Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction
- 1 Acts of Writing
- 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 1860–1870
- 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide
- 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide
- 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young
- 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension
- 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
- 8 The Athens of the South
- 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
- 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere
- 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
- 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man and Amy T. Matthews's End of the Night Girl
7 - ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction
- 1 Acts of Writing
- 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 1860–1870
- 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide
- 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide
- 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young
- 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension
- 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
- 8 The Athens of the South
- 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
- 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere
- 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
- 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man and Amy T. Matthews's End of the Night Girl
Summary
As founder and panjandrum of the Jindyworobak movement, Rex Ingamells would have a difficult relationship with the Sydney Bulletin, then the nation's leading literary journal. That the Jindyworobaks had national ambitions of their own was undoubtedly part of the problem, but so too was the fact that they were Adelaide-based and so lay outside the dominant literary axis of the eastern states. In 1935, however, such ructions lay in the future, and the Bulletin saw fit to encourage the 22-year-old Ingamells by publishing the following poem in its 20 November edition:
From a high hill-road I saw,
Against a line of low crests in the night,
The city's glitter and the city's glare —
A wide white sea of light,
Monotonously lapping round
Dark bays and capes without a sound.
Then inward swept a shadow-sea:
Dimmed-green, night-silvered mystery,
With star-like red-glow here and there,
And faint shouts of corroboree.
(Forgotten People, 8)‘From a High Hill-Road’ was not the first poem by Ingamells taken by the Bulletin that year but it was more clearly a promise of things to come. That the modern Australian landscape disguises a ‘vanished’ yet spiritually abiding Aboriginal presence would be a constant Jindyworobak theme. Here it is explicitly signalled by that single, terminal word ‘corroboree’; in later years Ingamells and his fellow poets would be much freer in their Indigenous borrowings.
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- Chapter
- Information
- AdelaideA Literary City, pp. 125 - 146Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2013