It is a great pleasure to be here tonight with so many women
to celebrate International Women’s Day, and the publication of this excellent
new collection of poetry by Australian women. As you have heard, the call for women to submit poems
dealing with the theme of work produced a bumper response, and I congratulate
Libby and Rachael on all the work they have put into selecting and arranging the
poems. One of the joys of compiling, and reading, an anthology is finding the
way that different poems speak to each other, as I am sure you will all
discover as you read through the poems in Women’s
Work.
Almost since the beginnings of print culture in Australia in
1803 women have been writing and publishing poems though their work has often
taken a long time to be recognised. Back in the 1960s when researching my PhD I
discovered a poem published in a Sydney paper in 1838 by Eliza Dunlop, ‘The
Aboriginal Mother (from Myall’s Creek)’.
This was a scathing indictment of the white stockmen responsible for the
Myall Creek Massacre. Over the years the poem has been included in several
Australian anthologies and last week I had an email from an American professor
who is to include it in a new Norton anthology called Poetry of Witness. So Eliza Dunlop will now have an international
readership.
There are many other women poets from nineteenth-century
Australia whose work is still not as well known as it should be. During the 20th
century women achieved more recognition thanks to the work of Mary Gilmore,
Judith Wright, Oodgeroo, Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter, to
name only the most prominent. Today there are many wonderful women poets in
Australia – and sometimes they even outnumber men in contemporary anthologies!
Poems by 68 women are included in Women’s Work – some poets are represented by two poems, making 79
poems in all. As Libby and Rachael indicate, these poets come from a wide range
of cultural backgrounds and different life experiences. Some of them have been
writing for many years and their poems are to be found in all recent
anthologies of Australian poetry: Judith Beveridge, Joanne Burns, Sarah Day,
Susan Hampton, Rhyll McMaster, Gig Ryan. Most of the others have published one
or more collections, though for at least one woman this anthology includes
their first published poem. While most of the poets come from NSW and the ACT,
there are also quite a few from South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. Though
their poems come in very different styles and lengths – from a few lines to a
couple of pages – all are vivid and passionate in their depictions of women’s
work, both now and in the past.
Women’s work takes many forms, something naturally reflected
in the poems in the anthology. Some deal more generally with the plight of women
in different countries, as in Sue Clennell’s ‘ riddle’, a poem that is so
appropriate for International Women’s Day, that I felt I must read it to you
(p.10). There are however a number of other poems which celebrate giving birth
as well as one which looks at the pain of trying to have a child without
success. A perhaps surprising number of poems also celebrate different types of
housework: cooking, sewing, washing, ironing, cleaning. In ‘Playing golf on
Monday’, however, Hilarie Lindsay has some fun at the expense of the
patriarchal system which decreed that women should always dedicate Monday to
the weekly wash.
Many poems of course look at work outside the home. While
some deal with traditional women’s occupations such as nursing, teaching,
office and sex work, others give insights into a variety of other occupations,
ranging from bee keeping and bean picking through to chemistry and dentistry.
Others celebrate notable Australian women such as composer Miriam Hyde, artists
Nora Heysen and Ellis Rowan, round the world sailor Kay Cottee. And others
reflect on the work-filled lives of numerous anonymous women, whether in
Africa, India, China, Puerto Rico, or, as in Cynthia Rowe’s ‘Fifty Cents’,
Australia. As she notes ‘An estimated 300, 000 outworkers across Australian
toil under Third World conditions.’
The poems in Women’s
Work, then, bear witness to the governing principle of the lives of most
women, in the past and the present, the work that is always with us, whatever
form it may take. Thorough their efforts, the poets throw new light on the
world of our everyday housework as well as giving us insights into the worlds
of women very different to ourselves. I congratulate and thank all of them, as
well as Libby and Rachael for thinking of this project and carrying it through
to this highly attractive outcome.
And I urge you all to buy copies if you have not already done so.
Before introducing some of the poets who will read, I’d like
to read a poem by Vera Newsom, a much loved Sydney poet who died in 2006. Vera
was born in 1912 into an enlightened family who ensured that she went to
university. She worked as an English teacher and school principal, and raised a
family of five, so only began writing seriously after retirement. Her first
poems were published when she was nearly 70. I had the pleasure of launching
her first collection, Midnight Snow,
in 1988. Four other collections followed, and she won a number of grants and
prizes. So, as Vera’s example shows, it is never too late to start! Her poem is
entitled ‘Woman at Dusk’ (p.19)
Our first reader Tricia Dearborn has published two
collections of poetry so far, and her poems have appeared in many magazines and
anthologies. She has two poems in this anthology and will read the first,
‘memo’ (p. 7)
Next Kath Copley, from the South Coast of NSW, will read
from a sequence based on her travels to Africa, ‘waiting your turn’ (p.62)
Joanne Burns has been an acclaimed poet for many years, with
her first collection published in 1972. Her satirical prose poems focus on many
aspects of contemporary society, as in ‘banking on it’ (p.61)
Lesley Walter is a Sydney poet whose widely published poems
often deal with the joys and sorrows of motherhood, as in the title poem of her
collection ‘watermelon baby’, and the poem she will read, ‘Innocence and
forgiveness (p. 47).
Barbara Fisher is another who came to poetry fairly late in
life after working in many other fields. She has published two collections of
poems, often with a focus on women’s lives, as in the mouth-watering ‘Cakes’
(p.36)
Susan Hampton, who joins us from Canberra, was co-editor of
the first major anthology of Australian women’s poetry, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, published in 1986. She
is also a prize-winning poet and fiction writer. She will read an extract from
her long narrative poem, The Kindly Ones,
which I had the pleasure of launching in 2005. In it, the Three Fates of Greek
myth decide to come to the contemporary world for a holiday and end up in
Sydney, one of them working at a Virgin call centre. It’s on page 94.
Brenda Saunders is a Sydney poet many of whose poems reflect
her Indigenous ancestry. She has two poems in the anthology and is going to
read ‘Innargang’ (p.53), which is dedicated to her grandmother.
Sheryl Persson is a widely published Sydney poet who often
writes about works of art, as in her reflection here on paintings by Nora
Heysen, ‘A Conversion between Portraits’ (p. 92)
Finally, Esther Campion was born in Ireland but now lives in
South Australia. Her remarkable poem ‘Prison Transfer’ (p. 85) was inspired by
her current work as a teacher of literacy and numeracy at Port Lincoln Prison.
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