The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry

by John Kinsella

  Jack Davis grew up in Yarloop, WA. His poetry books include The First-born and Other Poems (1970), John Pat and Other Poems (1988) and Black Life (1992). His plays include Kullark (1979), The Dreamers (1983) and No Sugar (1985). He also wrote the memoir A Boy’s Life (1991). Davis won numerous awards and honours. His work explores such issues as the identity problems faced by Aboriginal youth in contemporary society, the wider sense of loss experienced in Aboriginal cultures, and the clash of Aboriginal and white law.

  Maree Dawes was raised in the wheatbelt and studied in Perth before moving to Albany where she writes in sight of the Southern Ocean. She has two collections of poetry published — Women of the Minotaur: Les poèmes des femmes de Picasso (Tactile Books, 2008) and BRB: Be Right Back (Spineless Wonders, 2014).

  ‘Delta’ Identity unknown.

  Brian Dibble arrived in WA in 1972 from the United States to be foundation head of the School of Communication and Cultural Studies at the WA Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) and was a key figure in establishing the university’s creative writing program. He has been president of the Perth PEN Centre and the Fellowship of Australian Writers (WA), along with being on the board of the Australian Society of Authors. His biography Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley (UWAP, 2008) won the 2008 WA Premier’s Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the 2010 National Biography Award.

  Graeme Dixon lived in a Salvation Army Boys Home between the ages of 10 and 14, before being expelled from high school. He was in and out of reformatories and at 16 he was sent to Fremantle Prison where he spent most of the next 9 years, and where he first began to write poetry. At 27, Graeme Dixon began tertiary study and later completed a course at the WA Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) in politics, communications and Aboriginal Studies. In 1989 his first collection of poetry, Holocaust Island (UQP, 1990), won the David Unaipon Award.

  Dorham Doolette was born in Adelaide in 1872 and attended the University of Adelaide. In 1893 he travelled to WA for the gold rush and became a prospector, mine-owner, poet, mine manager, and speculator. In 1910, he became extremely wealthy when Charles Jones, a prospector he had staked, discovered Bullfinch goldfield in 1910. Doolette died in Perth in 1925.

  Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo, 2008) and Meanderthals (Web del Sol, 2012); and her awards include the Mary Gilmore Award and the Alec Bolton Award. The Guardians (Giramondo, 2016) won the WA Premier’s Award for Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Queensland and Victorian Premier’s Awards.

  Mary Doyle (‘May Kidson’) was born in England in 1858 and arrived in WA with her mother on 29 June 1886. In 1888, she married Charles Barclay Kidson, a draughtsman and architect and later, the first sergeant-at-arms in the WA Parliament. Kidson wrote the words for two songs, ‘Kitchener’s Message to Australia’ and ‘Memory Mine’, composed by Charles J.F. North. She was a regular contributor of poetry to newspapers and magazines in WA during the First World War and the 1920s. Her two sons served with the Australian Lighthorse. She published work as ‘M.K.’ and as ‘May Kidson’. She died in 1942.

  Gabrielle Everall has lived in Western Australia for most of her life. She has completed her PhD in creative writing at UWA. There she wrote her second book of poetry, Les Belles Lettres following her earlier publication, Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys (Gabrielle Everall, 2007). She has been published in numerous anthologies including The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (Penguin, 2008), The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (Desperation Press, 2013) and Fremantle Poets 3: Performance Poets (FP, 2013).

  ‘The Exile’ Identity unknown. Two or three poems suggest that he came from the Gippsland district in Victoria.

  Many of Wolfe Fairbridge’s poems reflect his interest in science, and he frequently incorporated biological and scientific imagery into his work. He died from poliomyelitis, at the age of 31. At the time of his death he was working on ‘Darwin’, a sonnet sequence he had intended to be a tribute from one scientist to another. His Collected Poems (Angus & Robertson) was published posthumously in 1953.

  Mick Fazeldean recorded his song with Carl von Brandenstein and Tony Thomas, which appeared in the volume Taruru: Aboriginal Song Poetry from the Pilbara (Rigby, 1973). He also worked on a book called The Shepherd with Graham James.

  Sarah French is an English teacher in Karratha. She is currently thinking of how to turn the Report Comment Bank into a found poem. In a former life she taught creative writing at Curtin University and co-edited the Young Writers Issue of Westerly. Her adoptive father is the ‘boy’ in the poem of the same name, which features in her collection Songs Orphans Sing.

  Kevin Gillam has had three books of poetry published, the last of these a shared volume entitled Two Poets by Fremantle Press. He has also had three chapbooks published by Picaro Press and poems appear in all major Australian literary journals. He works as Director of Music at Christ Church Grammar School.

  Sunil Govinnage has been writing poetry in Sinhala since 1965 and in English since 1989. He moved from Sri Lanka to Perth in 1988. Govinnage has worked as a full-time public servant in WA since December 1988. He has published seven collections of poetry. His English poetry has been read in Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and the USA and published in Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the UK, and the USA.

  Lilian Wooster Greaves, poet and botanist, was born in 1869 in Ballarat, Victoria. She moved to WA in 1904. She was a member of the Women Writers Club and representative of the Institute of British Poetry in WA. Her poetry was regularly published in local newspapers and magazines. Publications included Poems by Lilian, The Two Doves and Other Poems, Roses in Rain and Other Poems, and Wongan Way (including an illustrated edition, combined with a booklet about wildflowers). She died in 1956.

  William ‘Bill’ Grono was born in Cottesloe in 1934. He attended Claremont Teachers College, UWA, and Syracuse University. He taught at WA schools and universities in addition to editing several anthologies, including Margins (FACP, 1988), a comprehensive collection of WA poetry and verse from 1829 to 1988 and Dorothy Hewett: Collected Poems 1940-1995 (FACP, 1995).

  Kia Groom was raised in Perth, WA and gained a Creative Writing BA Hons from Edith Cowan University under the direction of Marcella Polain. She currently resides in New Orleans, where she edits the literary magazine Quaint (quaintmagazine.com). Her work has appeared in Cordite, Westerly, Overland, Going Down Swinging, and others. Find her online @whodreamedit / kiagroom.com

  William Hart-Smith moved to Australia in 1936, living in Sydney, Hobart, Western Australia and Darwin and serving in the AIF between 1942 and 1943. While in Tasmania in 1936, he developed an interest in Aboriginal mythology. This led to his involvement with the Jindyworobak Movement, and his poems were published regularly in Jindyworobak anthologies during the 1940s. In 1970 he moved to Perth and taught creative writing at the WA University of Technology (now Curtin University).

  Dennis Haskell is the author of 8 collections of poetry, the most recent What Are You Doing Here? (University of The Philippines Press, 2015) and Ahead of Us (Fremantle Press, 2016). He is a Member of the Order of Australia for ‘services to literature, particularly poetry, to education and to intercultural understanding’, and currently Chair of the Board of writingWA.

  Nicholas Hasluck practised law in Perth for many years. His novel The Bellarmine Jug (Penguin, 1984) won The Age Book of the Year Award and he has been twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. He has written 12 novels and various books of poetry including A Dream Divided (Access Press, 2004).

  Paul Hasluck worked as a journalist in Perth before serving for many years as a minister in the Menzies Government, and later as governor-general. His published works include Into the Desert (Freshwater Bay Press, 1939), Collected Verse (The Hawthorn Press, 1969), and The Poet In Australia (The Hawthorn Press, 1975).

  Charles Wiltens André
e Hayward was educated at Rugby and Oxford in England and practised law in South Africa before migrating to WA in 1894. He then worked for several WA newspapers, namely the Cue Advocate, the Geraldton Express, the Kalgoorlie Sun and the Perth Sunday Times, as a reporter, editor, and as a writer of rhymes. He published under the name Andrée Hayward.

  Michael Heald’s family emigrated to Perth from England in 1972, when he was aged 12. He attended secondary school in Swanbourne, then completed an arts degree, and subsequently a PhD, at UWA, whilst living in Mount Helena. Heald has taught at UWA and Edith Cowan.

  Percy Henn was ordained a priest in 1891 and appointed chaplain at Hurstpierpoint in 1892. In 1900 he decided to spend some time in WA as a missionary. Henn stayed for a short time at Kalgoorlie and then for several years at Geraldton as a rector. When his missionary term was over in 1905, he returned to England, but came back to Perth in 1909 at the invitation of Bishop Riley, to become headmaster of Guildford Grammar School, which flourished under his administration.

  Paul Hetherington was educated at UWA and is a former editor of Fremantle Arts Review. He has published 10 full-length poetry collections and 5 chapbooks. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards (poetry) and was shortlisted for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2016 Newcastle Poetry Prize. He is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) there and co-founding editor of the journal Axon: Creative Explorations.

  Dorothy Hewett (1923−2002) is one of Australia’s most celebrated and versatile writers. She had a distinguished and frequently controversial career, spending her childhood on a remote wheat and sheep farm in Wickepin, WA, and most of her adult life in Perth and Sydney involved in the tumult of radical politics, feminism and writing. She produced 12 collections of poetry, three novels, an autobiography, 13 plays and much else.

  Siobhan Hodge has a PhD from UWA, studying the poetry of Sappho. She divides her time between Hong Kong and Australia, and nurtures a passion for translation, fragmentation, and horses.

  Ee Tiang Hong was a poet and educator, and author of 5 collections of poetry, all written in an unadorned, spare and deceptively simple style. He was born in Malacca, Malaysia in 1933, and educated there and at the University of Malaya, Singapore. Writing in English in Malaysia, he was so discriminated against that he moved to Perth with his family in 1975, and became an Australian citizen four years later. As a child he was forced to translate for the occupying Japanese late in the Second World War and they paid him in cigarettes; he died from lung cancer in 1990.

  Peter Hopegood was born in England in 1891. He arrived in WA in 1924. Through his life he was a deckhand, jackeroo, journalist, freelance writer and poet. He seems to have left WA for Sydney around 1933. He died in 1967.

  Frieda Hughes is a poet and painter who has also written and illustrated several children’s books. ‘Wooroloo’ is the title poem from Hughes’s first poetry collection, which to date has been followed by 5 further collections, the most recent being Alternative Values (UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2015), which combines Frieda’s two driving forces — painting and writing. Frieda moved to Perth, WA in 1991, and became a citizen in 1992. In 1997, her father’s illness prior to his death in 1998 meant a move back to the UK where she now resides in Wales. www.friedahughes.com

  ‘Humanitas’ Identity unknown, possibly Henry Charles Prinsep.

  Afeif Ismail Abdelrazig was born in Sudan in 1962 and arrived in Australia in 2003. He is an internationally published poet and playwright, with works translated into German and Swedish. Afeif’s English publications include Bet of the Argil, Mum! This World Lies to Us, Orphaned Birds; and The African Magician and Son of the Nile as playscripts. Afeif’s poems in English are transcreations —artistic rewordings of literal translations from Arabic. He has worked with Vivienne Glance for several years in cross-cultural dialogue, through their ongoing transcreation workshop.

  Jackson was born in Cumbria, England, and lives in Fremantle. In 2015 she commenced a PhD at Edith Cowan University. She has published two books, a chapbook, 7 zines and a CD. She is the founding editor of Uneven Floor poetry blogzine and was the founder of Perth Poetry Club. thepoetjackson.com

  Peter Jeffery OAM, was a senior lecturer at Murdoch University and is current broadcaster of The World of Art on 6EBA, WA’s multicultural community station. He received life membership of the Film & Television Institute of WA, and WA Poets Inc. A poet, scriptwriter and filmmaker, Peter has been chair and deputy chair of WA Poets Inc., FTI, ECC Perth Television, TVW 44 and CTV Perth. In 1987 he was inaugural recipient of the Randolph Stow Literary Award.

  Wendy Jenkins, a fourth-generation Fremantle resident, has been poetry, fiction and non-fiction editor with Fremantle Press for several decades and now works principally as an assessment editor. Her collection Rogue Equations (FACP, 2000) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s poetry prize and several of her novels for younger readers (including the Killer Boots trilogy) have been Children’s Book Council Notable Australian books.

  Miriny-Mirinymarra Jingkiri was also known as ‘Horse Boy Jimmy’, as his work on De Grey Station mainly involved horses. He spent all his life at De Grey Station, usually mustering sheep but once a year mustering cattle for branding. He was also involved with droving — mainly sheep — between De Grey and Port Hedland, a trip which used to take about a week. He was uncle for Wirrkaru Jingkiri. He passed away in the late 1930s.

  Wirrkau Jingkiri’s main work was mustering at De Grey Station. When there was no mustering, he’d do fencing. In 1946 he joined the strike for pay and better conditions for Aboriginal workers on stations. To earn money he did pearl shelling with the gang at Jijila. He did prospecting around Pilykunykura in the 1950s, and passed away in the 1960s.

  Kristy Jones’s father’s family come from South Australia and Victoria while she, her mother and brother, come from Carnarvon. Family, her small-town upbringing, and the environment of her youth have all contributed to her view of life. She dedicates ‘Long Park’ to her friends and family, and especially to her grandad. (In absence of further information, this note is drawn from the anthology Those Who Remain Will Always Remember, ed. Anne Brewster et al., FACP, 2000.)

  Beate Josephi was born in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and always regarded the elegant capital of Hesse as her home. She studied History and English at the universities of Mainz and Freiburg, majoring in East European history, and gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree on modern Australian poetry from the University of Hanover. Moving to Perth in 1992, she became a lecturer in Media Studies at Edith Cowan University, with journalism as her internationally recognised research area. She was an executive member of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and serves on editorial boards of numerous journals, including International Communication Gazette.

  Amanda Joy was born and raised in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of WA. Her recent series of Snake Poems have been published in many journals and anthologies including the May 2016 issue of Poetry Chicago featuring Australian Poets (selected by Robert Adamson) and Australian Book Review, as winner of the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She is the author of 2 chapbooks, Not Enough to Fold and Orchid Poems. Currently she is finalising a manuscript titled Snake Like Charms.

  Yintilypirna Kaalyamarra was also known as ‘Shaw River Smiler’. He did mostly mustering with sheep on Shaw River Station. This station was actually a big outcamp for De Grey Station. He was also an artist and his black ink line drawing can be found at Dalgety House in Port Hedland. When in Port Hedland he used to go sailing on Jimmy Monaghan’s yacht with Jimmy’s son Tommy. He passed away in the early 1940s.

  After arriving in Fremantle from the Northern Territory in 1993, Jan Teagle Kapetas’s arts compass has swung between Freo, Roebourne and the Yindjibarndi Pilbara tablelands, the Martu people’s Western Desert, Bremer Bay on the far south coast and small communities across the state.

  Katakapu did musterin
g stockwork of cattle and sheep on De Grey Station. He also did cooking in the mustering camp. His wife, Dolly Pananykarra (cousin of Waparla Pananykarra), was the main cook. Dolly baked the bread for the station staff. Katakapu drove the horsedrawn spring-cart. This cart would carry enough food, swaps and equipment for 10 to 12 musterers. Katakapu joined the 1946 strike and subsequently joined the Nomads on Strelley Station. He went back to De Grey Station in the 1960s when conditions had improved for Aboriginal workers.

  Graham Kershaw’s ‘The Heywood Spire’ was written in 1985 on a walk along the Rochdale Canal, in the Lancashire town where he was born. Since 2007 he has lived in Denmark on the south coast of WA, where he practises as an architect and small-time publisher.

  ‘May Kidson’ See entry at Mary Doyle.

  Wimia King (Wimiya) was born c.1895. He recorded his song with Carl von Brandenstein and Tony Thomas, which appeared in the volume Taruru: Aboriginal Song Poetry from the Pilbara (Rigby, 1973).

  John Kinsella was born in South Perth in 1963. He has published more than 30 books of poetry as well as written or edited poetry anthologies, volumes of criticism, fiction and non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University. He lives with poet and novelist Tracy Ryan, and their son Tim, at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the WA wheatbelt.

  Lee Knowles has had 4 books of poetry published, the latest, Invaders of the Heart (Interactive Press, 2008) (following a BR Whiting Studio Residency in Rome) and Lucretia, a Wagtail chapbook (Picaro Press, 2007). Dial Marina (FP, 1986) won the 1987 WA Premier’s Award for Poetry. Lee writes about the human land and seascape, and now lives in a green valley town in Victoria.

  Andrew Lansdown graduated from Curtin and Murdoch universities with degrees in English and comparative literature respectively. He has worked as a teacher, tutor, journalist and an education officer at Fremantle Prison. His poems and short stories have appeared in Australian journals and collections, and his short fiction has been broadcast by the ABC and the BBC. He has been described as ‘one of Australia’s foremost poets working in the imagist tradition’. His poetry collection, Between Glances, won the Adelaide Festival’s John Bray National Poetry Award. His latest book, a collection of poems and photographs, is Kyoto Sakura Tanka (Rhiza Press, 2016). His website is www.andrewlansdown.com.