Gestures at the Dark

The Age of Revolution and Other Poems
by Hal G.P. Colebatch
Wagtail 113,
Picaro Press, 2011.
(Issues of Wagtail are available from Picaro Press, www.picaropress.com, by annual subscription or singly.)

The traditional “slim volume” cannot get much slimmer than Hal Colebatch’s The Age of Revolution and Other Poems, which first appeared in 2011. However, all these twenty poems are eminently worth reading and keeping, as a representative sample of the themes of Colebatch’s poetry—principally a sense of place, a robust defence of conservative values, and an understanding of the human condition.

They include word pictures that vividly capture moments in time: a “daddy long-legs” on a window-sill, Fremantle High Street on a wet day, Shark Bay, or an afternoon in the Dandenongs. Others form short, sharp and profound commentaries on the condition of Western culture, including the futility of left-wing deconstructionism (“On Subtle Cold-War Film Criticism”). Hal Colebatch’s belief that tradition and scientific progress are not enemies but allies is neatly encapsulated within the three lines of “Astronomer Royal”:

Two words arranged
to cover so much
of the breadth of a civilisation.

A similar message is conveyed in the title poem, where the most profound change of the “Age of Revolution” lies not in the political upheavals of the French Revolution but in the fact that Adam Smith helped James Watt to pioneer steam power. “To Kipling” is a respectful and intelligent tribute to a writer whose work, “bright as a tropic butterfly, mysterious as the tide”, outlives “the petty scribblers sunk in jealous rage”.

Still more passionate and powerful is “Photograph of a Bristol University Ceremony 1941” where visiting Australian PM Robert Menzies received an honorary degree from Winston Churchill the day after the Great Hall of the university had been destroyed by Nazi bombs in the darkest period of the Second World War. For Colebatch this defiant traditional ceremony is a brave act of resistance, “a ridiculous hopeless gesture at the dark” in defence of a beleaguered civilisation that would prove far from futile.

Hal Colebatch draws on his own memory of walking on a less salubrious Anzac Day in the 1950s with his mother in “Sunset at the Perth War Cemetery”. This is a vivid recollection of the loving respect felt even by drunken, brawling old diggers for a wartime nursing sister, a mother who deserves the title of “hero”.

Perhaps the most profound and moving poem is “Night at the Rottnest Island Hotel and Beer Garden”. It opens with an acknowledgement of Shel Silverstein’s humorous, sardonic yet humane song about the staff and customers of “Rosalie’s Good Eats Café”. Written in the same metre, it is a series of vignettes of the customers of the sole hotel on Perth’s offshore retreat. There are deep and poignant observations including those of an imaginative child, of a bored adolescent holidaying with his widowed mother, of a gauche lawyer unhappy in love, and of loving and contented older couples. To some degree Hal Colebatch may have drawn on his own life experience, in giving his subjects such credible humanity. One could wish that like “Rosalie’s Good Eats Café” this poem were set to music.

Put simply, Hal Colebatch as a poet uses language to convey meaning and not to obscure it, and he always has something worth saying. “The Age of Revolution” can be enjoyed by those who would not otherwise seek out contemporary literature, and lives up to the quotation by Chesterton on its cover: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”