Dr Thomas H. Ford, Senior Lecturer in English, is working to highlight the forgotten role of poetry in Australia’s political history.
Dr Ford’s research, which is funded by an Australian Research Council grant, will be the first comprehensive study of colonial Australian poetry from 1788 to 1901.
He says while poetry may now be considered a niche cultural interest with no impact on mainstream politics, things were very different in the nineteenth century.
“In the colonial days, leading politicians were often highly active poets. When they weren't drafting Australia's constitution, men like Alfred Deakin or Samuel Griffith could often be found writing poetry. Even the name of the place, Australia, first entered the language in a poem,” he says.
“My research returns to the nineteenth century to examine how poets helped write Australia into being. It will allow us to have a better understanding of Australia's literary heritage and its critical contributions to culture and nationhood,” he says.
Dr Ford’s research will also examine how colonial poetry engaged with Aboriginal people and cultures.
“White Australia may well have kept mostly silent about Aboriginal history for much of the twentieth century. But in the nineteenth century, settlers appear to have been remarkably keen to write about Aboriginal people.”
He says this took many forms, ranging from the astonishingly racist to the genuinely curious.
“Most often, it seems to have involved settler poets ventriloquizing Aboriginal people and speaking in their place. For example, there's a rather unpleasant subgenre of nineteenth-century Australian poems called 'Aboriginal laments’, in which settler poets wrote in the voice of an Aboriginal person mourning their vanished community.”
However, Dr Ford notes that some settler writings also involved transliterations and translations of Aboriginal songs.
“In many cases, these archival records have now become important for community projects of Language revitalisation.”
Dr Ford will undertake his research project, which will include books, journal articles and conference presentations, over the next four years.
