Charles Harpur by Judith Wright

 Charles Harpur by Judith Wright (Australian Writers and their Work)

Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1963

I love this little series of pamphlets - Australian Writers and their Work. Edited by Geoffrey Dutton, each title is a short 30-ish pages about an early Australian writer, written by another writer. Not only are they interesting in their own right, they are an illustration of a time when Australia was beginning to discover itself, and indeed study itself.

This series was a first step into the study of Australian literature as a literature separate to itself, rather than a stunted offshoot of English literature. Of course we have now (unfortunately) passed through that period, and we seem to no longer value the study of Australian literature as a separate subject: globalization doesn't only happen in the business world.

What I particularly like about these titles is that Dutton chose writers, rather than academics, to write each title (I suppose there may not have been academics qualified to write them at the time). The potential advantage of doing so is that no-one has a better insight into the art and craft of writing than a fellow writer. And so we have this small pamphlet about Charles Harpur, perhaps our first (white) poet, written by Judith Wright, one of Australia's great twentieth century poets.

The state of Australian literature in the early 1960s is evidenced by the fact that Wright had to journey to the Mitchell Library to consult the manuscript copies of Harpur's poems, as many of them were not extant in print. The major book of his poems, published in 1883 was heavily bowdlerised before publication and so Australian readers had little exposure to his work (thankfully this has since been rectified).

Wright, in the short space given her, expounds on Harpur's life: son of freed convicts, he worked mostly in labouring jobs and while he did have some contact with literary people, he was mostly resigned to living and writing by himself. She then goes on to give the reader a flavour of Harpur's verse: as a self-educated man with limited access to books in his youth (and quite possibly in his adulthood as well), he studied the verse he could access, writing essays about, and composing verses in the style, of several of the poets he'd studied such as Dryden, Chaucer, and others.

Absorbing what he'd read, Harpur became the first poet to write about the Australian countryside in a way that was Australian, rather than a transposed English pastoral. He also tried his hand at everything from hard satire, to an (unpublished) attempt at an epic poem about a kangaroo hunt, as well as writing political journalism in support of land reform and other liberal causes.

As Wright notes, Harpur as a poet was varied in his success. Much of his poetry is archaic now, but still important, because his work is the first by a native Australian of working class, and amongst the first to celebrate Australia itself. Anyone interested in Australian poetry and literature in general should get to know him - I guess these days checking out his Wikipedia entry is enough to discover him (it's quite good actually, with links to many of his poems), but, crusty old man that I am, I'd rather read Judith Wright's little tome.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell