By writers at ‘Old Queensland Poetry’
ed by D.P.G. Sheridan
Alice Gore-Jones
(1887-1961) was born at Toowong, near
Brisbane.
The
one volume of verse which Alice Gore-Jones left for us shows that even during
the First World War, Australian civilians were questioning its purpose and its
human cost.
Alice
Gore Jones was born at Toowong, near Brisbane, in 1887. She was educated in
Queensland and New South Wales, and worked for many years as a journalist on
the social pages of Brisbane newspapers, most notably the now defunct
Telegraph. Colin Bingham, a co-worker at the Telegraph, and himself a published
poet, remembers her as an innocent character. He recalled telling her about the
need to rearrange the tour program for the forthcoming visit of the Duke of
York:
‘whereupon,
without raising her eyes from a list of official engagements…… she said
sweetly, ‘”Oh dear, that means they’ll have to take out one of his
Balls."'1
She
never married, but was much loved by her extended family. She passed away in
the early 1960s. She published poetry as early as 1904, and was still
publishing as late as 1940. However, her only collection of poetry, ‘Troop
Trains’ was published in Adelaide in 1917. It’s a diverse book, with a number
of more or less conventional workings of conventional poetic themes such as the
urge to wander, the seasons, places and people.
There is even a nicely executed light piece about a dog on a windy day. One
of her poems, ‘Brisbane’, captures the languid, somnolent quality of Brisbane,
which is so much in evidence in later writing.
However,
the most interesting poems in ‘Troop Trains’ are the war poems. These begin in
a conventional way with the kind of jingoistic outpourings that were common
enough for poems of that time. So, ‘Anzac’ begins ‘Undying honour shall your
name possess’ and ends with the thoroughly conventional statement:
‘For
there amid the battle-dust was born-
Mocking
disaster, undismayed by fears’
Star-white
and radiant our Southern soul’.
However,
as the war progresses its truth begins to come home:
‘When
the sap in man and nature feels a swift and sudden stir,
And
the pipes of Spring are pulsing through the perfume laden air,
Ah!
the pity of youth’s pageant that the young dead may not share.’
From Spring, 1916.
In
most of these poems there is no doubt about the value of the fight. In ‘The
Lists’ she says ‘Honour, not death,/Has sealed their accolade’. But in some of
the more powerful poems, an element of scepticism and religious doubt creeps
in. For example, in ‘The Soldier’ Gore–Jones mixes grief with tropical imagery
in a way that is utterly unlike Rupert Brooke:
“Somewhere
in France” to-night he lies,
Paying
the bitter price,
“Somewhere
in France” to-night he sleeps
There,
‘mid the mist and murk of war,
On
the blood-red field of pain,
Can
he hear the stirring banana-palms
With
their patter like drifting rain?
She
concludes that he might not hear any of this at all and that ‘perchance, he
sleeps too well’.
When
read as a whole these poems have more elements of apprehension than of
patriotism. The title poem ends:
‘Troop
trains, troop trains,
Hear
the bugle’s note,
Flags,
and cheers, and music, and…..
A
touch that grips the throat.’
From Troop Trains
The
war poems in ‘Troop Train’s end with ‘Carnival’, where there is a ‘painted
clown’, ‘tinsel streamers’ and where ‘Trade waxes brisk’. It concludes with a
pitying look at a returned soldier:
‘But
on the pavement, where the shadows lie,
A
maimed and wounded man goes limping by’.
Troop
Trains was not intended to be read by some kind of intellectual elite. It
features poetry that had been published in mass-market magazines and newspapers
such as the Bulletin and the Sydney Daily Mail. Troop Trains shows that the one
simple thing we can say about Australian involvement in the war is that there
are no simple messages.
1 Bingham, C. The Beckoning Horizon, Melbourne, Penguin, 1983, p138.
Select Bibliography
Gammage,
B, The Broken Years, Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Canberra, Australian
National University Press, 1974.
Sources:
Pages:
Pinterest: http://uk.pinterest.com/dominicsheridan/
No comments:
Post a Comment