Peter Coleman

They were all there—poets and professors and one or two who were both or more, such as Robert Adamson, former outcast bohemian, thief and pastry cook, now Professor Adamson in the Chair of Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney. (“I only wish my mother had lived to see it.”) The occasion was the launching of Geoffrey Lehmann’s Poems 1957–2013 in the grounds of his home in Lindfield. It was an overcast, late winter afternoon but that couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd of some 120.

The launcher was Dr John Edwards (Adjunct Professor Curtin University; Board of Reserve Bank; quondam adviser to Paul Keating; author of Curtin’s Gift: Reinterpreting Australia’s Greatest Prime Minister). After Edwards had surveyed Lehmann’s oeuvre and declaimed his recent autobiographical “Why I Write Poetry”, Lehmann himself read half a dozen more, including his first published poem, written when he was seventeen (“The Image”); one of the Nero poems of the 1970s (“Instructions for a Murder”); “Breakfast with a Black Snake” and “Water from My Face”, both from Spring Forest; “The World” from the “Simple Sonnets” sequence; and the more recent “Thirteen Reviews of the New Babylon Inn”.

The new selection differs from Lehmann’s Collected Poems of 1997 in covering his entire work. (“This contains all of the poetry written by me that I think is worthwhile including in a book.”) So it includes about 260 of the 1000 poems Lehmann has published since 1957 when he sent fifty poems to magazines around the world, from which John Lehmann, editor of the London Magazine, accepted “The Image”.

I first became an enthusiast for Lehmann’s poetry when Jim McAuley published the wistful “Late Autumn” in Quadrant, January 1962. It does not appear in this latest selection, although “A Trip to Bunyah”, also in Quadrant (January 1966) and now re-titled “The Trip to Bunyah: A Letter for Les Murray” is included—along with a number of the Nero poems which Vivian Smith published in Quadrant in the 1970s. (Les Murray published more of them in Poetry Australia although he later savaged the book Nero’s Poems when it appeared in 1982. Lehmann is one of the best poets in the country, Murray wrote at the time, in the Catholic Weekly, but he should drop his crippling obsession with Emperor Nero as a great libertarian and Sydney as a new decadent Rome. “It all seems to go wrong and shallow when he puts on that silly toga.”)

A number of the poems in the new collection have been, Lehmann says, “substantially revised”, sometimes by restoring passages cut from earlier versions and sometimes by new cuts. He has also included some early poems which did not make it in the Collected Poems of 1997 but which, “recently revised”, are now revived. One of these that I was particularly glad to see revived is “Philosopher and Poet” from A Voyage of Lions and Other Poems of 1968. Some of the revisions are minor although all are improvements. In the earlier version the philosopher John Anderson is “tall”, now he is “stooped”. The poet Lex Banning once was “spastic”, now has “cerebral palsy”. The central anecdote is Anderson asking Banning, in his courtly Scots accent, if he may join him for coffee. The philosopher tells the poet that he sometimes wonders if his whole life-work has failed. “Look at my students,” he says, “who are critical of everything except being critical.” The poet grimaces with laughter. Lehmann now leaves it at that and deletes the following three lines that had ended the 1968 version:

Now both are dead, Banning and Anderson,
Gone with the bitter coffee of our youth,
Dissolved with the drifting fumes of cigarettes.

 Well cut, I say. Too cliché-laden.

Lehmann’s next book will be his memoirs. It will include some poems but no new ones. One from 2014, “Exotic Postcards”, slipped into Poems 1957–2013 at the last minute (making the book’s title wrong by a year). But that’s it. There will be no more. “I have said what I want to say.”

At the launch Robert Adamson, in professorial mode, told me that his next Public Lecture at UTS will be on Jim McAuley. He wants to combat the eccentric idea put about by McAuley’s critics that his best poetry was the nonsense poems of the Ern Malley hoax, The Darkening Ecliptic. This avant-garde construct has distracted attention from McAuley’s major work, some of the most profound and moving poetry yet written in Australia.

The following lines are from Keith Campbell’s obituary of David Armstrong in the current issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy:

He leaves us laden with honours: AO, FAHA, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Nottingham … his was a family of some distinction—his father rose to the rank of Commodore in the Royal Australian Navy, his mother belonged to an academic family from Jersey. One grandfather became Director-General of Public Health in NSW, while the other became Rector of Exeter College, Oxford … It is not easy, after the passage of more than fifty years, to recapture the anti-metaphysical tone of British philosophy in the 1950s … David had been inoculated against such an outlook by his training [in Sydney] under [John] Anderson … A naturalistic realism was, first and last, the leitmotiv of his work … his writing [sixteen books] and his indefatigable presenting of papers, informal talking, and letter-writing made their mark … The impact of all this has been two generations of philosophers, following his lead as much as that of any other single figure, engaged in the revival of metaphysical philosophy. A matchless legacy.

“Gentlemen, I challenge you to put up or back down.” Thus Jonathan Holmes, the former presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch, concluded his polemic in the Age against Dyson Heydon, formerly of the High Court, and Attorney-General George Brandis, for their criticism of Australian intellectuals over their “systematic campaign” against the Catholic Church. Holmes was referring to two recent lectures on religious freedom—one Dyson Heydon’s Acton Lecture at the Centre for Independent Studies and the other Senator Brandis’s lecture on religious liberty at the Sydney campus of the University of Notre Dame. Both warned us against the new wave of attacks on Christian, especially Catholic, beliefs and institutions in Australia. Adapting the old European adage that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals, Heydon described the new Australian anti-Catholicism as “the racism of the intellectuals”. Brandis singled out the ABC and the Fairfax media as obvious offenders. According to Holmes in the Age, there is not “a skerrick of evidence” for this line of criticism. It is “shocking” and “unacceptable”.

The point of Heydon’s lecture is in its title, “Catholic Resistance to German State Persecution: Lessons for Modern Australia”. One of the several lessons is that the Church in Australia faces entirely different attacks from those it endured under Bismarck or Hitler—different but more insidious. The threat to the churches in Australia is not ferocious nationalism but the anti-Christian spirit of the age. Australians are not serious Christians. “We avoid the poor, shun the ill and the outcast, and above all we grovel before wealth and power.” It is true that the state makes no attempt to seize church property, control church appointments, or jail priests without trial. Yet it takes no great leap of the imagination to foresee the time in Australia when one or other political party will win votes and power by proclaiming that it is unacceptable for churches to take public money for their schools when they teach “un-Australian” beliefs. Why should the taxpayer fund Catholic schools controlled by a Church whose teachings oppose pre-marital sex, same-sex marriage, contraception, abortion, euthanasia? Close them down!

This anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, Holmes said in the Age, may seem self-evident to Heydon or Brandis. “Well, it isn’t to me.” In a similar confessional mood I have to say it certainly seems self-evident to me. It’s only a matter of time. The same applies to Brandis’s warning about the new anti-Semitism, of uncertain consequences, that has emerged with the war in Gaza. I would be surprised if even Holmes did not find its emergence to be self-evident.

I listened attentively as always to Bettina Arndt when at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas she put her case for marriage against cohabitation as the right habitat for children. There are brilliant exceptions to this rule but they remain exceptions. The message seems to have sunk in among the better educated and more affluent women but is still ignored by the less educated and poor women. I am firmly in Arndt’s corner—influenced by recollections of my experience as a child of parents who were only briefly married. No use looking to feminists for guidance on these issues. They ignore them. But look up Bettina Arndt’s blog and her entry titled “Some families are better than others for children”. It begins, “I’m used to copping flak but …”