- Title
- 'Somewhere, Australia': toward a new poetics of regionalism
- Creator
- Glastonbury, Keri
- Relation
- Poetry and the Trace p. 131-139
- Relation
- https://puncherandwattmann.com/books/book/poetry-and-the-trace
- Publisher
- Puncher and Wattmann
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- This essay tells some stories about different generations of poets with some form of relationship to the regional New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga - better known for its disproportionate number of sporting heroes and focuses on my engagement with the work of a contemporary local poet Derek Motion. The name Wagga Wagga is a Wiradjuri phrase, thought to mean meeting place of the crows (Strauss 642). The poet and writer Mary Gilmore ( of Australian ten dollar note fame) lived in the Wagga Wagga district from the 1860s--1880s. Her memoir Old Days: Old Ways; A Book of Recollections details the impact of rapid farming of this region on Indigenous cultural and ecological systems, as the Wiradjuri were increasingly prevented from enforcing sanctuary law and maintaining established ways of engaging with the land. The Riverina region is now predominantly wheat and sheep country, with the heavily irrigated Murrumbidgee River wending its way down to the Murray River, which eventually flows through to South Australia (or perhaps doesn't flow through, given the salinity of the Murray Darling Basin and general degradation of the inland river system since white settlement). Significantly, Gilmore's colonial ecological consciousness seems to link more explicitly with the local Wagga Landcare movement than with Derek Motion's poetics. The fact that Motion's influences aren't directly drawn from any landscape tradition and are instead decidedly "post-avant" problematises some predominant assumptions about the "situatedness of place" in terms of regional aesthetics ( Giddens 16). The impact of contemporary media networks is likely a factor here, as Motion notes: "The internet definitely modifies my regional influences possibly lessens the impact" (Interview). Revisiting regional poetics in this essay has personal resonances as well: I also grew up and went to high school in Wagga Wagga, and after living in Sydney for almost twenty years, moved to Newcastle in 2006, another New South Wales regional city.
- Subject
- poetry; regional Australia; Wagga Wagga; Derek Motion
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1345450
- Identifier
- uon:29644
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781922186331
- Language
- eng
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