A POETRY LESSON

In our primary schooling, children of my generation were exposed to a great deal of poetry but within a very narrow range.  We learnt by heart My Country, Dorothea Mackaellar’s hymn to our wide brown land, and read some narrative poems about English derring-do on the high seas but, apart from that, the bulk of the poetry presented to us consisted of Australian bush ballads, so in our imagination we rode down the perilous slope to Dead Man’s  Creek on Mulga Bill’s Bicycle, turned the fleeing brumbies with the Man from Snowy River and came to understand just how Macdougall topped the score. We never so much as heard the name of T.S. Eliot mentioned in the class, even though the conscientious editors of the NSW School Magazine had included one of his Preludes in an edition.

I have only one memory of anything that resembled a poetry lesson rather than a mere poetry reading. When I was in what is now called Year Three, some good readers in the class were selected to perform and were rehearsed in a dramatic reading of the pirate stanza from Mabel Forrest’s Boy  Dreams,  a very Edwardian poem describing the adventure fantasies of an imaginative boy in which he is, by turns, a pirate, a fairy(!), a merman and an American backwoodsmen. The readers were even dressed-up in a very rudimentary costume.: bare feet, a colourful hanky tied around their heads, and a piece of red fabric as a sash,

I must admit I was rather sour at the selection of the performers. I knew that I was the best reader in the class, the one who was always selected to read a story to keep the class amused when the teacher needed to leave the room, but I was passed over for a performing role- too big, too clumsy.

The pirate stanza opens with the vivid and confronting boast,

I was a pirate once,

A blustering fellow with scarlet sash.,

A ready cutlass and language rash.

By contrast, Forrest’s fairy and even her merman reek of Pixie O’Harris

She then continues with images of violence and debauchery.

From a ship with a rum-filed water-tank

I made the enemy walk the plank.

I marooned a man on an island bare,

And seized his wife by her long, dark hair.

Took treasure, such heaps of it- wealth untold.

Bright bars of silver and chunks of gold.

She discretely refrains from describing what likely takes place following the pirate’s seizure of the woman. Surprisingly, she offers no disapproval of her pirate’s conduct but, rather, glamourises it through the employment of enticing imagery.

The poem no longer appears in children’s anthologies, and the proponents of Me Too would no doubt applaud this: sexual violence against women is no longer regarded as a routine prerogative of virile men and which is to be regarded with amused tolerance or, otherwise, a vehicle for erotic fantasy.

What is surprising, though, is that Mabel Forrest, of all women, should unselfconsciously employ it in its traditional titillating role in a children’s poem, for she knew only too well the reality of violence directed at women. She divorced from her brutal first husband to protect herself and her daughter after she was obliged to wrestle with him to prevent him from throttling the girl in a fit of temper and thereafter supported herself by her journalism until she remarried (happily), and then again after her second husband’s early death.

As a writer, she was extremely successful. In her native Queensland, only Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis), the creator if the iconic bush battlers, Dad and Dave and chronicler of their struggles on their Selection, being more highly regarded. Her  novels were published in the United Kingdom; and one, The Wild Moth, was even turned into a film by the great Australian cinema pioneer, Charles Chauvell.

She should be a heroine of Australian feminists as one who overcame horrific domestic abuse to become one of our most successful writers of the early twentieth century but, now, she is almost forgotten, the subject of a few academic papers but, otherwise, recalled only as the writer of a few politically incorrect liness in a children’s poem.

GARY IRELAND February 2025