Back To The Fields Of Youth

Abstract

There is also the sense of loss and longing for former times resonating in Hewett's tenderly described self-revelatory piece, "Exile": "Exiled for 60 years / let me return / as a handful of old bones / or a casket of dust.\n

THE GREAT southern wheat-growing district of Western Australia is the impetus for this collection of prose and poetry by Dorothy Hewett and John Kinsella. Both writers grew up in the district and have been significantly influenced by the land, its people and folklore.

Hewett notes that a "country childhood was the best possible forming ground for the poet", whereas Kinsella recalls that the family farm, named Wheatlands, was an "escape" where the "desolation became mythological".

The book is a harmonious blending of two very distinct voices. Hewett is the senior partner- at least in terms of age - in the book and writes:

"When I first began to read John Kinsella's poetry I had an extraordinary feeling of kinship. Separated by time and loss, I realised that we were coming from the same place."

With a return to the engravings of childhood, memory shapes many of the contributions in the book.

For Hewett, this can be "the sweat and brutality of labour", whereas for Kinsella, "When things were emotionally hard it was the farm that offered me refuge." WHEATLANDS. By Dorothy Hewett and John Kinsella. Fremantle Arts Centre Press. 143pp. $19.95. Reviewer: CHRISTOPHER BANTICK.

The pieces shift from the lyricism of rurally inspired poetry to introspective self-examination born of landscape. In her poem "The Witnesses", Hewett writes:

"This is the wide country / I lived in when I was young, / The great clouds over it / The hawk in the high sky hung . . . "

For her, Lambeth Downs, the family farm, had become her "home, my seed bed, never to be taken away even though it would be eventually sold out of the family in the 1960s".

Wheatlands is, by its nature, an intensely personal book. This is emphasised by the selection of photographs included by the authors, showing them as children and the landscape as they knew it. The result is an evocative combination of words and images.

But the book is not a family album of sentimental reflections. Kinsella's rust-hard imagery forces us to consider that childhood is a time when experiences and sights are embossed on long-term memory. In "Rainwater Tanks - Summer" he observes:

"Steel moulds sledgehammered into place / and the mesh bone structure holding / the hard grey flesh; or the elevated cylinders / corrugated like ripples in clear water."

For him, Wheatlands is a part of Australia where there is a constant battle between the intensity of the seasons and the struggle to make a living. This is explored pungently in the piece "The Hierarchy of Sheep - a report from my brother":

"A fly-struck wether with flesh / hanging in sheets and flies erupting / from its rib cage has a fly-killing / poison sprayed into its cavities - "

The enduring quality of this collection is the way poetry and prose - augmented with narrative black-and-white photographs - enhance our understanding and appreciation of one area of Australia. There is also the sense of loss and longing for former times resonating in Hewett's tenderly described self-revelatory piece, "Exile":

"Exiled for 60 years / let me return / as a handful of old bones / or a casket of dust."