Douglas Stewart

Douglas Stewart was the leading man of letters in the Australia of his day. His life and work are of particular significance for the cultural phase that extended from the 1930s to the late 1960s, and constitute a central point for the study of Australian literary life and its intersections during that period. Stewart was probably the last of his kind in Australia.

Poet, dramatist, short story writer, editor and critic, Stewart was the editor of The Red Page of the Bulletin from 1940 to 1960, a page brought into Australian literary importance by the work of A.G. Stephens and the many others who appeared there for the first time—a journal which, incidentally, appealed much to D.H. Lawrence during his Australian sojourn and which he featured in Kangaroo (1923). Throughout his writing life, Stewart was also associated with the publishing house of Angus & Robertson, and from 1960 until his retirement worked there as a reader and commissioning editor. He promoted its annual series of volumes, Australian Poetry, and the short story collections Coast to Coast, as well as inaugurating the Sirius Paperback collections of Australian “classics”. Both these now defunct Sydney institutions gave Stewart a particular position and authority among the writers of his time.

Stewart belongs to a very different literary Australia from the one that prevails today. Even the world of journalism in which he was able to sustain a literary career has changed irrevocably, as have the status and position of the writer. But Stewart had an acknowledged place as one of the leading literary figures of his day; he did his stint of public service for the Commonwealth Literary Fund; he was a generous guide and mentor to the younger generation of writers he published in the Bulletin and at Angus & Robertson, and he was instrumental in the publishing of the collected poems of most of his peers and contemporaries.

Stewart is now considered a rather middle-of-the-road conservative writer. He was pointedly omitted from some recent polemical anthologies. His association with the Bulletin and his devotion to iambs were held against him. It was thought that he had sidestepped the major issues of modernism, though he actually belonged to the avant garde of his time. His verse dramas, Ned Kelly and Shipwreck, his experiments with the radio play, The Fire on the Snow and The Golden Lover, and the verse sequences Glencoe and Worsley Enchanted, and his attempts to write poetry for film as in The Birdsville Track, were all at the cutting edge of the experiments of the period. The fact that these particular forms have been superseded, at least for the time being, may account in part for the eclipse of interest in his work, but that is only part of the story.

Australian poetry has moved in new directions since Stewart’s heyday, and the questions of Australian identity that so preoccupied him and other writers and painters of his time, have taken on different forms. Nevertheless Stewart’s work anticipates many later developments, and the eco-poetics which are now engaging many poets are already present in earlier forms in his work, and in that of a number of his contemporaries.

Some aspects of his work still need investigation. The whole range of his editing has never been examined, and his literary journalism, which was influential in the circulation and stimulation of opinion in its time, has worn exceptionally well. His engaging memoirs of Norman Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor and the Bulletin years are key documents of the times. Apart from the literary journalism of Vance and Nettie Palmer there is no other body of work like his in the Australia of the period, and like them, he has left a substantial archive.

For many the 1940s are the years of the Dobell case and the Ern Malley hoax, the time of the Angry Penguins and the emergence of painters like Nolan, Tucker and Boyd. But they were only one part of the larger, more complex picture of the culture that ranged across all the states of Australia and which consisted of a number of different intertwined threads.

In Springtime in Taranaki, his account of his early years of growing up in New Zealand and his first experiences as a journalist and poet, Stewart mentions W.H. Davies and Edmund Blunden as formative influences on his early verse, as well as Roy Campbell, “the South African poet whom we all admired so much at that time, because he seemed to have won the battle for colonial poets in England”.

On his first trip overseas in the mid-1930s he met some of his favourite authors, John Cowper Powys and Sylvia Warner for instance, and he commented:

England, just when I was beginning to feel I could survive in it, increasingly filled me with dismay. I was not writing my customary poem a week. I was not writing anything. Moreover, I could not see where I could ever make a start. In the kind of country writing in which I was interested, everything in both verse and prose seemed to have been said before. “That’s Hardy’s moor!” Yes, and that was W.H. Davies’ skylark, if it wasn’t Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s or Shakespeare’s; and that was Edmund Blunden’s biting stormy winter; and that was John Cowper Powys’s rolling, rich, Rabelaisian earth.

This might seem an example of colonial belatedness but it is rather an illustration of how Stewart and others of his generation were trying to place themselves as writers in the world they found themselves in. Stewart was after all born in New Zealand; he spent the main part of his writing life in Australia and it was to take him a while to find his imaginative bearings here.

Stewart’s observation explains a lot about his subsequent development. After he had shifted his New Zealand roots and set himself up as a writer in Sydney, he slowly set about transforming himself into an Australian writer, and one of the catalysts in his transformation was Norman Lindsay.

Lindsay’s impact on Australian culture from the 1890s to the 1950s is a study in itself. There can be no doubting the influence he had on writers like Hugh McCrae, Kenneth Slessor, Robert FitzGerald, Kenneth Mackenzie and Stewart himself—without going into the history of his whole family, or of his more problematic effect on a troubled figure like Francis Webb. Stewart’s personal memoir of Norman Lindsay appeared in 1975, a few years after Lindsay’s death and late in Stewart’s own writing life, and it is touched with a nostalgic afterglow; sharp edges are smoothed over, details presented in soft focus. But it is clear that from the 1930s on, Lindsay had a charismatic impact on Stewart, giving him personal support and encouragement and supplying him with a Nietzschean philosophy of art and an attitude to life that underpin his subsequent writing. Lindsay believed that the artist was a superior being, a kind of superman, and that art has an exceptional place in society. In a tribute, “The Flesh and the Spirit”, published in The Flesh and the Spirit (1948), Stewart saw Lindsay as “the fountainhead of the Australian culture in our time”. He continued:

All the arts, as far as I can see, have one great purpose: to reveal the existence of spirit. The art of the novelist, which is essentially an art of humour, reveals spirit chiefly by implication: the “message” of the great humorists such as Fielding and Dickens (and incidentally of Norman Lindsay’s comedies in paint) is that we might as well enjoy the comedy of life while we are living it, for it is only a passing show. The higher arts of poetry, painting and music bring the world of spirit to us by direct revelation.

When Stewart goes on to illustrate this point by saying, “When a nature poet such as W.H. Davies brings us a tree that stands still in the moonlight ‘with all its million leaves’ time itself seems to stop still; we are in the presence of eternity …” we are reading a sentence that could serve as a gloss to his poem “The Snow Gum” or any of the numerous nature poems that he was writing at this time and which were later collected in Sun Orchids (1952) and The Birdsville Track and Other Poems (1955).

In moving to the Bulletin, Stewart inherited two main traditions associated with that journal: its preference for light, comic and curious verse, and its continuing development of the ballad. It was there that Stewart came directly into Lindsay’s orbit, and this can be seen most clearly in The Dosser in Springtime, an under-rated book that marks Stewart’s emergence as an Australian rather than a New Zealand poet. Many of its poems read like illustrations to Lindsay cartoons and drawings with their use of fantasy and whimsy. Stewart was impressed by the Bulletin ballad tradition—he went on to edit several collections of Australian ballads and bush songs—and he always hoped to be a popular poet. In melding the older ballad forms with modern subject matter, he was trying to stamp his image on a new kind of ballad poetry in the way that Paterson imposed his image on the 1890s, or C.J. Dennis on his era.

In these poems Stewart takes characteristic, typically Australian images and icons—bunyips, lizards, old iron, rock carvings, as well as modern city images, an old woman feeding cats, the statue of Cardinal Moran outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, the convict past and the interplanetary future—and exploits them in various ways, with good humoured fantasy and even sometimes with mild touches of surrealism. In some Stewart starts to use aspects of the tall-story ballad, which was subsequently developed with considerable success by poets as different as Ronald McCuaig, A.D. Hope and David Campbell.

Norman Lindsay continued to illustrate Stewart’s various volumes, but the most successful collaboration between the two was Sun Orchids (1952), one of the most attractive volumes of verse published in Australia. Lindsay’s small sketches of birds, insects, animals and plants are among the finest examples of his art, displaying a rare delicacy and finesse and without the caricaturing touches that mar some of his work. Stewart himself was familiar with Asian art, and the book as a whole, as well as Stewart’s exploration of the field, has reminded some readers of Japanese insect, flower and bird books.

The recent rise of eco-poetry may well encourage renewed interest in the poets of Stewart’s generation. Judith Wright and A.D. Hope were deeply engaged with ecological questions, but there were a number of others—Roland Robinson, William Hart-Smith, David Campbell and James McAuley—who shared some of their concerns, though not at the deep theoretical and political level that involved Wright and Hope. Their landscape and nature poems developed in reaction to the Jindyworobak stimulus, itself partly inspired by D.H. Lawrence’s emphasis on the spirit of place and his own very beautiful nature poems, as well as the growing ecological awareness of their times. Stewart and his fellow poets drew on their own observations of Australian nature—Stewart’s from the area around Norman Lindsay’s house in the Blue Mountains, and the Southern Highlands where he often went trout fishing.

Books revealing the close observation of Australian nature started to appear soon after the European settlement, and there is a superb archive of paintings and sketches, from the first works of John William Lewin and the Port Jackson Painters to Ferdinand Bauer and Louisa Atkinson and many others, all of whom were moved to record images of the incredible fauna and flora they found here. Recent volumes published by the National Library of Australia have been celebrating the women botanic illustrators of the nineteenth-century colonies and later, but this is only a small part of the work that has been produced.

After the 1914–18 war, the camera did not completely supersede the pen and the brush, but throughout the 1920s and the 1940s there is an increase in the number of books about Australian nature and wildlife with photographic illustrations. There is no study of this large body of material, and it does not feature in the standard literary histories and bibliographies, but books like A.H. Chisholm’s Bird Wonders of Australia, Frederick Chapman’s Open Air Studies in Australia, Neville Cayley’s What Bird is That?, Mary Fullerton’s The Australian Bush, G.A. Waterhouse’s What Butterfly is That?, Thistle Harris’s Wildflowers of Australia and Keith McKeown’s Insect Wonders of Australia are some of the titles that were available to inform an increasingly interested public about the various inhabitants of their landscapes. Nature writers as different as Charles Barrett, Crosbie Morrison and Michael Sharland; journals like Wild Life, Emu, Queensland Naturalist and Victorian Naturalist are only a few of the authors and magazines that proliferated at the time. The field naturalist clubs and wildlife preservation societies, as well as the Gould Leagues associated with them, were harbingers of the conservation movements in Australia.

Stewart had a particular affection for writers like Izaak Walton and Gilbert White, as well as for the scientific work of Tarlton Rayment and the popular nature studies of Ambrose Pratt, and he made two notable prose contributions to this area of writing in The Seven Rivers (1966) and the posthumously published Garden of Friends (1985). In his chapter “Springwood” in Norman Lindsay: A Personal Memoir (1975), Stewart has written about the way he used to wander in the gullies near Lindsay’s house,

picking up small nature poems, like wildflowers off the bushes, wherever I went … I liked exploring the bush and finding places and plants and flowers and creatures that were new to me; and, then as at all times, I was haunted by the great mystery of evolution in which I felt that some creative spirit, beyond mere mechanical “natural selection”, must be at work … Only, of course, the moment you had invented some kind of deity or demi-god who could make an insect like a dead leaf for the fun of it, you came up against the fact of cruelty or apparent cruelty going along with beauty in nature, and this too was a problem that had to be resolved.

These “small nature poems”, with their miniaturist, microscopic view of things, were first collected in Sun Orchids. They have been widely commented on over the years, and some have been included in various anthologies of Australian poetry, but their place in Stewart’s development has been less understood. Apart from the difficulties of translating the visual into the verbal, it seems clear that Stewart’s preoccupation with the heroic and the forces of endurance and persistence in his plays led him paradoxically more and more to an awareness of the fragility of things, of the precarious nature of civilisation and its values. Many of Stewart’s nature poems, with their feeling that small is beautiful, are like close-up photographs of the plants observed, and it is possible to use scientific illustrations to show how precisely and accurately the plants have been described. They are for the most part lively little poems, full of movement and a sense of discovery, and if some of them show stilled moments of action, they are never static.

Stewart wanted to capture on the page the experience of noting and observing, and to illustrate the relationship between the natural world and the human understanding and interpretation of it. This is a dynamic process. He wants to suggest movement and change and growth in nature, a whole sense of becoming, and one that is inseparably aware of its own writerly problems. He says of his attempt to describe the tongue-orchid that it is “Moth or flower, flower or moth / Neither moth nor flower but both”, and through the juxtaposition and deliberately uncertain interplay of images the object itself emerges with real precision and clarity. In “The Fungus” he writes:

For white like the egg of a snake
In its shell beside it another begins to break,
And under those crimson tentacles, down that throat,
Secret and black still gurgles the oldest ocean
Where, evil and beautiful, sluggish and blind and dumb,
Life breathes again, stretches its flesh and moves
Now like a deep-sea octopus, now like a flower,
And does not know itself which to become.

Stewart’s concern with the fragility of things, and their persistence, is inseparable from his lyrical sense of transience and evanescence. One of the best images for this is snow, an element has featured in his work from the time of his earliest New Zealand poems, and while he is renowned as a poet of outback Australia, with its severity and hostility, some of his finest poems—“Brindabella”, “The Last of Snow”, “The Snow-Gum”—are set in winter or early spring snow country. One of the best examples of his art is “Spider Gums”:

Where winter’s snow and crashing rains
Have forced the snow-gums to their knees,
High in the sky on Kelly’s Plains
These frail and delicate spider-trees:

As though some pigtailed fossicker here
Now bleached as quartz on Dead Man Range
Had drawn a Chinese sketch on air
To speak for him when all should change;

Or high from where the Murrumbidgee’s
Tussocky rapids flash and race
A flying swarm of water-midges
Hangs in a mist of light and lace …

And know how earth took deepest thought
In this cold kingdom of the winter
To make some shape of grace to float
On high while snow-gums crack and splinter,

And made this phantom tree at last,
A thing more air than leaf or bough,
That slips clean through the killing blast
And dances clear from all the snow.

This poem also shows how Stewart usually works through elaboration and amplification—so that the charged and concentrated miniatures in Sun Orchids are something of an exception in his work.

Stewart’s writing, which is usually relaxed and apparently direct and immediate, does not seem to demand the close reading it rewards, and there are aspects of his work which can be easily overlooked.

Stewart is generally considered one of the least “political” of Australian poets. He has said that the function of the poet is to civilise mankind by other means than taking part in movements, but one cannot overlook the political context in which his poems appeared. “Terra Australis” from Sun Orchids, a poem which can be seen as the climax of his early work and an opening into his later work, developed out of Stewart’s exploration and rediscovery of Australian historical and geographical subject matter which brought him face to face with the figures of de Quiros and William Lane, and the whole question of Terra Australis and personal and national identity.

Stewart learnt from his dramatic writing how to bring conflicting characters into opposition with each other and to weigh up opposing attitudes. As his work for radio and stage diminishes, and he becomes more and more committed to lyrical poetry, he starts to produce poems in which he brings two characters together and sets them up in interplay. So in “Two Englishmen”, Kinglake and an English military man from India meet in the space of the poem and almost seem to float past each other without greeting—a sardonic comic comment on the attitudes of British imperialists in nineteenth-century Egypt and India. In “Mungo Park” Stewart posits a meeting between Sir Walter Scott and Mungo Park and contrasts the differences between the sedentary life of the imaginative writer and the life of an intrepid explorer:

Each to his trade, and mine’s to walk, Sir Walter;
Yet in the countries never seen by men
Who’s paid the greater price, who’s gone the further,
I with my travels, you with your midnight pen?

“Terra Australis”, first published in the Bulletin in 1949, belongs to the early Cold War years, and brings together two famous idealists, both deeply embedded in Australian history, one with an other-worldly, one with a this-worldly vision. Stewart’s stance is resolutely anti-fanatical and anti-extremist. He mocks illusions and self-deceptions, but this potentially negative energy is turned into the good-natured refusal to be defeated.

Another example of Stewart’s deft and subtle reactions can be seen in “B Flat”, his celebration of the Reverend Henry White (brother of the better-known naturalist Gilbert White of Selborne) “the most harmless, the most innocent of mankind”. Stewart once commented that he wrote this poem in reaction to a news item about the outbreak of war between India and Parkistan in 1965, and the poem affirms the values of gentleness and innocence. Stewart obviously believed that there are values to escape to as well as situations to escape from.

So, softly Muse, in harmony and conformity
Pipe up for him and all such gentle souls
Thus in the world’s enormousness, enormity,
So interested in music and in owls.

Stewart has a varied palette and a highly individual sense of the strangeness of life. He always wanted to look at things afresh and to strip the veil of familiarity from the world, as in the soft surrealism of “The Sunflowers” (1951):

“Bring me a long sharp knife for we are in danger;
I see a tall man standing in the foggy corn
And his high shadowy companions.”—“But that is no stranger,
That is your company of sunflowers; and at night they turn
Their dark heads crowned with gold to the earth and the dew
So that indeed at daybreak, shrouded and silent,
Filled with a quietness such as we never knew,
They look like invaders down from another planet.
And now at the touch of light from the sun they love”—
“Give me the knife. They move.”

The sense of the sheer otherness of nature is dramatically captured in a fragment of conversation registering a feeling of threat and menace.

Stewart’s sense of the oddity of things, and the human perception of it, is not to be confused with the deliberate, programmatic defamiliarisation practised by a later generation of poets, often with inspired results. Stewart’s poems appeared years before the work of the Martian poets, but like John Blight and William Hart-Smith, whose work he fostered in the Bulletin, he was constantly alert to “the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write”. Of the poets of Stewart’s generation, only David Campbell was able to tap into a deep neo-Martian vein in his exploitation of what he referred to as “the surrealism of the Australian landscape”.

Among Stewart’s poems “The Silkworms” has been the most admired. This profound meditation on the human condition, first published in Quadrant in 1957, is such a complex structure of interwoven meaning and suggestion that any attempt to sum it up can only sound awkward and abrupt. Some critics have seen it as a comment on the limitations of suburbia, others on Australian conservatism and the restrictions it imposes. These seem unduly narrow summaries of a poetically intricate whole. One might more fruitfully see it as a meditation on civilisation and its discontents, on what civilisation costs in terms of the constraints imposed on impulses and desires.

One does not need to approach the poem through a history of sericulture. It is full of literary echoes and overtones from Kubla Khan’s “ancestral voices” to the hands of the law, the word of God, of custom and fear, and the almost biblical cadence of some of the lines broken by more familiar everyday tones:

All their lives in a box! What generations,
What centuries of masters, not meaning to be cruel
But needing their labour, taught these creatures such patience
That now though sunlight strikes on the eye’s dark jewel
Or moonlight breathes on the wing they do not stir
But like the ghosts of moths crouch silent there.

Look, it’s a child’s toy! There is no lid even,
They can climb, they can fly, and the whole world’s their tree;
But hush, they say in themselves, we are in prison.
There is no word to tell them that they are free,
And they are not; ancestral voices bind them
In dream too deep for wind or word to find them …

And here is the tribe that they know, in their known place,
They are gentle and kind together, they are safe for ever,
And all shall be answered at last when they embrace …

For all its restrictions and frustrations, their life has its fulfilment in love and continuity, and in its experience of moments of transcendence. The sense of being a part of a community, which both protects and restrains, is weighed against the cost of complete individual freedom and isolation. The poem with its relaxed confidence of voice seems to distil a lifetime’s wisdom and awareness.

Stewart’s resignation from the Bulletin in 1960 marked the end of an era; Australian poetry would never be the same again. The full range of his achievement has never been adequately assessed or appreciated, but it has long been clear to discerning readers that he has written some of the most individual and enduring poems of his time.