Images
of The Cross in the poetry of Kenneth Slessor, Harry Hooten, and Anna
Couani
Ruark Lewis
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Kings Cross has for a long time been a place of urban sophistication which has meant that the area occupied an important symbolic position in the history of the Sydney artistic scene for many generations. The Cross is difficult to define and could really be considered to be a place that's constantly changing, a place that combines as the intersection of places; East Sydney, Darlinghurst, Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay, Rushcutter's Bay and Woolloomooloo. It is as much an attitude or social construct, or state of mind, as it is an actual location. And those wonderful long avenues, Brougham St, Bayswater Rd, Macleay St, Kings Cross Rd, Darlinghust Rd and William St each coming together to form an elaborate cruciform pattern. Perhaps this is the Cross. What I want to do in this account of three Sydney poets, Kenneth Slessor, Harry Hooten and Anna Couani is to try to map out a sense of place as might be contained in their poetics, in biographical and auto/portraits, the smell and sound and sight of a place, in the political polemics of the cold-war period, and the slide into the sixties and the digitally directed end of the millennium. I hope to locate in their writing something quintessentially Australian, urban Australian, particular, yet modern, sophisticated and non-sentimental being engendered and disseminated into the rest of the world.
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I think this is what it means to be in Kings Cross. `Five Bells,' Kenneth Slessor's best known work is constructed as a portrait of his friend Joe Lynch who tragically drowned after falling into the Harbour one night from the Manly ferry. Where
have you gone ? The tide is over you, Within Slessor's portrait of Jo is contained his own autobiographical reflection which records the varied details of a life and a society. Slessor's poetic reflectivity can be sensed in a structural system which resounds from the idea of refracted light in water, these deep and dissolving verticals of light ferry the falls of moonshine down both frame and compress the face of his friend who was sucked away in mud.
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These
are the young bohemian artists of the day. They were active in
the late 1920s and 30s. Jo worked as a commercial artist and the
poet the young journalist on the Sydney papers ...In Sydney,
by spent aquarium-flare of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper, we
had argued about blowing up the world mixes almost exotically
with your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales of Irish
kings English perfidy, and dirtier perfidy of publicans groaning
to God from Darlinghurst. From this I gather images of people
today in those wonderfully abusive reveries mined out of the tunnels
of excess, the sort of XTC in the endless hours before dawn where
one has lived upon the effects of eternity. I think that to know
someone in a real sense you have get a feel where they evolved
from so that there is more than a pulse or thumbprint, but sadly
it seems that in the Cross the city is endlessly introduced to
a floating population who struggle to hang in there, and I suppose
it will always be the group that quite literally avoids the deep
and has cheated time. You were living backwards, so each night
you crept a moment closer to the breast, and they were living,
all of them, those frames and shapes of flesh that had perplexed
your youth. Slessor displays a subtle use of time-key here,
as reflection on memory rocking back and forth - but I hear nothing
except memory - is a distortion of the familiarity that had initially
existed between two friends, the two larrikin mates, collaborators
in youth, that leaves the poet very much on shore down in Billyard
Avenue from the dark warship riding there below years later.
By the early 1950s the poet totally abandons verse and the artistic
enterprise came to a halt.
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A place
like the Cross is like a nodal point of transits, urbanization
soaking up the post-war migrant experience -that moment of an
infant cosmopolitanism, the New Australian experience, and this
often confusing climate of change symbolized in the ideals of
a radical political tradition was sometimes violently translated
into new forms by local writers in the Cold-war period of the
late forties and the 1950s. Although the movements in the making
of modernism in Australian poetry seem too constantly anglocentric
and polite in form and pattern, another less cultivated voice
emerged from the Bohemian traditions around the Cross and inner
city Sydney at this time. Here people like Harry Hooten, the iconoclast,
produced less predictable poetics, the sort that extort a philosophical
and political search, a didactic revolutionary voice, egalitarian
republican utopian. The politics were Trotskyist, anarchist, the
manner often nihilist. The challenge was the very structure of
society, rather than the positioning of artistic styles and taste.
Hooten's brand of urban, poetic, philosophizing was less about actual geographic spaces the likes of which had been mapped out in works by Slessor's such as `William St' or his `Five Bells,' a signature for Sydney Harbour. Hooten wrote about spiritualism in an atomic society. He was the vanguard of a revolution that seemed never likely to explode here, a feeling that was quickly consumed and folded into the voraciousness of the new capitalism of a modern Sydney. But old working Sydney, Labor Sydney, Sydney for the workers of the new age, a poetic that came out of the voice handed down by Henry Lawson and Walt Whitman and a movement of peoples' politics is what boomed from the emphatic writings of Hooten. |
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Photographs by Peter Lyssiotis, taken from the book "The Harbour Breathes". |
Within
the artistic assessment of the nature of a Harry Hooten,
one might comply and examine the literary and structural conditions
forming the writing in the context of an emerging modernist tendency
of the post-war period in Australia literature but this seems
to defeat his purpose. Hooten was not a nationalist, but a globalist,
he was not surrealist - quite the opposite as he's better described
as a social realist. He is not an individualist and humanist in
the same way that his contemporaries like Judith Wright and Alec
Hope might be seen. Hooten was a writer committed to new politics,
philosophy and poetics. He has been branded as a ideologue, agitprop,
Trotskyite, anarchist, fanatic and propagandist. All very grand
claims for any Australian who has written in the last 210 years.
Such forms of classification distort the value of a person like
Hooten. His manner is homely, eccentric, again there is the larrikin
in his verbal poetics even an eccentric crackpot happy playing
mad. His work is not elitist in that anyone can consume and read
it, absorb its direction and intentions which seems in opposition
and different to the prevailing existentialism of the then fashionable
French philosophers and writers of the day, like Camus, Sartre
and Merlu-Ponty. His strategies of communication were grassroots,
think globally - act locally. Hooten's were effective strategies
designed for the robotic future - The only thing wrong with
architecture is the walls and the roof. If man still needs shelter,
he can erect a roof over himself, his cities, or for that matter
over the earth as a whole - not an opaque mass of brick and concrete
but one composed of transparent fields of nuclear energy.
He tackled big social and technical issues, responded to the political
calling-to-come of the industrial age that became the new front
in the post-war/cold-war period. The writing of Harry Hooten ultimately
is urbanist in outcome and projection, and was a core influence
in the inner-city radicalism of a Sydney avant-garde - a sound
and voice that was the beat.
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As you look out to the north from Paddington at the profile of the Cross, you have the impression of a citadel the towering hotel blocks and older more substantial apartment blocks. Here we enter the petit-metropolis, a Gotham that is compelled to act out the imaginative essence of the moment - a time contained inexplicably in its own urban mythology. This little stage at his disposal, I sense the voice of Hooten, his long sustained calling from the minarets , the chant...Oh Manity of Manity, "But isn't man's
humanity to man a man made mandate (from 21st Century p.21, 1957) The reason Hooten should feature is this discussion about poetry and a mythology of Kings Cross, is less literal and more virtual than say the sense of place that is the project in Slessor's work. The beat poets and intelligentsia hung out almost exclusively in the Cross in the 40s and 50s. This place was the village environment that nurtured a more bohemian or progressive approach. As I have suggested, within Hooten's thought pattern were his excellent futurist theories for urban industrial societies, like his circa 1951, "Anarcho-Technocracy - The Politics of Things . . . .All governments over men must be replaced by the administration of things." Here he proposes a world administered only by technicians, and calls for an Anarchist Dictatorship, realizing that machines are, "the workers of today". Hooten claims we are keeping machines out of jobs - and in the Technocratic Age that anarchism had to change also to remain as the vanguard, and so the technician shall rule THINGS - a government over things. And so it all gets madder and madder - "We want our utopia in the heart of the city, in the heart of Sydney. We need an urban utopia. We should not rest until we have rebuilt Sydney, scrapped it's hideous transportation, pulled down it's idiot architecture, fashioned it to fit the needs of civilized man." His are, the Hootonics of Language. Hooten's writings often reach a point of ecstasis , a pitch where the author voice is rarely disguised by aesthetic or compositional device and in this way there is an immediacy, a youthful sharp tongued critical style all of its own. His ongoing epigrammatic project called DIRECTIONS explore and experiment his particular philosophical proposals. I am interested to look at the fluxus-like qualities in his epigrams, and how they were not stable entities, susceptible to change each time they appeared in publication. 27. from Things You See When You Haven't Got A Gun, 1943. . . .The work of art is everything, the artist nothing; man's behavior is everything, man himself is nothing 27. from The Politics of Things, 1955. . . .There is no stronger force than an idea whose time has come. . .it is usually strong enough to crush the original idea and too strong to accept the better ideas and ideals which should supersede it. 27. from Its Great To Be Alive, 1961. . . .minds are vulgar, common; they are like artsouls - everyone's got one. And finally waving his flag he uttered. . . . BE CONSCIOUS OF THINGS I see a line of development from Slessor who exhibits a passionate sensuality of place and people, to Hooten, who as his name suggests, represents the louder sound of the chanting polemicist hoping to beat the government and the technology of capital, and Anna Couani whose personal journey through city landscapes combines political sensibilities and social obligation with a personal biographical voice. I draw Couani into a relationship with the mythologising systems of metropolitan spaces because her urban poetic visions evoke and express a lived experience of inner-city Sydney. Her images are taken from growing up in and constantly moving through this city and her movements and passages in the terrain mark out, not the defendable territories of urban myth as found in Slessor's Darlinghurst Nights but from a sense and feeling of a place, a prediction that something will happen next and political deduction. Her writing is not protestation, though it is oppositional and intervenes, it comes out of a carefully composed sequence of meditation that generates from intelligent observation of environmental and social causes and effects. Her collaboration with Melbourne photo-monteur Peter Lyssiotis in 1989 resulted in a small book of poems called The Harbour Breathes which opens in this challenging way, "The bridge on the outer quay. The beautiful Sydney has been robbed of its culture as though to pay for beautiful geography." Some of Hooton's technocracies echo here when Couani goes on to describe her survival . . . . "My body's been stripped and wounded and closed up again with plastic parts and metal plates. My hearts gone and the respirator works too hard to oxygenate the atmosphere and the sea spray contains so much detergent that it breaks down my protective layers. I've been torn into and inspected in all my pores and my bowels. Like robot-operated surgery." Here Couani is reflecting dualities throughout the text and her cities and their spaces end up looking like a multi-layered matrix of connections. She reflects the duality that portrays the essence of her being and the memories she inherits from her mother and father, her grandmother and these influences resonate when she writes, "My memories are my grandma's memories of the city and my mother's talks looking at the mountains, talking about The Ancient, about the beginning of the world like the 2001 movie track but more serious. And Dad feeling alien anywhere west of Parramatta or Broadway even. I felt his sense of relief on the days we came down to the city and he showed me what his Sydney was like." Her journey through the city so often repeated not with the resignation of futility but with expectation, her sense of time, and as memories that define that periodicity. Here the observation of the urban fabric becomes the skin of the city . . . . "In my city I found simple recognizable features. The arch, ornamental brickwork, post and lintel. From the sawdust filter, the duct crossing the lane in the air. The corrugated iron roofs, the planes at different angles. The simple church opposite the high-rise flats. The window at footpath level, the glass bricks in the pavement." The use of observation like this is similar in its nature to the techniques developed by painters and composers. Within the flow of The Harbour Breathes the writer allows many quiet asides to exist and these interludes suspend the movement and provide readers with a moment of change. These melodic details are extracted as features in an imaginary landscape of the mind, and isn't this how we navigate through space and time in real-life. Someone in a coffee lounge half-obscured by the reflections on the glass and construed as lonely . . . .Up to the library, into town, back from town, down to the pool, up to the park, down the street to the shop, to the corner shop. . . Here a certain concentration of the image as it forms the culture of its sign. These details are rendered while we wait for the next part of her movements to commence, here always that endless progressiveness endless by being defeated by dreams, memories and their histories. And every city has it's dreamers, architects, and management authorities; as Adelaide has the precision of the engineer William Light, Canberra has the circularity that radiates from the imaginations of Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley-Griffin, and in gridded Melbourne an accuracy and accountability might derive in part from the purist ideals of the early colonial Protestants, yet in a place like Sydney the scheme of things seems haphazard in terms of its spatial intentions. The city of Sydney emerged very differently and its inner city form is in part more arbitrary and organic due to a lot of improvisation in terms of civil engineering - it has a greater blend of influences and competing forces that forms the outline of the systems that construct its physical profile . . . . Sydney, evil city , a dream runs through you. In relation to the development of influences over things and people and the areas surrounding the Cross, one of the substantial energy factors that was a continuing stimulus to the artistic community of the area was the main national broadcasting studios of ABC Radio in the William Street and Forbes Street studios in Darlinghurst. Much of the enigma of the old bohemian Kings Cross was linked to the shifting population of actors, voices, technicians, producers, dramaturgs, writers, poets, singers, journalists, critics and archivists. These professional people tended to live nearby and often in The Cross, and in the pre-television age of Sydney they created a culture of sophistication and influence that was felt throughout the nation. This was a unique urban situation for any Australian neighbourhood. When the ABC studios were fully digitalised in 1991 the need for the large analogue studios were over and these operations closed down and sold up and moved to Harris Street, Ultimo. At the Forbes Street studios the closing broadcast event was a live improvised recital by the experimental jazz band The Necks playing in collaboration with Anna Couani who read The Harbour Breathes. The site is now dominated by Harry Siedler's massive Horizon apartment tower. This final broadcast was a fitting and creative farewell to this institution, a great programming decision, where many of the themes in The Harbour Breathes sensitively mingled with the ideas of the changing of history, of this particular neighbourhood. from The Fold a slow release and
a long search unfolding, folding back Surry Hills, Redfern Crown Street Those years we shared
that space Maybe the Cross has changed now and will move into a newer phase without the microphones of the ABC being pointed out to the rest of the country. At this present time more and more apartments and the higher income brackets are merging into the city domains and steal the views in their urban fortresses. The next generation moved out to the west where housing was cheap and our city became a playground of the rich. How these newcomers and those that have left will mythologise and remember the Cross is yet to be determined. In a memorable point in The Harbour Breathes, Anna Couani has made peace with her rememberings in her period in time, in a place, in a city of signs and systems and poetics : "Down at the stadium, the first Bob Dylan performance which was too late for us. His conviction already changed by money and drugs. But, as the march arrived at the entrance of the stadium, the clarinet hit us, not like Bob Dylan, really meant something, summed up the long thin group marching up William Street and down Bayswater Road. The beginnings of the thing which became the anti-Vietnam war movement." References: `The Harbour Breathes'Anna
Couani / Peter Lyssiotis. Published by Sea Cruise and Masterthief,
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