to fill these images with their own feelings, thus creating a space of empathy from which to approach the situation of the "young girl living on a remote, black community" in stanza five (line 17); and by analogy, that of the speaker as well.

The precarious economic situation of the speaker, and the other "little fish sighing, for want of better" (line 36) in the second half of the poem, ties the uneven structure of the majority/minority relationship to violence as the "little fish" are contrasted with "the sharks motionless in the disguise of the undertow" (line 35). The fantastic transformation of the road and its traffic into a living river, and the syringes into fish, brings movement to the piece. However, this movement serves only to create a dynamic between (sub)urban Australia and the "remote, black community" in stanza five (line 17). It shows that there is exchange between these two, but that the exchange is an uneven one. There is "a minority of her / in a majority" (lines 18–19). The river, an unchanging entity made of movement, stands for the nature of this dynamic which both allows movement and change, but which nevertheless maintains its form and existence.

The river is constant in its existence, and unchanging. Yet the river is also made of movement. Here is the doubt which Watson's poetry expresses, as the question in "A Black Bird of My Mind": "why walk a road of bitter sweet?"; and in "For the Wake and the Skeleton Dance": "better to forget?" (Smoke 38, line 15; Smoke 50, line 18). These are questions Watson appears not yet ready to answer in this first volume. What his poetry does contain is a recognition that words can create movement, can make rivers of roads and fish of syringes, and create a longing for more. The question remains as to whether words can change the shape of these rivers or bring these two worlds together as equals.

Close attention to the status of reality and of the sacred in Watson's work makes it clear that, although his poetry utilises different modes common to postcolonial literature, the instability of categories such as real/fantastic/sacred/mundane becomes a central element in what I choose to read as a model of Romantic irony in his work. This is reflected in an enmeshment of the infinite and the immanent, each continuously referring to, creating, and ultimately limiting, the experience of the other, much as each image in the Rubin Vase both delineates and denies the other. In Watson's writing of (sub)urban Australia, this structure is expressed as a presence effect in which past, present, the sacred, the mundane, the topical and subterranean no longer provide distinct frames of reference but are merged and cocreating. This is not only a case of different modes being used to bring the postcolonial condition of Indigenous Australia more sharply into focus. More than anything, it is a joining of fates in which the possibility of moving forward together is simultaneously asserted and revoked in a way that recalls the structure of Romantic irony.

# **Language: Beyond the Embrace of a Twisted Tongue**

"Language can be figured as a fox entering a hen house. Yes, there is planning, stealth, a desired goal on the fox's part, but there is also an awful lot of feathers and squawking, lunging and biting, with varying effects" – *Lynn McCredden 2015*

Language and writing in Watson's poetry hold hope for creating a connection between people and the proximate experience of the sacred, even in (sub)urban landscapes. Language, however, is suspect on two counts. Even as it gestures towards embodied experience, it is trapped by its own mediality. The background against which the epistemological questioning of language occurs in Watson's work is tied to, although not exclusively concerned with, an acknowledgement of the power structures involved in writing in English. Watson reacts to these conditions by making these issues visible and reflecting on them in his poems. The body becomes an important canvas in this regard. Nowhere is the difficult position of the poet clearer than in "Blacktracker…Blackwriter…Blacksubject" (Love 50). In this poem, the fratricidal blacktracker figure is melded with the act of writing which "feeds my Dreaming to the Queen's tongue" (lines 12–13). It is the "Blacksubject" who "will always know … it's with the pen that the lies are used to overwrite the Dreaming, and the written word will never be worth the country it's written on" (Love 50, lines 20–211 ). Yet in other pieces, there is an urgent and restless desire for a connection with others beyond a binary approach to Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations; or as Watson phrases it, "the black and white frame from which we developed our first glimpse of innocence" (Love 104 "Elsewhere", lines 23–24). The poet's artistic drive, as well as the complex ways in which English has been a force of both oppression and resistance in Australia, find combined expression in the figure of the muse.

### **A Writer's Musings on Gastank Fumes**

#### **"Gasoline"; "Gastank Sonnets"; "After 2 a.m. "**

The female body, in the form of the muse figure, is a physical representation of the act of writing in the language of the coloniser. The poet's relationship to the muse exemplifies both the potential of poetry to bridge the self/other divide, and the siren song that is the language in which the poet writes. In his poetic reflections on the nature of writing itself, Watson expresses a deeply spatially rooted understanding of language and meaning. He explores the ability of language to gesture towards a linguistic space beyond its own dimensions, while making the reader aware of the gap between meaning and sign. Typically for Watson, however, these dimensions are expressed in corporeal terms. "Blood and Ink" is not just the title of one of Watson's poems; it is the central tension which runs throughout his second collection of poetry, *Love Poems and Death Threats*.

"**Gasoline**" (Smoke 106) is the first of the muse poems examined here. It is a poetic sleight of hand, in which a petrol-sniffing addiction takes the form of an erotic encounter with a woman. The poem maintains the metaphor of the female body for the petrol and its pump throughout. The effect is that it simultaneously distances meaning from sign in a deliberately obvious way, and also lends voice to what might otherwise be expressed only in a way which speaks in terms of oppression and victimisation.

> you just know where it will lead to – the prelude of a lingering kiss upon the fumes of a heated and ravenous breath

and you're already a weary veteran of this road

'cause it's going to combust, the spirits of her mouth entering yours with that NO NAKED FLAMES tattoo falling from her lips into the curves of her chest

the fragrance of a weathered fuel tank leaking unleaded desire (lines 1–12)

Rather than writing of this addiction in terms of power relations, the opening lines express the speaker's resignation in his powerlessness to resist. This resignation and passivity characterise the addiction as less of an action or choice, than an affliction. This affliction, which is deeply rooted in the impact of colonialism, is reimagined in universal terms of passion and desire, even if that desire is "unleaded" (line 12).

Reading this piece in the context of Watson's other poems reveals an equivalence between other lovers in Watson's poetry and the muse figure. Substance use/abuse is connected to the process of writing, in other pieces such as "Chloe in the Window Box" (Smoke 11) or "Shout-Me-a-Wine-Requiem" (Smoke 41). Aside from the presence of the female figure (however metaphorical), there is one line in the middle of the poem which also supports the association of language with the fuel tank in the piece. The "NO NAKED FLAMES tattoo" (line 8), which should be a sign attached to the petrol pump, is not portrayed as a tattoo on the beloved's body (as would be consistent with the overarching metaphor), but as "falling from her lips" (line 9) as words would. The poet's "veteran" (line 4) status implies a long struggle between the desire for these (English) words and the poison they bring to the mind. Read in this way, the selection of the trope of petrol sniffing, which leads to brain damage through inhalation of the "fumes" (line 3), serves the double function of both linking the piece to a well-known side effect of colonisation on Indigenous communities, and drawing attention to the brain or mind as a space which is also affected, by both fumes and language. The connection between petrol and language, or more specifically poetry, is made explicit in "Gas Tank Sonnets" (Smoke 111–112) a few pages later. The final lines of the piece, like the title, bring together poetry in the form of the "sonnet" and petrol in the form of the "gas tank".

The gas tank sonnets of this piece, however, are differentiated from the muse whom the subject leaves as he exits Byron Bay, in the lines "feelings of withdrawal / leaving / Byron Bay and the muse, / for the likes of Brisbane-town / and this want of becoming a writer" (Smoke 111, lines 15–19). Through the use of the word "withdrawal", the "feelings of withdrawal" the poet experiences from this muse once again circle back to the same connection between substance abuse, the muse figure, and language in "Gasoline". With these lines from "Gas Tank Sonnets" in mind, "Gasoline" also appears to offer not the image of a true muse, but a false muse. The petrol fumes lend the poet a language which masters him, rather than one which offers the possibility of transcending structures of division to create a connection with the poet's readers. The distancing of meaning from sign through the extensive metaphor in "Gasoline" draws attention to the falsehood of this language. No spirits bring a sense of place to this piece. The only spirits are the petrol-fume "spirits of her mouth, entering yours" (Smoke 106, lines 6–7).

The road in "**Gas Tank Sonnets**", with its "days and days of service stations pies" (line 9), is the ultimate anti-place. It offers nothing but movement away from place, and bad food which is always the same. That which the poet truly desires is the food of place and poetry: "the Pacific / looking good enough to eat […] Byron Bay and the Muse" (lines 13–14). The irony of his leaving the muse "for the likes of Brisbane-town / and this want of becoming a writer" (lines 16–19) expresses once more the ambivalence and the gravitational pull the poet feels towards his craft.

In the gas tank pieces, the petrol motif connected the muse to the ongoing negative effects of colonialism in Indigenous communities. The ambivalent position of the Indigenous writer is explored outside this motif in "**After 2 a.m**. " (Smoke 6). The piece makes use of line lengths to clearly introduce the aspects at stake for the poet-figure in the act of writing. The long and short lines in the piece follow a loose pattern in the first half, in which the longer lines contain the verbs and the short lines (between one and three words) contain simple nouns. The rhythmic and visual effect is that whilst the verb lines contain narrative movement, this narrative is brought to an abrupt halt which accentuates the short lines in their stagnant simplicity. This simplicity peels back the process of telling to reveal the core elements of the poem as: "two", "black", "myself ", "3 a.m.", "our embrace", and "night". Until "night", these elements are clearly paired and reflect the duality ever present in Watson's poetry: that of the speaker's Indigenous identity and being a contemporary Australian poet.

> I wept along with the night two black hideous dimensions – myself and 3 a.m. releasing a crystal tide of bottled insanity while the shadows mocked our embrace and from then on I knew that forever night would be my mistress (lines 1–12)

The poem oscillates between seemingly simple pairings and the complexity of the relationship between the two elements of the speaker's identity. The first pairing of night and poet in the piece is an uncomfortable one for both parties. In the first line, the poet weeps, but so too does the night. The relationship between the two then changes as they merge into one. They are no longer separate dimensions but become one through the mutual possession of "our embrace" (line 8). This occurs through the act of writing.

The poetic impetus takes the form of a love affair with a female muse, which continues throughout Watson's work. However, as so often, the muse motif here is perverted, and highlights the unevenness of power in the relationship. This relationship is, after all, that of an Indigenous poet to writing in an imported tongue, which nevertheless also belongs to him. Viewed in this way, it is unsurprising that this relationship is in constant flux between a love affair, an integral part of the poet's self and imaginative impetus, and "bottled insanity" being released. The poet is "mocked by shadows" which could be read as the spirit beings that feature in other pieces. On the other hand, the love affair is situated in the night, which is a borderland on the fringes of society and sanity. This shows Watson's poetic language to possess subversive potential, in common with so many things pushed to the edges of the acceptable.

### **Writing: A Bittersweet Necessity**

### **"A Blackbird of My Mind"; "Blood and Ink"; "Musing: The Graveyard Shift"**

The writer's ambivalence towards language and writing is expressed beyond the muse figure as well. "**A Black Bird of My Mind**" (Smoke 38) likewise questions the act of writing, which is a double-edged sword, being both a necessity and a curse. The poem opens with the movement of "migrating thoughts" and the contradiction of "bittersweet anxieties", which reflect the dynamic of Watson's entire oeuvre (lines 1–2). It is the dynamic whereby Watson's poetic voice stems from the very "road / of stone" and "curse" which has paved over the places and spirits of his Indigenous heritage (lines 6–7, 4).

migrating thoughts of bitter sweet anxieties come once in a curse or on a road of stone harshly cut rocks of little chance that attracts a man of word of time of sacrifice to lay against the grain but why walk a road of bitter sweet? (lines 1–14)

The poet's description of himself is a general one, "a man / of word / of time / of sacrifice" (lines 10–14), which widens the scope of these three elements to a general predicament facing all Australians in their own way. The first attribute is "word". If this were to stand alone, a simple equation with poetry would be easy. However, "word" cannot be separated from "time" and from "sacrifice": "word" or language is shown to be contingent on time. As such, it is caught up in history, a history which has involved considerable blood sacrifice on the altars of both colonialism and rationalism.

This is the problem with language with which Watson battles in his work, and which he continued to explore in "**BLOOD AND INK**" in his second collection, *Love Poems and Death Threats* (Love 3). The two elements which make-up the title of this second collection perfectly encapsulate its main concern. This is the relationship between the language of colonial and now postcolonial2 Australia, and the author's Indigenous heritage. The gravity of this relationship is expressed in the selection of the poem's epigraph from Philip K. Dick's *The Man in the High Castle*: "Blood, Herr Reiss, can never be eradicated like ink" (Love 3). The selection of a science-fiction author appears strange at first, however, considering the central role the Nazis play in this book and their association with genocide, the reference is thematically relevant to Australia's own history of bloodshed. The book's examination of alternative histories and the power of language and representation are likewise telling.

The choice of metaphor to carry the poem's meaning in this case is water. This medium is well chosen, as it has the ability to express the longing for connection represented by the kinship ties in the piece, as well as the feeling of danger and the unfulfilled hope that language holds when carried on these waters. Each subheading in the poem refers to one of these aspects of water. The first section, "**Headwaters**", commences with a connection between water and consciousness: "head" and "water".

#### '*I AM A RIVER*…'

How your words reverberate off the mirror of our conscience. The connection is water. Wanting to pour forth the bubbling within. A well of knowledge, waiting below the surface of us all.

And as you professed, my uncle, we all congregated. Albeit in a dark hour, we dreamed as one, in a pure beast of afternoon light. There were tears, but they were merely spray off the surface of your departure. Young sea eagles danced your wake.

What you gave us cannot be taught in foreign halls; the darkness of humanity and poison pens. How they fashion textbooks to suit the tides of chaos.

Ink can be cleansed in the headwaters of your flow. Wash my eyes from censored images of history. I am not a neo-human of dystopia.

Below your river a dangerous undertow can gather momentum and try to pull us down.

But we always float as estuaries in your memory, a consensus of blood that can never be eradicated like ink. (Love 33 )

The italicised quotation at the beginning of the poem, "*I AM A RIVER*…", emphasises this connection in a way that further defines the relationship of mind to water, as the specific function of the mind as subject-creating ego. The association of water with the mind expresses the desire, the "wanting to pour forth", for a connection with that which lies outside the subject, but which has its origins inside the individual mind.

The images of unity and community which follow this desire to "pour forth" occur in the context of death, but still with the water. The communal grief which marks the death of kin becomes "spray off the / surface" of the poet's uncle's departure. Death and grief here are communal affairs, a unified dreaming "as one". This sense of unity through communal dreaming, as symbolised by the water, brings together death and new life in the final line of the second paragraph: "young sea eagles danced at your / wake". This stands in contrast to the final three paragraphs of the first section, which identify the "dangerous undertow" of writing that whitewashes history though a fashioning of "textbooks to suit the tides of chaos". Just as it was in "Future Primitive" (Smoke 129), colonial and postcolonial Australia is not characterised as the alien mechanical standing in opposition to the natural: Watson manages to successfully avoid this cliché. Instead, here both are natural in their own way. The natural, however, does not mean harmless. The waters are both what the poet's kin passed down to him and the "dangerous undertow" of an ink which writes the stories of a white Australia.

The second section, "**Ebb Tide**", reflects the departure of the uncle in the retreating tides.

There is no recession in your departure. The river replenishes and everyone needs time to regain buoyancy. We have to

catch our breath and wade.

You taught us never to dive 'headfirst' into unknown depths. Feel the water as each one of us is our own burgeoning course. There will be low water succeeding at times, but we will always try to maintain a steady drift. And in the ebb tide – as your decree, my teacher – no one should be left behind.

Question all questions drowned and forgotten. In their resuscitations, storm birds break glass and fish shed tears. In a consensus of dreams, everything could surface. (Love 4)

The question posed by the uncle's departure and teachings, however, is what the tide leaves behind. This question comes with a new image. It is a premise of unity in a "consensus of dreams" which includes the fantastic: the glass-breaking storm birds and crying fish. The answer the poet seeks must be sought inside himself, and in movement and merger, rather than finality and purity. This seeking within the self is expressed in the title of the third section, "Backwaters".

As a pupil I must ask: How is it you charted the backwaters before your time? Is it connected with the Dawson River, the conduit of your mother's spring? I am uncharted of the Kungulu ways in my being.

I have smelt the burnt husks of brigalow leaves and twine, as we have now entwined, in the backwaters of your journey. No heart of darkness has rested here. The river does not rest. What I search for is further upstream, in an essence, the midst of unexplored waters. A whirlpool simpatico belongs there; unrest and calm. (Love 4–5)

The backwaters are the connection to the ancestors. The speaker's lack of orientation on these waters is the result of his lack of understanding of the Kungulu tongue, which nevertheless lies inside him. However, the answers the speaker seeks are not purely in the charting of his living cultural roots and kinship ties, but in "a whirlpool simpatico […] unrest and calm" (Smoke 5). This dynamic shows an unfulfilled hope to be grasped in movement between kinship and ink: the movement between the writer's Indigenous heritage and Australian-English with its colonial history. The reference to Joseph Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* in paragraph two shows that even a language imported by colonialism contains a potential for change that is as fluid as the river in Conrad's novel and in Watson's poem.

In the final section of this piece, "**Postscript in a Bottle**", he plays on the classic symbol of hope, the message in a bottle, to describe the hope he places in languages or ink, and its power to reach others. The replacement of "message" with "postscript" further situates this hope in his own poetic endeavours, but also with that which comes after script, even after language. The irony lies in his acknowledgement that creating a connection (the "collective thoughts" and the water itself which is the connecting force) means movement rather than a stable unity. His hope lies in the "discourse of ink and blood":

> *Uncle, will you please make a beacon; a campfire on the shore of our backwater? I fear some of us could lose our way*…

> *The river will never rest, our collective thoughts from the headwaters, through the ebb tide and into the backwaters of our being. We are all rivers, on a discourse of ink and blood*… (Love 5, line 5)

The "discourse of ink and blood" (Smoke 5, line 5) is posited as a way forward. It is able to function in this capacity because of the structure which I identify as that of Romantic irony: it is an endless backwards and forwards which allows both positions to stand equally and neither to become final.

### **Beyond Language's Limits**

### **"Musing: The Graveyard Shift"; "Author's Notes #2"; "Kangaroo Crossing"**

Love Poems and Death Threats also contains poems which are concerned with the self/Other divide in a more universal sense. "**Musing: The Graveyard Shift**" (Smoke 13–14) plays with nature as a source of poetic impetus and its role in bridging the self/Other divide. Rather than setting up the city and nature in opposition to each other, the poem explores the relationship between the writing process and the material world outside, in the context of a modern Australian cityscape. The title itself indicates a connection between poetic inspiration in the form of the muse and the role of the thinking mind as its muses, thinks, or ponders.

The piece shows the writing process to be on the cusp of these two aspects of the self/Other divide. Paper and pen, the utensils of the thinking and writing mind, lie on the window ledge. Window ledges form a borderland between the domestic man-made place inside, and the river outside, which is part of the natural world.

> as I enter a writers' graveyard shift sheltered by a desk lamp a lover is nesting within the covers breathing softly

paper and pen on the window ledge third floor overlooking the river, dark wet stretching leather

red buoys flicker on / off

signal thoughts to the writer on graveyard shift

looking for inspiration in poorly lit boats shuttling past

the crew all strangers to me as I am almost a stranger to the person in my bed (lines 1–16)

The poet looks to nature for inspiration, only to be confronted with another language separating him from a poetry which could bridge the gap within himself, and between him and the lover in his bed. Looking out over the river, he does not see a body of water, but the modern electric buoys of the city flashing on and off. In this piece, the flashes from the buoys function as a perverse Morse code which is the antithesis to language's communicational function. Inspiration does not come from these. The poet remains a stranger to the lover/muse figure in his bed, and no connection is made to the poet's fellow man. The feeling of being on the cusp of inspiration, of this connection being just within reach, remains in the qualifier "almost" in line 16. For all the difficulties and deep wrongs Watson's poetry lays bare, not least the murkiness of promises made and the "the ideal machine of consequence" (line 20), there always remains a sense of reaching for a point of touching, where the touching of language and the absolute is possible, and where one mind reaches out to touch another's.

Watson's exploration of the limits of language are reflected formally in his mixed forms (for instance, epigraphs, haiku, typography, and even poems which read like recipes, such as "Intervention Rouge" in *Monster's Ink*, page 22). Particularly, Watson's use of haiku has the odd effect of first presenting the reader with a poem containing detailed writing, which gives the impression of having conveyed that information, and then ending with a form predicated on its fragmentary nature and the immediacy of its vision.

Watson's "**Author's Notes**" (Smoke 155, 159, 170) are meta-lyrical pieces which are presented as part of his body of poetry yet blur the boundaries between poetry and commentary. They present a clear expression of where Watson situates language, meaning, and writing, by conveying a significant distance between the words and any spontaneous organic meaning. Watson treats his words much like fish hung up for smoking, thrown "on the rack" to "stretch" in "Author's Notes # 2" (Smoke 159). The choice to include such reflections on the author's own process, as though these "notes" were themselves poetry, displays a desire for reflexive writing. This makes the reader aware of the artificiality of language as the medium through which he has experienced the poems on the earlier pages of the collection.

All good wordsmiths get 'the thousand-yard stare'. That's when you're looking beyond the page. Some writers never cross the third or second dimension of a page. After a while, writing on a 'rack' is like reaching into yourself and arranging the words on the inside of your ribcage … you're looking out … visualising the rack and how those words translate to the reader, how those words feel on you. You're always looking out, in and beyond.

The ribcage offers some choice 'wire' for the word. But if you're going to use the ribcage as a rack, don't use permanent ink, and what I mean by 'permanent' is overloading your rack with the dark ink that stains for life. I started making my own rules about writing and devising my own nomenclature: a 'rack' is a page, a 'wire' is a blank line. A 'hump' is a full stop.

After words are yanked from the pool in my head, I hand them out on the 'wire' to dry, and then after the sun goes down, I throw them on the 'rack' and stretch them out a bit. (Smoke 159)

This piece expresses a highly specific view of language which, by acknowledging multiple dimensions on the page, envisions language in spatial terms capable of indicating a linguistic space beyond its own dimension. This understanding of language recalls the philosophy of early Romanticism rather than later concepts, such as poststructuralism. If there is a "third dimension of a page" to be "crossed", then it follows that there is something further beyond that page to be grasped. This returns to the idea of negative assertion, which lies at the heart of Romantic irony.

The question of language, and poetry's ability to signal a space outside language, is something which Lyn McCredden has written on; and interestingly, she draws on Watson in her analysis. For McCredden, poetry both carries meaning, and at the same time, "points beyond itself, to the limits of language to a space differently configured as erasure, silence, the unsignifiable" (Lyn McCredden 2015, 95). Discussing Ian Almond's comparison of Derrida and Meister Eckhart, McCredden demonstrates that the ontological consequences of acknowledging this space are characterised differently depending on the approach. For Derrida, the extreme indeterminacy of language entails erasure, whilst at the other end of the spectrum, the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart reaches for a space of silence, beyond thought, in which to meet the Godhead (ibid., 105–106).

McCredden proposes a middle path, which is of particular relevance to reading Watson's work. For her, a recognition of language's finitude serves to highlight not just language's limitations, but also the limits of the reader (ibid., 106). As McCredden says, "as language animals, and particularly as writers and readers of poetic language, we have our own finitude revealed to us, at the same time as we continue to reach for meaning, again and again, through the ephemeral structures and forms of language" (ibid.). In her reading of "Kangaroo Crossing" by Samuel Wagan Watson, this is not something she examines further. Nevertheless, the implication for non-Indigenous readers of Watson's work is that they are made aware of the limiting structures of their own thinking, in relation to the Indigenous perspective.

In her musings on the nature of language, McCredden does not look to Romanticism. However, both the hope that language holds in its ability to point beyond itself, and the acknowledgement of its limits, are central to early German Romanticism. This is the middle road between the hope of Meister Eckhart's Christian mysticism and Derrida's assertion that there is nothing outside the text (Derrida 1978). The reflection on the finitude of the subject in Romantic irony is concerned with language's simultaneous ability to gesture towards that which is beyond itself, and the limits that language itself places on the thinking subject's ability to reach that which lies beyond its own language-based thought structures. This is a train of thought which, on the surface, appears to have nothing to do with the difficulties involved in bridging the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Nevertheless, Romantic irony offers a useful heuristic for understanding what is at stake in the way in which Watson's work simultaneously makes the non-Indigenous reader aware of the limits to their understanding of the sacred, the modern, and place, whilst at the same time again and again expressing hope through a frail but urgent call to dialogue.

In her analysis, it is not the aspect of the reader's finitude which concerns McCredden, so much as what she terms "the poetic construction of silence" in the piece (Lyn McCredden 2015, 103). McCredden identifies two key spaces in this regard, which "Kangaroo Crossing" (Smoke 88) plays with. These are the space beyond language to which the poem gestures, and a space which is created by the combination of two modes of writing: the realistic and the hyperreal (ibid., 104). The hyperreal in Watson's poetry is most obviously expressed in his use of dreaming tropes. In "Kangaroo Crossing", "dreaming is figured as a sudden, wordless, non-human stroke of power, in the materiality of a kangaroo and a particular stretch of road" (ibid.). The materiality of these expressions of dreaming is central, as it is able to do what language cannot. It brings together all time levels, "from split seconds / to eternity" (lines 16–17), in one moment of experiencing dreaming in its complex combination of the spiritual and material structures. This is something which language is unable to facilitate completely. In the specificity of the setting, "this stretch of road … *this stretch*" (line 9, emphasis in original) echoes the ontologically grounded, proximate sacred discussed previously.

I know this stretch in my blood

this is where the *Megaleia rufa* song cries louder than any car stereo

the dreaming that suddenly crawls onto the road and takes it out of the living – the ones who fantasied constantly on their own immortality behind the wheel

but this stretch of road … *this stretch* is where the extroverted angels turn their heads as the flash that is stronger than steel

launches onto the highway and brings those of the present forward to their own judgement day

refraction of light from split seconds to eternity (lines 1–17)

The sacred here is grounded, but not just in the material proximity of "this stretch" (line 1) of road and the kangaroo. It is in the knowledge of place which is embodied in the blood of the speaker and the song of the *Megaleia rufa*. 4 The poem contrasts this dreaming, this way of knowing, with the road itself and with the steel of the car. However, these modern fantasies of immortality "behind of the wheel" (lines 7–8) are proven to be weaker than the sheer violent power of the kangaroo. As this "flash that is stronger than steel / launches onto the highway" (lines 11–12), its very materiality disrupts the European traditions of time and the sacred in one moment, as past, present, future, eternity, "extroverted angels", and even "judgement day" condense into one moment of silent experience, on this stretch of road where "the *Megaleia rufa* song / cries louder than any car stereo" (Smoke 88, lines 12–14, 2–3, emphasis in original).

The combination of law, lore, and the proximate material connection of place in dreaming, serves as a deeply powerful foil in Watson's poetry, against which modern Australian life with its search for the sacred in the proximate, material things, and desperate reaching for a sense of place, is measured and unrelentingly brought into the political sphere. As the structures of social interaction and belonging are part of the sacred in Aboriginal dreaming, so too is the sacred a social and political imperative in Watson's poetry. Modern urban Australia is not a world apart, but one that must necessarily, however problematically, become part of a new dreaming.

### **The Abstract Transcendent**

#### **"Raindrops Fall in Vain"; "A Dead Man's Mouth Harp"**

In Watson's poetry, there is a subtle reaching for the transcendent just beyond the page, which is never made explicit. The poem that most closely approaches this is "**Raindrops Fall in Vain**" (Smoke 10). This piece addresses a reaching for the transcendent, with all the tensions involved in this process. One of these points of tension is between ending and continuation.

> raindrops fall in vain and abuse

the kindness of my soul I hear them landing outside, an audience to a short-lived affair continuum of vertigo, a song (lines 1–6)

The rain, which dances the dance of the absolute, is both a "short-lived affair" and a "continuum" (lines 5–6). The "continuum" (line 6) is associated with a European image of the transcendent as upwards, a "vertigo" (line 6) of endless upward movement, and a Romantic association of the infinite with music (cf. Dahlhaus 1981, 79–91). The transcendent is found at the moment the raindrops fall to the ground: it occurs at the point when the rain meets its end, rather than in the continuum of its upward movement. The rain's final fall is a paradoxical one, an opening and sharing which occurs in a state of isolation and separation as the rain drops "fall / in the open / and share their end" (lines 12–15).

The final line of the piece accentuates this separation, consisting of only one word: "alone". Rather than this final word closing the piece, it is left open by an odd failing of grammar in line six of the final grouping of lines. The line "remedy to dry spirits / that one can envy such courage to fall / in the open" (lines 11–13) leaves three possible reading open, due to Watson's free approach to punctuation. In each reading there is an unfinished thought which begs for a sense of completion that the poem does not provide. A casual reading such as "… remedy to dry spirits [so] that one can envy" is missing the necessary syntactical preparation. Alternatively, the sentence could refer to a person or thing: "that [person or thing] can envy such courage" – which, however, begs the question of who or what is being referred to. Finally, the least likely reading is that the thought of what the spirits do is broken-off in the middle of the line and left unfinished, "dry spirits that[…]", before the sentence picks up again with a different train of thought. Considering that the rest of the poem provides commas, the confusion here can be assumed to be deliberate. It indicates the possibility of a space in which the spirits reside, and which cannot be entirely expressed in language.

 This is despite the trappings of inspiration it carries, which occur in other poems in the collection; as well as those of the Romantic poetic tradition, such as the muse ("a maiden", line 9), the night, music (line 19), and the upward movement towards and beyond the heavens "beyond the ebony cover of sky" (line 16). These motifs are qualified by the presence of strong negatives, or are mutated slightly in the piece, such as in "chilled evil" (line 13), "unwelcome" (line 4), or "hollow" (line 10); and not least, "a maiden" (line 9), which, as a description of female virginity, is an unfruitful version of the lover-muse motif in Watson's work.

A closer look at these negative qualifiers reveals two types: the opposite of the transcendent ("hollow", "over and over", "monotone", "tired", "lonely"), and that which transgresses ("witching hour", "levels the grass and foliage", "crystal spear", "strays", "damned"). The key is in the setting of the first stanza, where the dead man's song is an "unwelcome companion" (line 4) while the speaker is walking "along a bitumen shoulder" (line 1). This "whistle like a crystal spear" (lines 6–7) exceeds the borders of modern Australia's bitumen reality. It reminds the speaker and reader of the songs this bitumen has paved over: not living songlines, but the song of a dead man. It casts a darkly sardonic light on the possibility of the sacred or the transcendent, in a place which is haunted by the dead of the place it once was.

# **A New Way Forward**

## **"Poetry on the Green Bridge"; "Stealing Kisses"; "Let's Talk"**

*"After all this talk and reading my answers were still false, disgusting to me. I wavered politically. First to one edge – this is our country, not yours in your historical murders and current shame – and then to another – we all share country. We all must live here, Aboriginal and Other alike, and the only question is how to do that honourably [*…*]. For all that I walked, slept, breathed and dreamed Country, the language still would not come. My trust in words had finally come to this: Nothing. I began to think I might have to deliver mere rhetoric to you, rather than something that might sustain us both. But if the Aboriginal people of Northwest Australia are correct in their cosmology, then surely Nothing is Nothing" –* Lucashenko 2006, 9–10

Watson offers an alternative to the elegy found in Indigenous poetry of the first generation, although he does pay homage to the tradition in "A Dead Man's Mouth Harp". He uses writing to instead call for an active relationship between the textual practice of the poem, the reader, and the lived landscape of urban Brisbane. Expressed in the terms of the theoretical lens proposed in this book, the relationship to writing and place Watson proposes forms the application when a model of Romantic irony is used as a reading lens. Watson's call can be most clearly heard in his collection of two short pieces, "On the Transom of Ghosts" and "Dreaming River Triptych", under the title "POETRY ON THE GREEN BRIDGE" (Love 33). In "On the Transom of Ghosts", it is unclear if the subtitle "An interactive poem for the commuter" is a serious request for active participation on the part of the reader, or if it serves the same purpose as the use of italics throughout the piece: specifically, to heighten the effect of direct speech and to lend the poem an air of oral communication. In either case, it calls on the reader directly to create a presence experience while reading. The act of reading then becomes an attempt to bridge the distance between word and experience that is inherent in European poetry's concept of language.

> (*An interactive poem for the commuter*) *On this transom, the river's dawning skin* … stand here … *give your breath to the fleeting mist* … stand here … *in the crimson shadow of Coot-tha's*<sup>1</sup> *dusk* … stand here … *and whisper upon night's canvas, whirlpool eyes, the songlines of Kurilpa*<sup>2</sup> *ghosts*…

The poem posits that the material and conscious experience of place can overcome the deafness of the city as described in pieces such as "Crust" (Smoke 43) or "Deafening Cold" (Love 61). It does this by denying fictionality in favour of a socially constructed, presence-based understanding of storytelling and, by extension, poetic experience.

The piece's use of italics and normal type plays with the changing dynamics of movement and stillness represented in the poem by the commuters on the one hand, and on the other, the call to stand still and listen "here" in the piece. The main body of the poem is written in italics, which not only lends it a spoken quality, but also reflects the movement and connection expressed in those italicised lines. On the surface, "transom" in the piece appears to be the "Green Bridge" of the title. Yet the placement of this "transom" on the river implies the nautical meaning of the word,3 which draws the reader from the simple commuter's bridge outward into the moving water. The section title "On the Transom of Ghosts" transforms the "transom" from a place on a boat, to a reference to the ghosts which make this space an Indigenous place. The first line of the piece situates the reader aboard this "transom", which is a stationary place on a moving river.

A river is a moving thing, yet here it is transformed into a body with "dawning skin" (line 1). The second line likewise encompasses body, movement, the landscape, and the concept of sharing, in the line "*give your breath to the fleeting mist*" (line 3, italics in original). The italicised middle lines are framed by conspicuously static non-italicised formatting, which grounds the reader in space with great authority. These sections invite the reader to pay attention to the movement and the exchange which creates the place underfoot. The words "stand" and "here" at the beginning and end of each line are separate in this poem, but syntactically they belong together as a single command. Their separation into one word of action (stand) and one word of place (here) creates a momentary stumbling block which slows the tempo and draws attention to the interrelatedness of these two elements. Standing "here" in this context means understanding the places and the ghosts on which you stand; otherwise you are simply standing, and there is no "here".

The ellipses between the descriptions of place in italics and the call to stand reflect the separation between the two. This is the gap which the process of standing and listening attempts to bridge. The final sentence of the poem starts with the stationary word "here …"; however, it breaks out of the pattern by allowing this line to run-on into the next, rather than forming a closed frame. In these lines, the reader becomes more than an observer. He is invited to join a dialogue which is based on speech (a "whisper"), but which nevertheless seeks a different language. This language is an embodied language; embodied in a land which carries ghosts and songlines deep within itself. This poem stands as a testament to the hope the poet carries for hybrid places, created through a shared understanding of their deep history as places without "illusion-isms" and "delusion-ism" (Monster's 3 "Enemy of the State", lines 22–23).

The two poems which fall under the title "POETRY ON THE GREEN BRIDGE" (Love 33) do not do so elegantly. The assemblage of words on the page consists of one title, two seemingly unrelated titles under that, and finally, one subtitle which is both in brackets and italics. However, when read as a set, it becomes clear that the first piece describes the conditions under which the second can be read as more than simple sarcasm. The second piece, "Dreaming River Triptych", presents Watson's city as a single image. The river is at the centre, and it is the river which holds power over its surroundings.

> Never the same this river-archaic vein, snaking through the land's dreaming cortexsubmerging provinces; the past, present and future – an aquarelle triptych cultured on every tide… (lines 1–4)

This body of water, like the land, is described in Aboriginal terms. The river's movement is that of a snake, and the land has a "dreaming cortex" (line 2), whilst the river of the title also dreams. The city along the banks of the river condenses all time, as the "past, present, and future", into a multidimensional space "on every tide" (lines 3–4). This is not one place layered onto another: all three are equally caught up in the movement of the river, which is itself "never the same" (line 1). The use of the word "triptych" (often referring to the three painted or carved panels of an altar) underscores the connection between these "provinces" (line 3), perhaps even classifies them as part of something sacred.

The word "cultured" to describe the "provinces" along the river carries an air of sarcasm. People become "cultured" in a process of exchanging their original culture for one more influenced by European manners and education. This carries with it a dark set of historical connotations in an Indigenous Australian context. However, the first poem, "On the Transom of Ghosts", invites the reader to offer his own breath, a sacred symbol of life, to the experience of this river and all the many places it encompasses. It invites a kind of movement of the soul which has the potential to mitigate any sarcasm in the final line of "Dreaming River Triptych", and to reveal the underlying desire.

If these poems can be read in contradictory ways, it is because there is both mistrust and anger in Watson's work, as well as hope and desire. The poems "Stealing Kisses" (Love 59) and "Let's Talk" (Love 36–37) represent each of these contrasting instincts. "Stealing Kisses" (Love 59) likens writing to a trick, an act of burglary in which the poet has to steal into the mind of the reader without setting off alarm bells. Language, for the poet, enables an act of deception. "Stealing Kisses" is a light-hearted reminder of other deceptions, such as those in the state archives which the poet speaks of in "In the Light of Two Fires" (Love 6). These deceptions include "itemised accounts of [the poet's] kin's value / in pounds and Shillings" (Love 6, lines 14–15), and the juxtaposition of the death-by-stabbing of a young Murri man with the judge's quotation of Kipling in the courtroom in "The Book, the jungle, the judgement" (Love 100–101). Romanticism, at least Kipling's Romanticism, does indeed ring "hollow" here. However, the poet refuses to give up on poetry and the endless process of sharing experience and asserting the limits of the knowledge it is possible to have of the Other.

Watson's poems are startlingly and deeply powerful; yet they are also inherently opaque. His poetic landscape contains forms and ways of knowing to which the non-Indigenous reader has to assume a certain degree of cultural blindness. On the other hand, the author's biting critique of modern Australia's interactions with Indigenous Australians and Indigenous place could not be clearer. The irony of the fact that in order to be heard, this very critique had to be written in English, and published for what is still very much an Anglo-Australian dominated literary culture, is an undercurrent running throughout Watson's oeuvre.

This is part of the two primary concerns examined in this book: Watson's critique of language, and the dual-reality structure of the mythical versus the mundane rationality of (post)colonial Australian culture. These realities are the primary source of tension in Watson's poems. Tracing this structure highlights how it is used to subvert the writing of urban and suburban place as white, modern, and rational. It is also clear that Watson's critique of language is to be read in the context of the continued situation in which Indigenous authors are caught up in English-language publishing and educational structures. This poses limitations on the ability of the poet's language to truly encapsulate his lived experience, and to facilitate an equal dialogue with the potentially white reader.

The reflection on language's finitude in the poems examined above contains at once an epistemological stance towards language per say, a long-established critical approach to the role of English in postcolonial literature, and most importantly, it highlights the limitations experienced by the reader faced with Watson's - and perhaps other Aboriginal - writing. His poetry self-reflectively performs the limits of interlocution even as it asserts the possibility of it. Watson celebrates language's ability to gesture beyond itself, towards the unspeakable and in doing so, bring that which cannot be articulated to the page. The constant movement between assertion and negation could be viewed as simply ambivalent. However, I have argued that it is more than this because of the value placed on this endless backwards and forwards as both irresolvable and productive. This dialectic has been brought into sharper focus in these readings by a recognition of its similarly to Romantic irony. How the two might be brought together from a theoretical perspective was explored in the chapter "Model Theory: How Romanticism Continues and Adapts". The primary purpose of these readings, however, has been to show that the ambivalence expressed here is itself productive. For all the beautiful words, Watson's poetry ultimately strips away the delusions of the reconciliation narrative and offers a humbler hope for Australia as a hybrid place of deep history.

#### **Opening Up a Dialogue**

In her analysis of Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology speech, Liliana Zavaglia argues that the orientation towards the future in the speech "exposes the 'face uplift' of the redemption narrative, that harmonisation by which whiteness is afforded an exit from the ongoing demands of historical justice claims" (Zavaglia 2016, 209). Watson's poems critique the redemption narrative of reconciliation. Instead, they offer a more complex view which shows the history and concerns of black and white Australia to be deeply enmeshed. These poems reveal this in the almost violent juxtapositions of historical, present, global, regional, personal, profane, and sacred into a single presence effect experienced on the streets of (sub)urban Brisbane.

Although Watson's Indigenous heritage is foregrounded in his work, this is not the only level at which these poems function. There is something in these poems which is recognisable and which connects, even to the cultural outsider. While writing from the specific experience of being an Indigenous poet, Watson's work simultaneously engages with the nature of language itself and the relationship between the mundane and the sacred. It is this aspect which bears a level of similarity to the questions early Romanticism attempted to address. Not least among these is the question of how we might have knowledge of the self and of the transcendent, when the period which Watson would later call "western rationality" (Smoke 50) was emerging as heir apparent to the soul of the modern West and its subsequent colonial expansion. The ironic reflection on the limits of language (and poetry) itself is a structure recognisable from Romantic irony. However, Indigenous Australian culture is such a central element in Watson's poetry that to interpret his entire oeuvre as presenting a model of Romantic irony would run the risk of subsuming Watson's voice into the tradition of European transcendental philosophy.

His poetry represents two equal realities and the tension between them: between that of modern rationalism and one portrayed using Indigenous words and figures. Rather than keeping these two realms separate, Watson enmeshes the two. The result is a move away from an antagonistic relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous renderings of place, towards a writing of the city in which the sacred is a natural part of urban and industrial Australia. This denies a binary structure in which the Indigenous elements are tasked with carrying the entire burden of the sacred vs. 'white' Australia representing the rational and modern. Language is also a key concern in Watson's writing, both from a postcolonial and a more general artistic perspective. Even as language gestures towards the possibility of creating understanding between people, or even a proximate experience of the sacred in (sub)urban Australia, it is trapped by its own mediality. There is a negative dialectic at play in Watson's writing which I have interpreted through the lens of Romantic irony. Within this structure, Watson's recognition of the limits of language highlights the limits of interlocution with the reader.

The reflection on the finitude of the subject in Romantic irony represents language's ability to gesture towards that which lies beyond itself, and at the same time, the impossibility of reaching this point. Although this might at first appear an abstract issue at best, Romantic irony nevertheless offers a useful heuristic for understanding what is at stake in the way in which Watson's work simultaneously makes the (likely non-Indigenous) reader aware of the limits to their understanding of Indigenous space and reality, whilst simultaneously calling for dialogue and approach. In the face of a lack of first-hand understanding of Indigenous experience and knowledge, Romantic irony offers an interpretive lens which has been able to reveal the tensions at play in Watson's poems, and which provides a clearer view of the approach the poet takes in his refusal to offer resolution.

Watson's poems reveal two ways of knowing, which are compacted into one space and shown to be deeply intertwined, yet unreconciled. The poems reflect on the limits of language in reconciling the two. However, this is more than a simple "us versus them" call for justice, even as his poems make the reader abundantly aware of many injustices. Watson offers hope by calling for a constantly active dialogue and reaching for understanding. His poetry is a disconcerting reminder that reconciliation, in the sense of bringing a final resolution, is not possible. Rather, Watson's poetry appears to utilise these tensions and limitations to find a powerful way to keep talking, from within the dual inheritances of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

In one of the most energy-charged pieces of the collection *Love Poems and Death Threats*, "Let's Talk", Watson places the past and present, pointless and painful words, against the power of speech. These "voices long-worn on the only certainty that Dreaming-wings are clay pigeons for nothing other / than brutal hunger" (lines 14–15) are called once more to speech:

> But, *Let's talk about drafting a treaty* … *let's talk! Let's talk a genocidal monster to sleep; senseless unto its own demise in peaceful dreams* … *let's talk!*

*Let's talk reconciliation until we're all too exhausted and the only imperative to take a stand together is to hold each other up and find the comfort of embracement* … *let's talk!*

*Let's talk evil into sensual goodness; speak over the red-taped triggers that wait silent and deadly, so they will aim only into the crosshair of an eternal ceasefire* … *let's talk!*

We cannot fight every evil, but as long as a dialogue and ever a daily diatribe exists on the destructive principle of evils, *let's just talk!*

Let's talk, until Evil bows to listen, and the fires burning from voices, that are long-worn, can settle into the beautiful warmth of embers.

And even then when we're done, let's never stop talking…. (Love 37, lines 23–39)

Here is the only answer the poet can give to the question of language, power, and deception which flows through his work: an embrace of flux, and the imperfect embrace of the Other.

# **V. Synthesis: The Actualisation of Romanticism in Contemporary Australian Poetry**

"There was the vast town of Sydney. And it didn't seem to be real, it seemed to be sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never penetrated" *– "The Kangaroo", D. H. Lawrence*

According to previous scholarship, Romanticism never quite arrived in Australia. We1 missed the boat on Romanticism because we were still on the boat to Botany Bay, as it were, and did not like what we saw very much when we did arrive. The view of Romanticism in Australian literary criticism is still very much tied to a way of thinking which determines the conceptual horizon of art on the basis of temporal and geographical proximity. This does not explain why, or how, Romanticism has come to be a perennial part of Australian poetry. Nor does it explain why the term can be used with such ease in scholarship on the work of David Malouf, yet not in relation to the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson.

Contemporary Australian literature accesses and adapts ideas well outside the aesthetic and epochal schemas of the European or North American canon. This is the double-edged sword of Australian culture in general. Late colonisation, harsh local conditions, and long-lasting cultural dependency on Britain have meant that Australian literature developed relatively late, in comparison to the history of many other literatures. This places it in the enviable position of having a wealth of cultural resources from vastly different times and places to draw on simultaneously. However, it also poses the challenge of working without an organic historical cultural participation in the discourses around historical literary movements. These challenges are exacerbated in an Indigenous-Australian literary context, in which the availability of these cultural resources is deeply entwined with an ongoing history of systematic violence and oppression on the one hand, and the use of English-language writing as a means of resistance, selfexpression, and cultural exchange on the other.

An overview of past debates on the presence of Romanticism in Australian literature reveals a desire to compensate for a lack of local literary history. The addition of prefixes to the term (post-Romantic etc.) can be viewed as an attempt to establish some kind of genealogy of ideas rooted in *cultural continuity*. Apart from the fact that this adds very little to the essential qualities at play, it also – however unconsciously – implies an organic connection between race, environment, and artistic vocabulary which is worth questioning.

This is perhaps why I have found approaching the work of David Malouf and Samuel Wagan Watson through the lens of Romantic irony unsettling to a far greater extent than I had at first anticipated. The reception of Malouf 's work asserts the presence of Romanticism in his writing as being self-evident, whereas this is not the case for the reception of Watson's poetry. Pairing the two has highlighted just how different the expected frames for reading these two authors are. Both poets probe the possibilities and limitations of language and poetry in transcending the individual's cognitive horizon to connect with the Other. Yet there is an unspoken ease with which Malouf 's work can be approached from this perspective, whereas using the same lens on Watson's poetry requires a good deal of thought in relation to his status as an Indigenous-Australian author. The line between respecting the cultural differences Watson writes about, and falling into the trap of inadvertently policing the boundaries of how he is to be read, is a thin one.

It has been my hope that approaching Malouf and Watson through the same theoretical lens can reveal nuances in both authors' writing which might otherwise have been obscured by the implied norms for framing their work. Despite their differences, Watson and Malouf are connected by their negotiation of the Australian condition through a productive negative dialectic; one which is first found in the philosophical and literary concept of Romantic irony. In this book, the concept was approached as both a world-interpreting model and a mode of representation in Malouf 's work. In my exposition of Watson's poetry, it became an interpretive lens through which I read his poetry. In each case, the aim has not been to prove each author a 'Romantic' nor to provide yet another definition of Romanticism itself. Instead, this book has attempted to rethink Romanticism as a source of different models and to show that they might be productively applied to the challenges facing the subject in contemporary Australia.

Model theory offers a way of engaging with the presence of Romanticism in Australian literature without the need to establish geographical, temporal, and aesthetic continuity from eighteenth or nineteenth-century Europe to Australia, particularly in relation to an individual author's cultural background. Models reduce a complex original, such as Romanticism, to a specific core idea according to its usefulness for the application of the model. This shifts the focus away from aesthetic markers and historical narratives, towards a purpose-oriented understanding of Romanticism. The focus in this book has been on Romantic irony. Over the course of writing it, I have come to the conclusion that Romantic irony is a particularly useful model for poetry in a contemporary Australian context, because it does not suggest a false road out of an impossible situation.

The philosophy of early Romanticism shows attempts to address the very real pressures of social change at the end of the eighteenth century (cf. Matuschek and Kerschbaumer 2015, 142; C. Bode 2010, 90–92). The philosophy of natural law which developed during the Romantic period drastically changed the concept of the self from that used in the mid-seventeenth century. Rather than being a part of, and dependent on, a natural whole (communal, cosmic, religious), the individual emerged as an independent being with an identity apart from the communal. In her study on the Romantic political and the social contract, Zoe Beenstock writes that by the time of the Enlightenment, and Thomas Hobbes's exploration of the idea that the individual's social identity is a matter of nurture rather than nature, the "former assumption that the social collective takes priority over individuals had broken down" (Beenstock 2016, 1). It is easy to overlook the almost terrifying aspect of this freedom (so aptly portrayed in Dostoyevsky's *The Grand Inquisitor*). Rather than scrabbling for a new, definitive meaning-making structure for the individual, early Romanticism calls for an embrace of this freedom, of an endless dialectic of becoming: no solution, just the puzzle.

The early Romantics offer a highly philosophical programme, one which deals with the relationship between the material and the metaphysical, the mundane and the transcendent, the finite and the infinite. This programme was developed to address not only these pressing questions of high philosophy, but also very real questions of how the subject may think of itself in the now industrialised world, in nature, and outside religion. The process became a heuristic for thinking about the subject as bereaved of an ordered place in the world and in the cosmos. It is exactly this process which the formerly colonial, and now the contemporary, subject in Australia undergoes.

In an Australian context, nature stands at the heart of this lack of order. As previously noted, the nature with which European settlers were confronted in Australia was not the Nature with an upper-case "N" of European Romanticism. For the European settlers, the Australian continent was not yet landscape. With transportation (willing or unwilling) to Australia, colonial subjects fell out of not only the explicit social order of their home communities, but also the unspoken religious and cultural traditions of nature, and even the most basic culturalspatial orientation (the rising of the sun in the east, for instance). The supposed emptiness of the land made way for the processes of making sense – literally making or creating meaning – of this land, on colonial terms of possession, transformation, and the repression of its first custodians. However, it also had the side effect of creating meanings between settlers and land from scratch, creating a sense of how the subject fits into the world using only an upside-down compass, in a process that continues to this day.

Gerard Stilz notes that the so-called European "cultural frontier" has developed dynamically, and independently of the general understanding of Australian space outlined above. The interaction between the two becomes even more complex under the aspect that the "gradual shift of the European 'cultural frontier' [...] is not necessarily identical with the frontier of rural or urban settlement" (Stilz 2007, 31). This is a point which becomes all the more important when examining the work of authors such as David Malouf or Samuel Wagan Watson, which is grounded in the cultural centres of the coast. The treatment of urban and suburban spaces in literature is dependent on these cultural frontiers, which are the "mental borderlines drawn by individuals or groups in order to separate those physical spaces which are felt to be exotic, different, fearful or strangely fascinating, from spaces which have become familiar, homely and accepted as common part of everyday life" (ibid.). In other words, the frontier in Australia has less to do with an American concept of the frontier of settlement versus wilderness, than with shifting imagined cultural frontiers which move independently of the real frontiers of settlements.2 Attempting to read Watson's work through a Romantic lens has shown that these cultural frontiers are drawn differently even in the same city.

The debate around Romanticism in Australia has primarily focused on settlers' relationships to nature, rather than on centres of cultural production. This phenomenon reflects a view of Romanticism as synonymous with a particular understanding of nature in the new world in general. This was the idea that "nature" or the "wild" are spaces for the "creation of a supposedly deeper, truer or more authentic identity, whether understood in spiritual, political or often nationalist terms" (T. Clark 2011, 25). The opening chapter of this book has already traced the arguments which propose that the inability of nature to fulfil this role throughout the nineteenth, and into the twentieth century, was the cause of Australia's lack of an endemic Romantic movement. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Australia started down the path of Britain's rebellious sons across the Atlantic, and began to purge itself of all that was European and impure: dollars for pounds, gums for willows, and *Possum Magic* for *Peter Rabbit.*<sup>3</sup> I have used model theory in my analysis as a way of separating Romanticism as a European cultural good from this genealogical structure which always ties Australian literature's use of Romantic elements to colonial era Britain. The conceptual framework which model theory provides made it possible to re-think the interaction of historical European Romanticism and contemporary Australian literature along the lines of usefulness rather than genealogy.

The Australian subject is impossibly in-between and always will be. In-betweenness is the scar tissue of the violence upon which the existence of Australia as a nation is predicated, just as it is a reminder of the unlikeliness of the second chance that Australia became to so many people. There have been recent calls for the humanities to once again take on the task of creating a new progressive national narrative.4 It would be hard not to agree that a serious conversation about values is long overdue in Australian society, or that the humanities need to step up to the conversation. More than ever, though, the questions we need to address are not those of nationhood, but of what it means to be human in specific environmental and social contexts: that is, what it means to be a human of the reef, or of the city, or of the mines.

Reading Watson's work alongside that of Malouf, the role of poetry in writing the subject into place came under a problematic light. The desire to "come into full procession of a place" (Malouf 1998) revolves around creating a sense of ownership of place through creative processes. It celebrates the things which we make, even as it reflects on their finitude. Malouf 's poems express the predicament of the European-Australian relationship with absolute authenticity. His work is empowering in its reflection on the impossibility of ever writing ourselves into place. It represents a letting go of this pressure to reach a point of perfect synthesis. Instead, something smaller is celebrated: the humbling process of reaching for the transcendent while becoming aware of our own limitations. However, these creative processes are conceived of somewhere between the sacred-mundane and metaphysical musings. Malouf 's poems probe the limits to what we can know of the Other, from a position where that Other is largely silent.

The readings undertaken here trace patterns and developments within each author's poetry. Watson's writing shows a development away from the writing back paradigm of the first generation of Indigenous poets towards a structure of productive negativity. In the case of Malouf, overcoming the self/Other divide in order to write the subject into place, is shown to be a central aspect of his writing which is negotiated through a pattern of strategies tied to setting in his work. The result of these readings is a much more ambivalent attitude towards the power of the imagination in Malouf 's writing than has previously been argued for by scholars.

Place plays a central role in Malouf 's poetry. The desired, yet unattainable absolute takes on the form of a desire for placedness. More than postmodern geography, in Malouf 's poetry, placedness is configured specifically as transcendent and sacred. Romantic irony is able to account for the quotidian Australian sacred as part of this dynamic in a way that other paradigms are not. Malouf 's poetry is not Romantic because it celebrates the imagination. Its Romanticism lies in the value attributed to place-making as a transcendental and sacred process in his writing.

Language is posed as both a method of approaching a unified sense of place, and as limiting the subject's ability to experience the same. Schlegelian irony turns this backwards and forwards into a productive force. Malouf 's ocean poems challenge categories such as the human and the animal, nation and borders. By pointing to the fundamentally deceptive nature of such categories, the poet calls into question the hierarchies implicit in the desire to possess the land and the animal Other, thus revealing the deceptive nature of place-making in postcolonial Australia.

Unlike the ocean in Malouf 's poetry, (sub)urban space is written and re-written in a process of culture. As such, it is always provisional. Gardens, on the other hand, reflect an understanding of earth as language itself. Malouf merges the quotidian sacred with the concept of the living word to explore the possibility of accessing this language through the body. The body, with its ability to eat functions as a medium between the material and the infinite. Malouf 's ideas about communion reflect how the corporeal can be a conduit for the sacred: the transcendent in the immanent. Thus, the different settings in Malouf 's poetic oeuvre become testing grounds for different ways for trying to find this connection between the self and the other, and the experience of something which transcends language. In each case, language fails to write the subject into place, but in its very failure, it is able to signify the possibility of a unified sense of place for the subject negatively

Placing Watson's poetry in the same frame of reference as that of Malouf has heightened my awareness of the way that his attempts to imagine the subject into place resonates with my own experience: one which is passively predicated on the silence of Indigenous inscriptions of the land. Watson's poetry unmakes this way of experiencing place, starting at the tarmac line of (sub)urban Australia. His poetry is deeply unsettling, because it does not confront the reader with an image of place which is so different, and so uncanny, that it can be read as though Aboriginal Australia somehow existed in another dimension. Instead, he presents the reader with the self-same world familiar to anyone walking the streets of Brisbane. Watson's work is too deeply entwined with the complex realities of being a poet with Munanjali, Birri Gubba, German, Dutch, and Irish heritage to offer a single coherent model of Romantic irony. Yet it also speaks of irresolvable disjuncts, and the limitations and possibilities of language to overcome these. Ultimately, this poetry finds the only possible solution in a constant process of reaching towards something akin to reconciliation. This is not reconciliation as a sop for an imagined national soul; it is the gritty and hard process of creating a treaty.

The challenge and joy of Watson's poems lies in the way they offer points of connection to all readers, yet reveal the limits of language itself. Watson writes in a way that connects with the reader on a universal level while he simultaneously tells his own story. This opens up possibilities for dialogue in an impossible situation, rather than immediately confronting the reader with impenetrable alterity. Watson merges the injustices of the past with the present and reflects on the role which writing has played throughout this history. Irony in Watson's poetry is conceptualised here as a reaction to social pressures in which the relationships between subject/language and subject/world are fundamentally political. Irony's endless motion reveals political structures to be subject to dialectical change, thus challenging the status quo. Watson's work places the invisible norms of urban Australia under scrutiny. He does not do this by simply increasing the agency and visibility of Indigenous voices and culture in his poems. Instead, he maintains multiple positions, leaving the reality status of the material or fantastic, profane or sacred, Indigenous or 'white' Australia open and unresolved.

In his characterisation of modern urban Australia, Watson plays with common signifiers of what at first appear to be diametrically opposing poles of Indigeneity and modernity. Watson's ironic voice satirizes much that is modern Australia. However, the negative dialectic I identify at play in his writing is not divisive but works towards understanding and community. The destabilising effect produced by Watson's layering of the sacred and the mundane, the present and the historical, creates an ironic contingency in urban Australia, which contains the potential to create a new dialogue of the sacred between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australians.

Although Watson's Indigenous-cultural heritage is a central part of his poetry, he writes in a way which invites multiple framings and which makes his poetry accessible and deeply moving, even for expatriate European-Australian readers like myself. Reading Watson's work through the lens of Romantic irony highlights the tensions and dynamics in his writing of the city. His streets are palimpsestic, etched with multiple histories and systems of knowledge existing simultaneously in one place: intertwined, but ultimately unreconcilable. The dialectic movement of Romantic irony highlights the productive potential in the poet's refusal to resolve these tensions. Within Watson's voice of protest there is also a voice of hope. This hope lies in acknowledging the limitations to reconciliation in contemporary Australia and instead engaging in constant approach, dialogue, and negotiation.

Not every Australian poem contains a juicy Romantic centre. Using model theory in these cases has been a way to determine whether or not a model of Romanticism lies at the core of a work. Romanticism has turned out to be central to Malouf 's poetry, although in a very different way from that previously supposed. Romantic irony becomes an immensely moving force in his poetry through a simple shift away from achieving ultimate synthesis, towards a celebration of the process of reaching for it instead. This model reflects on the inability of poetry to achieve a true synthesis of subject and place. Instead, it offers an alternative, in which the process of trying and failing, and our awareness of these limits, holds the potential for re-examining our relationship to the absolute, and just maybe, to each other as well.

The irony in both Watson's and Malouf 's poetry is a concrete expression of an idea which lies at the core of Australian poetry: its penchant to question narratives which offer simple resolutions and happy endings. Irony makes the reader aware of the poem's position as something which sits between what can be known of the Other, what cannot, and what might be – provided we keep listening to the edges of silence around speech. This is not the voice of a proud nation striving forward or running from its past. It is the silence of an Australia quietly tending veggie patches in the underbelly of the Milky Way.

# **Notes**

### **Introduction**

"Love" for *Love Poems and Death Threats* (Watson 2014) and "Smoke" for *Smoke Encrypted Whispers* (Watson 2010). For Malouf, "RD" for *Revolving Days* (Malouf 2008), "P" for *Poems 1959–1989* (Malouf 1992), "EH" for *Earth Hour* (Malouf 2014), "BoP" for *Bicycle and Other Poems* (Malouf 1970), "NT" for *Neighbours in a Thicket* (Malouf 1980), "TM" for *Typewriter Music* (Malouf 2007), and AOB for *An Open Book* (Malouf 2019) all of which are commonly used.

### **A bad Romance? Rehabilitating Romanticism in Australia**

particularly in areas like Tasmania, which bore the brunt of the colony's penal system, Australia was home to two deliberately constructed narratives simultaneously: the vision of hell on earth and the penal threat; and the lure of a new Eden for classed settlement (See Haynes 2006, 31–56).

### **New Approaches to Romanticism: A Model of Romantic Irony**

### **Malouf: An Author in Context**

Australia was no-man's land at the time of colonisation, which had been formalised in Australian law since 1889. Because the Meriam people owned land as groups or individuals rather than communally, they were able to claim a continual ownership of the land prior to, and continuing throughout, colonisation to the present. The Queensland government's cases rested on the argument that when Australia became a dominion of the Crown, it fell under English Law and all its land fell to the Crown. The Queensland government enacted the *Queensland Coast Islands Declaratory Act 1985* in a bid to retroactively remove islanders' land claims, but it was overturned on the basis that it went against the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Eddie Mabo and the others eventually won the case in the Australian High Court in 1992. For the full details of the case, see: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/1992/23. html. While this was a watershed moment in Australia's legal history, the situation of native title in relation to the significant amount of land under pastoral leases remained unclear. In 1993, the Wik and Thayorre peoples took a case to court for ownership of land which was under pastoral lease. The court allowed them to continue with their claim on the basis that shared land usage might apply. As Liliana Zavaglia writes, "this was an unusual moment when true reconciliation might have been enacted in an arrangement of shared land use" (Zavaglia 2016, 9). Unsurprisingly, however, considering the powerful position traditionally held by pastoralists in Australia, the Howard Government amended the Native Title Act in 1997, effectively handing over title rights to the pastoralists in any event of conflicting native title rights (ibid., 10).

(2001); Jason Christopher Souter's *Writing Bodies Writing Spaces: The Writing of David Malouf* (1994); Yvette Blackwood's *A Fluid Reading of David Malouf's An Imaginary Life with Echoes of Contemporary Metaphoric Philosophy* (1994); and Jörg Heinke's *Die Konstruktion des Fremden in den Romanen von David Malouf* (2003). In addition to this, the essays: Natalie Seger, "Imagining Transcendence: The Poetry of David Malouf " in *Australian Literary Studies* 22:2 (2005); Martin Hugo Leer, "At the Edge: Geography and the Imagination in the Work of David Malouf " in *Australian Literary Studies* 12 (1985); and Patrick Buckridge, "Astonished by Everything: The Functions of Sublime Discourse in David Malouf 's Fiction" in Nettelbeck (1994) are worth mentioning, as is the JASAL edition on Malouf (2014: 2), which includes an article on Malouf as a poet by James Tulip (Tulip 2014).

7. It should be noted that negative capability itself has nothing to do with Romantic irony. Keats' famous phrase refers to the issue of living with uncertainty in the context of the question of truth versus beauty in art. Although it contains the term 'negative' it is not related to the Ordo Inversus figure in Novalis nor the negative dialectic of Schlegarian irony which are the basis of the model of Romantic irony as it is understood in this book.

### **A Poetics of Place**

instances of misplaced concreteness – i.e., they make the mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions like "nature" and "culture" for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be pre-existing foundations" (ibid.). These potent consequences include the human and the animal body in a way which goes far beyond acknowledging that nature is a cultural concept, or that there is no place untouched by human influence in the Anthropocene age.

### **Water**

to differentiate between forms of representation and, for want of a better term, philosophical standpoint.

### **Interiors**

## **(Sub)urban**

## **Of Earth and Clay**

### **Malouf 's Imaginary of Endless Becoming**

## **Framing the Indigenous Author**

tradition of Indigenous protest which was traced at the start of this chapter. Criticism which engages with Watson's work can be found in Lyn McCredden's work on the sacred in Australia (Lyn McCredden 2015), Bridie McCarthy's doctoral thesis which was supervised by McCredden (McCarthy 2006), and a smattering of essays. David McCooey briefly mentions Watson in his chapter for *The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry* (2017), defining him as a Murri poet and part of a second generation of poets following on from the protest school of Fogarty, Oodgeroo, and David (McCooey 2017, 77).

12. For a recent example, see https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/36 kinship-and-identity/genetic-testing-and-aboriginality

### **Two Realities, One City**

its tropes of trauma and haunting is changed, so that the ghosts are not the spirits of the dead, but repressed and closely experienced traumata (ibid., 186). Through the combination of Indigenous culture and the Gothic, the Aboriginal Gothic writes the Indigenous subject back into the landscape, and in doing so, completely undermines the "fiction of an Aboriginal absence which is behind many colonial Gothic stories and their postcolonial counterparts" (ibid., 17). As Althans notes, "every binary opposition inherent in the Gothic mode could be projected onto the opposition of white settler vs black native" in colonies such as Australia (ibid., 4).

creative interests and talents, and still be supported. The girl was provided for by her tribe, allowed to practise skills, even though they were unnecessary for physical survival. Also, as a rare token of esteem, she was permitted to dance in the mens' [sic] corroborees" ("Native Symbols", Retrieved 10.11.2017).

## **Language: Beyond the Embrace of a Twisted Tongue**

### **A New Way Forward**

### **V. Synthesis**

# **Bibliography**

*für seine Zuhörer (1795)*. Edited by Wilhelm G. Jacobs. Philosophische Bibliothek Band 224. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

Frost, Lionel. 1992. "Suburbia and Inner Cities". In Rutherford 1992, 190–97.

Sandra Kerschbaumer, and Stefan Matuschek, 141–56. Laboratorium Aufklärung Volume 28. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.

Ab Band 21 wird die Reihe im Peter Lang Verlag fortgesetzt.

#### MUSE: Munich Studies in English.

#### Münchener Schriften zur Englischen Philologie

Edited by / Herausgegeben von Christoph Bode and/und Ursula Lenker

Band 42 Sabrina Kessler: Kartographien von Identität und Alterität in englischen Reiseberichten über die Neue Welt. 1560-1630. 2016.

www.peterlang.com