Australian English
Australian English (AusE, AuE, AusEng, en-AU[1]) is a major variety of the English
language and is used throughout Australia. Despite English being given no official
status in the Constitution, Australian English is Australia's de facto official language
and is the first language of the majority of the population.
Australian English started diverging from British English after the founding of the
colony of New South Wales in 1788 and was recognised as being different from British
English by 1820. It arose from the intermingling of children of early settlers from a
great variety of mutually intelligible dialectal regions of the British Isles and quickly
developed into a distinct variety of English.[2]
Origins
The earliest form of Australian English was first spoken by the children of the colonists
born into the colony of New South Wales. This very first generation of children created
a new dialect that was to become the language of the nation. The Australian-born
children in the new colony were exposed to a wide range of different dialects from all
over the British Isles, in particular from Ireland and South East England.[3]
The native-born children of the colony created the new dialect from factors present in
the speech they heard around them, and provided an avenue for the expression of peer
solidarity. Even when new settlers arrived, this new dialect was strong enough to deflect
the influence of other patterns of speech.
A large part of the convict body were the Irish, 25% of the total convict population.
Many of these were arrested in Ireland, and some in the UK. It is possible that the
majority of Irish convicts either did not speak English, or spoke English "indifferently".
There were other significant populations of convicts from non-English speaking areas of
Britain, such as the Scottish Highlands and Wales.
Records from the early 19th century survive to this day describing the distinct dialect
that had surfaced in the colonies since first settlement in 1788,[2] with Peter Miller
Cunningham's 1827 book Two Years in New South Wales, describing the distinctive
accent and vocabulary of the native born colonists, different from that of their parents
and with a strong London influence.[3]
Influences
The first of the Australian gold rushes, in the 1850s, began a large wave of immigration,
with approximately two per cent of the population of the United Kingdom emigrating to
the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria.[4] According to linguist Bruce Moore,
"the major input of the various sounds that went into constructing the Australian accent
was from south-east England."[3]
This great influx of immigrants caused the integration of numerous new patterns into
the local speech. By this time several words of Irish origin had been adopted into the
language (some of which are also common elsewhere in the Irish diaspora), such as
tucker for "food", "provisions" (from Irish tacar: "support, provisions"), goog / googy
"egg" (Gaelic gog / gug "cluck", "egg" [baby-talk]), chook "chicken" (Gaelic tsiug /
tsiuc / tsiucaí / tsiugaí "come!" [call to chickens], "chicken" [baby-talk]), duffer
"rustler" (Gaelic dubhfhear "dark(-haired) man, highwayman, man involved in "dark"
deeds), bum "bottom (of person)" (Gaelic bun "bottom, base"), galoot "fool, idiot"
(Gaelic galltuata "foreign simpleton"), sheila "young woman, woman" (Gaelic síle
"tomboy / mannish woman, effeminate man" - an idiomatic use of Síle "Sheila"), gob
"mouth" (Gaelic gob "beak, pointy nose"), puss "face" (Gaelic pus "mouth"), slog (of
whiskey) (Gaelic slog "swallow"), blob (Gaelic blab), slob (Gaelic slab "slime, mud,
goo"), hooligan (from the Gaelic family name Ó hUallacháin, from uallachán "howler,
rowdy person, rioter"), gab (Gaelic geab [a slang word] "speak, say"), and cack /
cacky / kicky "excreta" (baby-talk) (Gaelic cac "excreta", cacaí / caicí "excreta" [baby-
talk]). Moreover, the meaning of one or two native English words may have changed
under Gaelic influence, such as paddock for "field", cf. Irish páirc "field".
Some elements of Aboriginal languages have been adopted by Australian English—
mainly as names for places, flora and fauna (for example dingo) and local culture. Many
such are localised, and do not form part of general Australian use, while others, such as
kangaroo, boomerang, budgerigar, wallaby and so on have become international. Other
examples are cooee and hard yakka. The former is used as a high-pitched call, for
attracting attention, (pronounced /kʉː.iː/) which travels long distances. Cooee is also a
notional distance: if he's within cooee, we'll spot him. Hard yakka means hard work and
is derived from yakka, from the Jagera/Yagara language once spoken in the Brisbane
region.
Also from there is the word bung, from the Sydney pidgin English (and ultimately from
the Sydney Aboriginal language), meaning "dead", with some extension to "broken" or
"useless". Many towns or suburbs of Australia have also been influenced or named after
Aboriginal words. The most well known example is the capital, Canberra named after a
local language word meaning "meeting place".[citation needed]
Among the changes starting in the 19th century gold rushes was the introduction of
words, spellings, terms and usages from North American English. The words imported
included some later considered to be typically Australian, such as bonzer.[5] This
continued with the influx of American military personnel in World War II as well as
film; seen in the enduring persistence of okay, you guys and gee.[5] The American
influence through film has led to the localised adoption of terms such as bronco for the
native brumby meaning wild horse, and cowboy for the native drover and stockman for
a cattle or sheep herder, though such words are still overtly felt to be "Americanisms".
Where British and American vocabulary differs, Australians sometimes favour an
Australian usage as in capsicum, also used in India (for US bell pepper, UK red or green
pepper), sometimes shares a term with America, as with eggplant for UK aubergine, and
sometimes shares the British usage, such as mobile phone for US cell phone.
Phonology
Main article: Australian English phonology
Australian English is a non-rhotic dialect that is distinctive from other varieties of
English. It shares most similarity with other Southern Hemisphere accents, in particular
New Zealand English.[6] Like most dialects of English it is distinguished primarily by its
vowel phonology.[7]
Vowels
The vowels of Australian English can be divided according to length. The long vowels, which
include monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in
analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centring diphthongs. The short vowels,
consisting only of monophthongs, correspond to the RP lax vowels. There exist pairs of long
and short vowels with overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length
distinction, which is unusual amongst the various dialects of English, though not unknown
elsewhere, such as in regional south-eastern dialects of the UK and eastern seaboard dialects
in the US
short vowels long vowels monophthongs diphthongs
IPA examples
ʊ foot, hood, chook
ɪ kit, bid, hid,
e dress, bed, head
ə comma, about, winter
æ trap, lad, had
a strut, bud, hud
ɔ lot, cloth, hot
IPA examples
ʉː goose, boo, who’d
iː fleece, bead, heat
eː square, bared, haired
ɜː nurse, bird, heard
æː bag, tan, bad[nb 1]
aː start, palm, bath[nb 2]
oː thought, north, force[nb 3]
IPA examples
ʊə cure, lure, tour[nb 4]
ɪə near, beard, hear[nb 5]
æɔ mouth, bowed, how’d
əʉ goat, bode, hoed[nb 6]
æɪ face, bait, hade
ɑɪ price, bite, hide
oɪ choice, boy, oil
1. ^ Historical /æ/ has split into two phonemes, one long and one short, so
that, for example, in some parts of Australia bad does not rhyme with lad, while
in others (Queensland, Northern New South Wales) it does, that is to say, lad
has the long vowel. However, all Australian regions distinguish can [kæn]
"know how to, be able to" from can [kæ:n] "(tin)can, to can [vegetables, etc.]".
2. ^ Many words historically containing /æ/ have /aː/ instead, however the
extent to which this development has taken hold varies regionally.
3. ^ oː tongue position in oː is back, and therefore Australian oː has a very
different quality from Scots and Irish oː.
4. ^ The phoneme /ʊə/ is almost extinct with most speakers consistently
using /ʉː.ə/ or /ʉː/ (before /r/) instead.
5. ^ The boundary between monophthongs and diphthongs is somewhat
fluid, /ɪə/, for example, is commonly realised as [ɪː], particularly in closed
syllables, though also found in open syllables such as we're, here, and so on. In
open syllables particularly the pronunciation varies from the bisyllabic [ɪ:a]
though the dihpthong [ɪə] to the long vowel [ɪ:].
6. ^ In the environment of syllable final /l/, the diphthong əʉ assimilates to
the /l/, i.e. becomes ɔʊ, and the final /l/ can become [w] when followed y a
consonant, thus gəʉld "gold" > gɔʊld > gɔʊwd, thus forming a minimal pair with
gəʉd "goad".
Consonants
There is little variation with respect to the sets of consonants used in various English
dialects. There are, however, variations in how these consonants are used. Australian
English is no exception.
Variation
Main article: Variation in Australian English
Academic studies have shown that there are limited regional variations in Australian
English; the most notable variation is sociocultural. Some Australians speak English-
based creole languages such as the Australian Kriol language, Torres Strait Creole and
Norfuk language.
Sociocultural variation
According to linguists, Australian English can be divided into three main varieties:
broad, general and cultivated.[12] These accents form a continuum that reflects the
variations in the Australian accent. They can reflect the social class, education and
urban or rural background of speakers, though this cannot be relied on.[13]
Australian Aboriginal English is made up of a range of forms which developed
differently in different parts of Australia, and are said to vary along a continuum, from
forms close to Standard Australian English to more non-standard forms. There are
distinctive features of accent, grammar, words and meanings, as well as language use.
The ethnocultural dialects are diverse accents in Australian English that are spoken by
the minority groups, which are of non-English speaking background. [14] A massive
immigration from Asia has made a large increase in diversity and the will for people to
show their cultural identity within the Australian context. [15] These ethnocultural
varieties contain features of General Australian English as adopted by the children of
immigrants blended with some non-English language features, such as the Afro-Asiatic
and Asian languages.
Regional variation
Although relatively homogeneous, some regional variations in Australian English are
notable. The dialects of English spoken in the south east of Australia, where majority of
the population lives, differs somewhat to that spoken in South Australia, Western
Australia and Torres Strait islands. Differences in terms of vocabulary and phonology
exist.
Most regional differences come down to word usage. For example, swimming clothes
are known as cossies or swimmers in New South Wales, togs in Queensland, and
bathers in Victoria and South Australia. The word footy generally refers to the most
popular football code in the particular state or territory; that is, rugby league in New
South Wales and Queensland, and Australian rules football elsewhere. Beer glasses are
also named differently in different states. Distinctive grammatical patterns exist such as
the use of the interrogative eh?.
There are some notable regional variations in the pronunciations of certain words. The
extent to which the trap-bath split has taken hold is one example. This phonological
development is more advanced in South Australia, which had a different settlement
chronology and type than other parts of the country.[citation needed] L-vocalisation is also
more common in South Australia than other states. In Western Australian English the
vowels in near and square are typically realised as centring diphthongs, whereas in the
eastern states they may also be realised as monophthongs.[16] A feature common in
Victorian English is salary–celery merger. There is also regional variation in /uː/ before
/l/.
Vocabulary
Australian English has many words and idioms which are unique to the dialect and have
been written on extensively, with the Macquarie Dictionary, widely regarded as the
national standard, incorporating numerous Australian terms.
Internationally well-known examples of Australian terminology include outback,
meaning a remote, sparsely populated area, the bush, meaning either a native forest or a
country area in general, and g'day, a greeting. Dinkum, or fair dinkum means "true", or
"is that true?", among other things, depending on context and inflection. [17] The
derivative dinky-di means 'true' or devoted: a 'dinky-di Aussie' is a 'true Australian'.
Australian poetry, such as The Man from Snowy River, and folk songs, such as
Waltzing Matilda, contain many historical Australian words and phrases that are
understood by Australians even though some are not in common usage today.
Australian English, in common with several British English dialects (for example,
Cockney, Scouse, Glaswegian and Geordie) use the word mate. Many words used by
Australians were at one time used in England but have since fallen out of usage or
changed in meaning.
For example, creek in Australia, as in North America, means a stream or small river,
whereas in the UK it means a small watercourse flowing into the sea; paddock in
Australia means field, whereas in the UK it means a small enclosure for livestock; bush
or scrub in Australia, as in North America, means a wooded area, whereas in England
they are commonly used only in proper names (such as Shepherd's Bush and
Wormwood Scrubs).
Litotes, such as "not bad", "not much" and "you're not wrong", are also used, as are
diminutives, which are commonly used and are often used to indicate familiarity. Some
common examples are arvo (afternoon), barbie (barbecue), smoko (cigarette break),
Aussie (Australian) and pressie (present/gift). This may also be done with people's
names to create nicknames (other English speaking countries create similar
diminutives). For example, "Gazza" from Gary, or "Smitty" from John Smith. The use
of the suffix -o originates in Irish Gaelic (Irish ó), which is both a postclitic and a suffix
with much the same meaning as in Australian English.
In informal speech, incomplete comparisons are sometimes used, such as "sweet as" (as
in 'That car is sweet as.'). "Full", "fully" or "heaps" may precede a word to act as an
intensifier (as in 'The waves at the beach were heaps good.'). This was more common in
regional Australia and South Australia but has been in common usage in urban Australia
for decades. The suffix "-ly" is sometimes omitted in broader Australian English. For
instance "real good" in lieu of "really good."
Spelling and grammar
As in most English speaking countries, there is no official governmental regulator or
overseer of correct spelling and grammar. The Macquarie Dictionary is used by
universities and other organisations as a standard for Australian English spelling. The
Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers is the most prominent style guide,
serving as the standard for Australian governments.[18]
Australian spelling is similar to British spelling. As in British spelling, the "u" is
retained in words such as honour and favour, and "re" is preferred over "er" in words
such as theatre and for metric units such as metre, litre. The "-ise" ending is used in
words such as organise and realise, although "-ize" also exists, but is far less common.
Words spelled differently from British spelling, according to the Macquarie Dictionary
include "program" as opposed to "programme", "jail" as opposed to "gaol", "medieval"
as opposed to "mediaeval", "encyclopedia" as opposed to "encyclopaedia", and "analog"
as opposed to "analogue" when used in a technical or electronic sense. [19] Both
"acknowledgment" and "acknowledgement", as well as "abridgment" and
"abridgement" are used, with the shorter forms being endorsed by Australian
governments.[19][20] In addition to these words, the dictionary also notes an increased
tendency within Australia to replace the 'ae' in words such as "palaeontology" and
"faeces", and the 'oe' in words such as "foetus" and "diarrhoea" with 'e', as with
American practice.[19] Single quotation marks with logical punctuation and unspaced
em-dashes are preferred, and the DD/MM/YYYY date format is used.
Different spellings have existed throughout Australia's history. A pamphlet entitled The
So-Called "American Spelling", published in Sydney some time in the 19th century,
argued that "there is no valid etymological reason for the preservation of the u in such
words as honor, labor, etc."[21] The pamphlet also claimed that "the tendency of people
in Australasia is to excise the u, and one of the Sydney morning papers habitually does
this, while the other generally follows the older form."
This influence can be seen in the spelling of the Australian Labor Party, spelt without a
"u", with the atypical American spelling that was more common at the time of its
formation in 1912. For a short time during the late 20th Century, Harry Lindgren's 1969
spelling reform proposal (Spelling Reform 1 or SR1) was popular in Australia and was
adopted by the Australian government.[citation needed] SR1 calls for the short /e/ sound (as in
bet) to be spelt with E (for example friend→frend, head→hed). Many general interest
paperbacks were printed in SR1
Australian performance poetry
Australian performance poetry is not a recent phenomenon in English-speaking
Australia. It would not be beyond credibility to identify Henry Lawson as Australia's
first professional performance poet, but there had been many performance poets in
Australia prior to Lawson (real name Larsen, Norwegian father) from the First Fleet
onwards. In fact prior to 1890 most poetry in Australia was received orally. The Sydney
Bulletin began a campaign of publishing Australian poetry in the 1890s,
"The 'nationalistic' element fostered overtly at times by Stephens and the Bulletin is
indicated in Stephen's review on 15th February 1896, in which he joined Lawson with
Paterson as two writers who, 'with all their imperfections' mark 'something like the
beginnings of a national school of poetry. In them, for the first time, Australia has found
audible voice and characteristic expression'." (Perkins in Bennett and Strauss, 1998)
It is generally acknowledged in most of the histories of Australian literature from H. M.
Green's in 1962, to the most recent The Oxford literary history of Australia, 1998, that
the Bulletin Bush poetry, in its nationalist mission to be Australian, over-zealously
mythologised the nature of the Australian identity and that it promoted that ideal long
after Federation (1901) and even long after Lawson and Paterson. A. B. Paterson's
Waltzing Matilda is probably the most performed Australian poem ever, and has
become somewhat of an unofficial anthem of Australia (in sports particularly). The
words of Dorothea Mackellar's My Country, 1908, are probably present in the minds of
every Australian, even if they have never seen it written down.
"I love a sunburnt country,
a land of sweeping plains,
of rugged mountain ranges,
of floods and droughts and rains."
The sound of that early Australian bush poetry is firmly embedded in the national
psyche. The largest selling poetry volume in Australia,. C. J. Dennis's Sentimental
Bloke in 1915 was poetry to be performed, and was performed. But the voices in that
poem and others by C. J. Dennis are character voices, often over exaggerated, of
stereotyped Australian voices comically represented. Maybe something akin to Paul
Hogan's stereotyping of Italians with his 'luigi' or Mark Mitchell's comic representation
of the Greek Australian 'Con the fruiterer', CJ Dennis was also humorously reflecting
changes in the Australian voice and cultural identity.
The Jindyworobak poetry movement of South Australia was very much into sounds and
introducing Australian sounds into Australian poetry, the sound of the land and the
people that had been dispossessed. But this was an unnatural [citation needed] appropriation of
aboriginal culture and plagued by dubious[citation needed] political associations. Kenneth
Slessor in the 1940s , and Bruce Dawe and Thomas Shapcott, in the 1950s, introduced
the sound of everyday Australian voices, incorporating the vernacular and the colloquial
language of Australia as part of their poetry. Their voices as heard on the Audio
anthology "Australian Poetry : Live (Page, 1995)" are devoid of the BBC British radio
announcers accent often used by Australian poets like R. D. Fitzgerald, A. D. Hope and
James McAuley when reading verse (even Dylan Thomas discarded his Welsh accent
for the BBC British radio voice.) They speak in the Australian vernacular, the common
language of the street. The Commonwealth Literary Fund, which in the 1950s toured
Australian poets on reading tours of their works, e.g. Roland Robinson, provided
another way in which sounded poetry was promoted by that organization. Oodgeroo
Noonuccal (Kath Walker) also emerged as an Aboriginal-Australian voice in the late
1950s and early 1960s.
In the 1960s poetry readings were associated with the great poetry explosion that was
happening globally but also particularly in Australia due partly to the challenging of the
self proclaimed establishment of university poet-professors led by A. D. Hope. A D
Hope strangely enough, due to strict censorship laws and due to sexually explicit nature
of his poetry, was more likely to have been heard than read as he didn't publish his
poetry until the early 1960s. I t seems public readings were not the preference of
academia at the time, as Tasmanian poet Tim Thorne writes in his personal memoirs,
"I remember my first public reading, as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. It was
organized by James McAuley and it consisted of him and me reading our own poems
and those of Vivian Smith and Gwen Harwood. Gwen and Vivian were allegedly too
shy to read their own. Both, however, were in the audience, and I was acutely aware of
their presence as I hoped I did their poems justice. Having got to know Gwen much
better in later years, I am amazed that she could have offered such an excuse." (Thorne,
2003)
International poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ted Hughes, Adrian Mitchell from the
UK, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the USA, came to Adelaide Arts
Festival Writers' Week in the late 1960s and early 1970s and gave great, as reported in
the newspapers, public performances to town hall's full of people. Postmodernist
Hedwig Gorski coined the term "performance poetry" after the strong influences of
performing Beat poets like Ginsberg and John Giorno who produced audio recordings
of their print poems.
Geoffrey Dutton wrote in the Bulletin: "Maybe Yevtushenko is the man who will give
the relation between poet and public in Australia the tremendous lift it badly needs and
so easily might achieve". Bruce Dawe believed that Yevtushenko's visit would "help to
establish in people's minds that poetry is not necessarily and forbiddingly long-hair or
academic". (Starke, 1998) That is one of the lasting influences of performing and
performance poets.
By the 1970s there was a great push in Australia for the voices to be heard that were
other to the Anglo-centric male dominated majority, i.e. women, migrants from non-
English speaking backgrounds, indigenous Australians, differently abled and gendered
persons. For many the poetry reading was the place to be heard. There were many
poetry groups and much performance activity in the 1970s. Andrew Taylor, a
foundation member of the Friendly Street poetry readings in Adelaide wrote in the
Number Ten Friendly Street poetry reader; acknowledging the cultural as well as
literary value of poetry readings;
"In 1975 we had all (Richard Tipping, Ian Reid and Andrew Taylor) recently returned to
Adelaide from various extended periods overseas, including time in the United States
where small, public poetry readings were very popular and frequent. Many of these
were held in bookshops or bars – unelaborate, even casual occasions whose value was
to be found as much in the opportunity they gave people to get together with a purpose
as in the poetry that was read. Why we asked was nothing of this kind happening in
Adelaide?" (Harris and Josephi, 1986)
Very early in the 1970s University of Queensland Press released a series of 12 poets on
vinyl 45 rpm 7" records, featuring older and newer Australian poets reading their work.
This was a milestone publication in Australian poetic culture, the first commercially
available sound recording of twelve of Australia's most prominent poets of the time.
As early as 1973 Eric Beach had started to work as a full-time, grossly under-paid poet,
conducting workshops at schools and performing and was a recipient of a grant from the
newly formed Australia Council for the Arts. Ania Walwicz, Vicki Viidikas, thalia,
Sylvia Kantazaris, Anna Couani, and Pi O emerged as strong non-anglo voices in
performance poetry, and Kate Jennings's anthology of women writers Mother i'm
rooted, 1975, highlighted the lack of women in Australian poetry anthologies. Most of
the new women writers had engaged with poetry through the activity of poetry readings
and not the formal anglo-centric male dominated academic poetry of the universities. In
1976 the Poets Union was formed, identifying that poetry was indeed work and workers
needed to be represented by a union to negotiate their demands. New readings, often
centred around performance were held in Sydney by the 'militant' Poets Union there and
were the genesis of the later pub poetry in that city. Chris Mansell and Les Wicks,
among others, were prime movers in this new movement, organising readings and
publishing Compass and Meuse (with Bill Farrow) respectively. The Poets Union
pushed for better conditions for poets at the Sydney Festival, which then included
writers, and successfully gained recognition and payment.
Dorothy Porter and Robert Adamson, Sydney poets, refused to attend the 1976 Writers'
Week of Adelaide Festival because they were not going to be paid for their invited
readings. (Starke, 1998) In 1978 a contingent of poets' union members attended the
Writers' Week in Adelaide and Pi O claims in his anthology of performance poetry
(PiO, 1985) that the term 'performance poetry' was coined at a seminar where David
Malouf was speaking. But this is not the first time the term was used outside of
Australia. This event definitely marked the beginning of the use of the term
'performance poets' as Ruth Starke notes in Writers, readers and rebels, 1998. However
it was not the first instance of the call for the performing of poetry. The coinage of the
term that matches with the commonly accepted definition of performance poetry is
credited, however, to American poet Hedwig Gorski, who used it in fliers and posters in
the mid-1970s.[1] The term was used to describe Gorski performances in the Austin
Chronicle almost two decades prior to the reported use of the term in the 1998
publication by Ruth Starke. Performance poets write poems only for performance and
not for print. Performing poets are those who use theatrics when presenting their print
poems to an audience. The description below clearly points to performing poets reading
their poems written for print:
"'If poets are going to perform in front of large audiences, then they ought to learn how
to project their voices, or how to use a microphone; otherwise they should introduce the
poem and let someone else read it,' wrote Geoffrey Dutton (ABR, April 1970), after the
1970 Writers' Week." (Starke, 1998)
The performing poets, in 1978, were recognised as a group, or movement, or new
cultural formation, separate from published poets for the first time. Jenny Boult in
Adelaide had also attained professional status as a performing poet by the end of the
1970s. There were many other semi-professionals, like Ken Smeaton, Geoffrey
Eggleston and Shelton Lea in Victoria, but the majority held full-time jobs and did their
performing as a secondary activity.
The 1980s saw a greater development in performed poetry, with more professional
poets earning their living by poeting, Geoff Goodfellow joined Jenny Boult in South
Australia, komninos, Myron Lysenko, Liz Hall, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Lauren
Williams, Kerry Scuffins, Kerry Loughrey, Carmel Bird, in Melbourne, Grant Caldwll,
Chris Mansell, Les Wicks and Steven Herrick in Sydney and others in other states. The
mid 1980s also saw major literary events enter the public sphere. Literary readings were
usually restricted to academics, publishers, writers and readers and Writers' Week
programs, although in Sydney there were readings in Balmain, notably in the Cafe
L'Absurd where poets such as Nigel Roberts, Chris Mansell, Cornelius Vleeskens and
Rae Desmond Jones often performed and were joined by interstate and international
readers on occasions. Later Cafe L'Absurd moved to Newtown and became known as
New Partz where it became the centre of Sydney performed poetry and attracted
performance and so-called page poets. In Melbourne Readings Bookshop and Mietta's
Hotel held a regular Sunday afternoon reading that attracted 200-300 people. Later, in
Sydney Writers In The Park, had weekly events at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe,
supported by local book-seller Glebebooks, the writing programs of UTS and UNSW,
the feminist performance poetry groups of Newtown, Paddington and Surry Hills,
attracting up to 400 people a night (Christie and O'Brien, 1986). In Brisbane, Talk it
down, at the Storey Bridge Hotel at Kangaroo Point had weekly readings that drew large
mixed crowds of poetry lovers and public bar drinkers alike. Readings had a renewed
boom in the mid-1980s and regular readings have since been held in all capital cities
and many towns in Australia.
A notable manifestation of Australian performance poetry occurred in Sydney in early
1991, when ten poets, including Pi O, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Amanda Stewart, Jas
H. Duke, and others, teamed up with jazz musician Jenny Sheard, to create, direct and
produce the first ever, poet-performed/directed and produced, dramatic verse play ever
presented. Entitled CALL IT POETRY/TONIGHT, the show was made up entirely of
the poems of the poets who were performing and involved unusual presentations of their
work, including a kind of cinema noir voice-over rendition of Grant Caldwell's
"famous" letter poem as well as several poems broken up into dialogues between the
poets themselves. Rehearsals as well as the actual show were archived on broadcast-
quality video, which was later edited and screened - as CALL IT POETRY - round the
world. In the television production, several of the performances were presented as
"concrete poems", with video graphic overlays, including Jas H Duke's legendary
DADA Poem. Copies of the program as well as all the rushes are available through the
Librarian, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT.
"There are now poets who write primarily for performance rather than the page and,
whereas good readers were once more scarce than good poets, these people are very
much 'performers' rather than just 'readers'." (Haskell, 1998:275)
Until the mid 1980s poetry readings in public places had been the domain of well paid
international poets from the USA, Russia and the UK. Les Murray wrote in Quadrant in
April 1977, that he would never be asked to read in the Town Hall during Writers'
Week, "when the overseas heavies come around, we are shown our true place in the
estimation of our cultural establishments. We are just about good enough to sleep on
friends' floors and read our work in a tent." (Starke, 1998) But the performing poets had
been having small readings in public places, hotels and coffee lounges, since the early
1970s. By the mid 1980s Les Murray and the performing poets were sharing large
public stages in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The sounding of poetry in Australia has always been present but in most historical
accounts it has not been emphasised as an activity, always assumed to be a
supplementary activity to the industry of print publishing. Even when the oral
transmission and aural appreciation of poetry dominated the aesthetics and poetics of
Australian poetry and in the absence of sound recording devices, our record of these
works remain as printed texts. The texts contained the 'sound' of the poems in their
metre and rhyming patterns. Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, published in 1998 was
the first attempt to present a collection of essays from American sound poets and
performance poets that treated the field as a worthy topic of research. Bernstein
borrowed Gorski's term (1978) to describe her poems written only to be spoken and
recorded. It had by the publication of Bernstien's book in 1998, been extended in
popular usage to include other types of spoken word texts featured in the anthology.
"Since the I950s, the poetry reading has become one of the most important sites for the
dissemination of poetic works in North America, yet studies of the distinctive features
of the poem-in-performance have been rare (even full-length studies of a poet's work
routinely ignore the audiotext), and readings no matter how well attended are rarely
reviewed by newspapers or magazines." (Bernstein, 1998)
Unlike the USA, Australia lacks any real academic discourse in the field of performance
poetry or poets; there are no prizes, no courses of study at universities, no peer-reviewed
journals, no histories, no national anthologies, nothing that could be considered a body
of information for the study and analysis of performance poetry. All there is are reports
that have appeared in the daily presses and on radio and television, and the memories of
readings attended. In the USA, Def Poetry and Slams are the legacy of performing poets
like Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and those like Hedwig Gorski who eschewed writing
for print and publishing their poems in books in favor of recording and radio broadcast.
Academia associates the American performance poetry movement to a history of
African American oral culture in its current manifestation as Def Poetry and Slam.
Australia has yet to examine how aboriginal oral culture and classical oral traditions fit
into the history of 'soundings.'
Since the 1960s, when regular rhyme and rhythm in poetry became replaced by a more
freestyle expression, and the public soundings of these works relied less on familiar
rhythms and more on the political, social and psychological interpretation of the words,
sounded poetry, has been appreciated for many other qualities. The sound of words and
word combinations, fragments of sentences, repetitions, mirroring within the text,
alliteration and assonance and even internal rhyming became devices in the writing, and
the line the basic unit of the poem, the breath determining the rhythm. The performing
poets in 1978 drew attention to themselves as a new cultural formation and to the fact
that there were poets dedicated to the sounding of poetry as their primary poetic activity
and that poetry could be written not only for print, but exclusively or primarily for
sounding. Obviously the print poets who were being asked to present their work to
public audiences at State Writers' Festivals in the 1980s, must have felt intimidated by
the performing poets that they shared the stages with, but history tells us they also had
much to learn from them as well.
"Indeed, the value of the poetry reading (sounding) as a social and cultural form can be
partly measured by its resistance, up to this point, to reification or commodification. It is
a measure of its significance that it is ignored. That is, the (cultural) invisibility of the
poetry reading is what makes its audibility so audacious. Its relative absence as an
institution makes the poetry reading the ideal site for the presence of language for
listening and being heard, for hearing and for being listened to." (Bernstein, 1998)
Attendance at any Writers Festival in any State these days will confirm the quality of
sounded works, and the emphasis placed on the importance of soundings by authors of
their work in public. The new Australian poetry made poetry readings central to poetic
culture: at Friendly Street (Adelaide), La Mama (Melbourne) at New Partz and later at
Harold Park (Sydney). "Readings have now become ubiquitous for Australian poets."
(McCooey in Webby, 2000, pg169). Local poetry groups and organisations have
increasingly turned to performing poetry alongside, or instead of publishing it. The Red
Room Company has made this combination the basis of their public poetry projects,
commissioning and presenting staged performances of work, often within spatial
installations.
As well as sounded poetry that explores the phonic qualities of words and lines and
stanzas, there is also Sound Poetry, a small but worldwide movement of the late 1960s
that experimented with the sonic quality of the sounds that make up spoken language.
Sound poetry with practitioners in the UK, the Filkingen group in Sweden, the Fluxus
and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the second wave Beats of the USA, the French
sound poets Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidseik, etc. was represented in Australia by some
exceptional sound poets that received international recognition in this field. Jas H. Duke
and Ania Walwicz, in Melbourne and Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann in Sydney, were
influential, great performers and unique in style and content. Sound poetry remained
very much a fringe activity of Australian poetry until the mid 1980s. But an
international festival of Sound Poetry, SOUNDWORKS curated by Nicholas Zurbrugg
and Nick Tsoutas at Performance Space as part of the Sydney Biennale in 1986
highlighted the intensity of the activity in Australia over the previous 15 years.
(Zurbrugg and Tsoutas, 1986)
"One way or another, all of the artists performing at the SOUNDWORKS festival splice
cut, heighten, release and more or less transform the creative potential of words, sounds
and gestures, be these live, recorded, filmed, projected, or various combinations of all
these possibilities." (Zurbrugg, 1986)
