Armidale poets - beginnings

I watch the greying, hazy air
drifting from gardens like a pall,
winter my sister died in pain
Gwen Kelly
This Autumn
(For Edna)

This begins the story of the Armidale poets that  I warned you about in Introducing the Armidale poets. Under the influence of the poetry, I then wrote a further post Hockey and the Armidale poets.

But what makes an Armidale poet?

By their nature, most are in some ways expatriate, brought to the city from some other place. Armidale is a university city, drawing people for study or work not just from other parts of New England but well beyond.

This does not of itself make them an Armidale poet as opposed to a poet from Armidale. Other things are involved as well.

According to the Kardoorair Press web site, the Kardoorair Poetry Society was established in 1975 by a far flung group of external students at the University of New England.  By 1979 founding member, Anthony (AJ)Bennett, had a regular community radio show and ran a monthly series of readings at the Wicklow Hotel in Armidale.

I think, I stand to be corrected, that the Society marked the embryonic start of the Armidale poets.

In 1979 Kardoorair Press was established as the publishing arm of the Society to serve primarily as an outlet for poets based on the Northern Tablelands region of New England or writers with an affiliation with the region.

Kardoorair's first publication, Loose Federation, was released in January 1980 and featured the work of Michael Sharkey and Julian Croft. Croft subsequently was a Commonwealth Poetry Prize winner and Sharkey a much published poet and respected literary critic. Kardoorair now has over 60 publications.

At the same time as Kardoorair started publishing so did Michael Sharkey's Fat Possum Press, both joining with each other and other small presses. All wanted to promote an alternative view. 

Did they achieve this? I do not know.

UNE's mid-term strategic review

The University of New England is in the process of carrying out a mid-term strategic review. You will find the paper here.

I would be interested in reader including alumni comments. What do you think of the approach? Where would you like to see UNE go?

Introducing the Armidale poets

In Sunday Essay - obsessions with reading I reported on my growing obsession with reading and then writing. This was not my first post on this topic nor, I suspect, will it be my last!

Today I had to take youngest to hockey at Little Bay. To help while away the time in breaks in the game I grabbed three small poetry books of my shelf, all published in Armidale in 1980 or 1981. Between them, they provide a snapshot of a part of New England poetry at a point in time.

One of the problems an area like New England faces is that its cultural life is rarely re-presented. There are few local publishers, few journals analysing cultural activities, no platforms. Even within local areas people do not get to see patterns, to re-interpret past material in the light of current events. The problem becomes greater as we look at the broader New England. Similarities and indeed differences are lost within the melange of metro or national models.

At the time these books were published the Armidale poets were consciously challenging what they saw as the metro dominance. More precisely, I should say, the dominance of Sydney's Balmain push with its often contemptuous rejection of anything outside their own collective or, more broadly Sydney, as provincial, second rate.

What do I mean by Armidale poets? They came from many places and to some degree had different interests and approaches. The unifying element lay in the fact that they were in Armidale at that time. This created a shared bond.

You will not find material on the Armidale poets if you Google search, although you will find material on poets from Armidale. There have been a lot.

Over the next few posts I thought that it might be fun to explore the world of the Armidale poets, using the three small poetry books I grabbed from my shelf as a base. Who were they? What did they write about?

I hope that you enjoy the series.

The Books

Wilfred Belmont, A J Bennett & Michael Sharkey, No Standing :12 Poets, Kardoorair/Fat Possum Press, Armidale, 1980.

Gwen Kelly & A J Bennett, Fossils and Stray Cats, Selected Poems, Kardoorair Press, Armidale 1080?.

Michael Sharkey, Barbarians, Fat Possum Press Armidale & Canberra, One Eyed Press, Auckland, 1980.

The Posts

• This post
• Armidale poets - beginnings

Linked Posts

• Hockey and the Armidale poets
• Pea and ham soup and poetry

Armidale Air Show 1959

Back in September 2006 in New England Australia - Aviation I spoke of Australian aviator P G Taylor.

Now in The Southern Cross comes to Armidale Paul Barrett has returned to the theme.

I won't repeat Paul's story, you should read it yourself, but I could not resist one of his photos.

This photo shows the Southern Cross, Kingsford Smith's plane, at the Armidale Airshow in (I think) 1959.

Dear this took me back. Hats are still in, while women's dresses are still in shapeless mode! I really love old photos because of the way the detail tell's us things. To see what I mean have a look at New England Airways - Postscript.

Took me back. I actually have this vague memory of queuing to see the plane.

I said that I could not resist one of Paul's photos. Well, here's a second!

This one gives you a better view of the queue formed to see the plane. If you click on the photo you can see the school girls queued at the front.

Things like this were big time. Indeed, they still are.

One day I will write a little about air shows I have seen!

Belshaw’s World: Selection, perception and bias in reporting

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 5 August 2009. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here.

Sunday morning and another blank screen.

I have just finished a piece responding to an Indonesian blogging colleague.

Tikno lives in Samarinda, the capital of the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan. He is, I think, Christian. For those who do not know Indonesia, Christians make up nearly 9 per cent of the Indonesian population, roughly the same number of people who live in Australia.

Tikno was concerned that reporting stereotyped Muslims. He wondered why there was no reporting on things like two Fatwas against terrorism, one from Indonesia, the other India.

The Indonesian Fatwa was issued in 2004 by Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), the highest Muslim authority in Indonesia.

Another blogger, Nadia, is an Indonesian Muslim working in Angola as an oil industry engineer. She lost friends in the second Bali bombing, 2005, a loss brought back by the recent Djakarta bombing.

She, too, worries about stereotyping. In her case, the fact that she has an Indonesian passport creates constant airport delays.

I understand their concerns.

I have written a fair bit about selection, perception and bias in the media, if from an Australian perspective.

I was on holiday in South West Rocks when the story about Tamworth and the Sudanese refugees broke. I was horrified.

If the reporting was true, then we had a major racism problem. But knowing Tamworth and some of the people involved, I did not think that things were as simple as reported.

I was also horrified at the way the story carried round the world, reinforcing stereotypes that all Australians were racist.

I had seen this before. Simplistic metro reporting based on Australian stereotypes gets transmuted in global reporting and writing in ways not recognised by those who wrote the original stories.

Of course some Tamworth people are racist, as they are in Armidale or Sydney. But that is not Tamworth.

In some of the most widely quoted and visited reporting that I have ever done, I followed the Tamworth story through.

What I did was simple enough.

I went back into all the previous stories in the Northern Daily Leader. I checked material against official web sites to find out about the official programmes relating to Sudanese refugees. Then I wrote about the story as it unfolded.

With time, the metro media itself began to present the other side. But, by then, the damage had been done: Tamworth was racist, Australia was racist.

I don’t know what we do about all this. We all have deadlines. We have to simplify. For me, writing to meet my own deadlines is a constant issue.

Perhaps the one thing that I have learned is simply this: try to look outside, to see how what you might say might be interpreted by those who do not share your world view.

Easy to say, not so easy to do in practice.

As I write, the story about problems in Australia’s overseas student sector and especially those affecting Indian students runs and runs and runs. What began as reporting on a small number of perceived race motivated attacks has developed into a global story now doing great damage to what had become Australia’s third largest export industry.

Was Four Corners wrong to run the story it did? No, I don’t think so. However, I would question the timing.

The existence of problems in the overseas student sector has been well known, and not just in the private vocational sector. Four Corners could have selected this as topic before. It took the difficulties faced by some Indian students to make it news.

Round the New England blogging traps 9 - Hunter Valley focus

Kurt Gidley who plays for the Newcastle Knights in the National Rugby League competition has shifted his blog to a new address.

On Snippets and sentiments, Gaye is, I think, still adjusting to the move into town. Despite the fact that she is renting, she has not been able to resist the temptation to start fixing up the garden! Early one morning in July and missing the Hunter Valley, she took the car and her thermos and drove back out into the Valley to explore the early morning.

Back in May, I missed it at the time, in Newcastle’s shame, newcastleonhunter mourned the violent and sudden demise of the old Palais Royale.

This is a very well written and passionate piece. Growing up further north, I never visited the Palais Royale, although I was fascinated by the building. There was certainly nothing like it in Armidale!

I remember one day on the beach at Newcastle a girl tried to pick me up with the line didn't we meet last night at the Palais!

Things must change, but I think that some of the things that have happened in and to Newcastle are a tragedy, one made worse by what I see as the loss of memory of Newcastle's broader past. To quote from the piece:      

Newcastle is a contrary and perplexing social microcosm: broadminded citizens of a global village yet disconcertingly xenophobic, parochial, even naive, to foreign visitors.

I do not fully understand Newcastle. I think that one has to live there to properly understand the place and especially the modern Newcastle. I used to know it quite well, but that was in a different era. Growing up, I just thought of Newcastle as the North's big city, a place made more interesting because it was so different. 

NEWCASTLE AU. CITY PHOTOS PLUS HUNTER VALLEY AND BEYOND continues with its regular short posts and photos on Newcastle and surrounds. I really like this gentle blog.

Craig Wilson's Media Hunter has been ranked 95 in a list of the world's top advertising blogs. More importantly, perhaps, it ranks second in the average number of pages looked at per visit. No less than 6.7 pages! That's a quite remarkable number. Crikey I feel envious! This blog presently sits on 1.5.

The writer of Saved by Psychotherapy, a new blog, grew up in Newcastle. Some of her posts contain material on Newcastle life.I found the blog a little sad, but hope that the writer continues.

Not on blogging but related, FlIckr has a Newcastle and Hunter Valley photographers group.

Finally, ric woods photography newcastle nsw australia is a new Newcastle photo blog.

I have run out of time. Time for bed.

A note on New England's Aboriginal languages

A week or so back in Saturday Morning Musings - Aboriginal languages and the return of Kamilaroi I mentioned that I had been bogged down in New England's Aboriginal languages. It really has been something of a journey, one squeezed into my little available time. One side-effect has been further limitations on blogging time.

This week I loaded some of the things that I had written into a single document simply called New England languages. I hope to have this finished over the next few days so that I can load it as a working draft onto the New England History blog. It is now over two months since I last posted there.

In any form of research, the first part is nearly always interesting because you are looking at new things. Then come the dog days, trying to fit bits together to create a working narrative. I say dog days because this part is time consuming and often frustrating. Once past this point, life is again interesting because the structure is there. The process now involves test and extension.

I have been in the dog days on Aboriginal languages, the consolidate and write period. Only now can I begin to see my way through to the next stage. There is still a fair bit of effort to go, perhaps the equivalent of two full days research. Still, I at least hope to further flesh out the structure this weekend.

I think that it will be an interesting piece. I hope that you do too once it is finished.    

Belshaw’s World: Corrugations, pot holes and the Australian economy

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 29 July 2009. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here.

I have mentioned Gordon Smith’s great photo bog (http://las.new-england.net.au/) before. It really is a delight, especially for someone interested in Armidale or the Tablelands.

Gordon is presently running daily photos taken on his outback trip. At the time of writing, his most recent photo was simply called corrugations. It shows an outback road marked by corrugations across the road.

When I learned to drive, many of the roads around Armidale were dirt. I quickly learned that the only way to overcome the vehicle shudder created by corrugations was to drive faster.

This worked well so long as there were no pot holes. Pot holes required slower driving. Any road combining corrugations with pot holes guaranteed a bad trip.

I actually like dirt roads, although I don’t miss the clinging clouds of dust that used to rise on the more heavily travelled roads, nor do I miss the stones thrown up. Still, you actually have to dive on dirt roads.

My family, modern people that they are, regards my liking of dirt roads as strange. Give them a modern highway any time!

The Australian economy is a bit like all this just at present. The immediate stimulus packages have helped us maintain a degree of economic speed, thus minimising the impact of the corrugations, but can we avoid the coming pot holes?

Back in early February in Access Economics feeds the herd instinct, I suggested that Australia’s best known economic consultancy had got things wrong and that, worse, its very negative prognostications on Australia’s economic outlook were feeding a negative herd instinct.

I wrote the column against a background of analysis that I had done looking at the underlying economic data. I simply could not make Access’s forecasts stack up with that analysis.

Well, Access did get it wrong. The Australian economy has done far better than they allowed, far closer to my then conclusions.

Access now admits that their forecasts were incorrect. However, Access’s Chris Richardson is still expressing certain cautions about the future. In this case, I agree that we do need to be cautious.

Well, what are the potential pot holes?

The first is China.

It is not clear to me that the present stimulus driven Chinese growth is sustainable. The huge expansion in money supply and official bank lending has fed what appear to be asset bubbles in real estate and now on the stock exchange. There is a risk that China will, like Japan in the 1990s, hit a stagnation wall as the bubbles unwind. This would be bad news for all of us.

The second linked potential pot hole is the Australian balance of trade on goods and services. After a long period of deficit, this went positive last year just when the country needed it most. Talk about good fortune!

The balance of trade is now back in the red.

To a degree this was inevitable since the maintenance of economic activity of itself implied continuing imports at a time exports were going to come under some pressure because of the global downturn. Should pressure on exports become too great, and we do depend here to a considerable degree on China, then our balance of trade could move from support to pot hole.

The third potential pot hole is inflation.

The headlines on Australia’s most recent inflation numbers screamed the lowest inflation rate for years. However, if you drop down to the detail, things look a little different.

The things that went down included financial services and insurance and fuel. The big increases, all above the Reserve Bank's target inflation band, were education, health, housing, food and alcohol and tobaccos. What can we say about this?

Well, transportation is strongly influenced by fuel costs, so if fuel prices rise as the global economy starts to rise again, we can expect this item to rise. Insurance and financial services costs are strongly influenced by interest rates, and will rise with interest rates.

On the other side of the ledger, the majority of high rise items are in non-import competing sectors and will rise as the Australian economy starts to expand. Rents are already rising. In addition, there are built-in upward factors in education and health.

So increased inflation is a real risk, and with it comes increased interest rates.

In saying all this, I have not joined the negative crowd. I just think that we need to manage carefully at personal, business and national levels.

Getting balance (and interest) in New England's history

I have just finished Keith Leopold's memoirs on his student days, part in Armidale, part in Sydney. Today I rushed through John Bach's A Maritime History of Australia. 

So much to write about, but I am trying to limit myself to 100,000 words in my history of New England. More and more I am becoming fascinated, obsessive, about what to include, what to leave out, how to tell the story.

I was talking to eldest yesterday after a politics lecture. She did not fully understand the difference between the states and territories. It was the ACT gay marriage saga that bought this alive. She commented in passing just how boring she had found Australian history at school.

Boring? It's fascinating. So how, then, have we killed it?

The answer, I think, lies in the fact that we try to tell kids what they should know rather then telling a story. I am not talking just about narrative history here. All history involves stories.

New England's story is a fascinating one. But how to write it so that it is accessible to all?

History has to have framework and facts. It must be as accurate as possible and testable by other researchers. Yet, despite this, the best history should draw the reader into the story.

I think that people and examples are central to this. Each section of the narrative should build, creating a world that sweeps the reader along.

At one level this may sound a contradiction, for I am saying that the reader should be grasped, absorbed. If you are absorbed, how then can you be objective?

I think that objectivity and test comes later. The literary value of the work, and history is or should be literature, stands alone.

I know that in a sense I am setting myself up to fail because the absolute benchmark created cannot be met. But, surely, isn't it a good thing to aim high?  

Our new house

Well, we have moved. If you read Moved at last. It should be a fun house you will see that I love the new place because it reminds me of home!