Dennis Haskell’s speech at the ceremony for the 2011 Australia Council Writers Emeritus award

The Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts is pleased to announce Australian poet Robert Gray as the recipient of this year’s $50,000 Australia Council Writers’ Emeritus award.

 

The Literature Board’s main activity is to give grants to selected writers, writers’ organizations, magazines and publishers, but

once a year it considers nominations for its Emeritus Award. This is not a grant but an award in recognition of an individual’s

contribution to Australian literature through the creation of a significant and substantial body of creative work. It is the major

award for literature offered by the Australia Council and is the closest thing that the nation has to a Nobel Prize for literature for

Australians. In many years no award is made. I am delighted to announce that in 2011 the Literature Board has decided to

make an award, and it is to the poet, editor, reviewer and memoirist, Robert Gray.

 

Robert is best-known as one of Australia’s major poets, the author of eight individual volumes published in Australia and

overseas, plus a number of editions of a Selected Poems, ever expanding like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He is also, with

Geoffrey Lehmann, an important anthologist of Australian poetry, work which has culminated in their publication this year of

Australian Poetry Since 1788, at 1100 pages the largest and most comprehensive anthology of Australian poetry ever to

appear. Robert is also the author of an extraordinary memoir, The Land I Came Through Last; the title comes from Christopher

Brennan, a poet utterly unlike Robert Gray, although both have been wanderers of sorts. The Land I Came Through Last is so

lyrically written that it is viable to read it as a long prose poem. As with all Robert’s work, it is tempting to quote from it endlessly

but I’ll save that temptation for the poetry. The memoir does present some of Robert’s key ideas, and his courage in adopting

and defending them, for most of them have been intellectually unfashionable. One of these ideas is a valuing of realism.

“Realism,” he writes, “is the foundation of art”:

 

              whatever forays we make from that, and we certainly need to experiment, they are minor forms. .. Realism in art is innately

             satisfying-it bites down hard into our experience. It is not just style, but is morality – a respect for what is outside ourselves. To

             feel we have before us an effort at the truth adds another dimension to a work of art.

 

It is surprising to think of realism as morality as well as aesthetics but it is typical of Robert to come up with such originality of

thought. It is fundamental to him to deflect attention from himself, even in a memoir, to “what is outside ourselves”. We also

have here a belief in the value of any experience, and in the concept of truth. He writes elsewhere that “the commonplace is

the sublime”. All these ideas underlie all of Robert’S writing, including short poems that might on the surface seem just

presentations of images. He is a very philosophical writer.

 

I’m making Robert sound professorially serious; in fact he has a wonderful, razor-like sense of humour. The Literature Board

meets, probably to the horror of many grant applicants, in the Patrick White Room, and Patrick White’s curmudgeonly face

grimaces at us from one wall. I’m pleased to say that Gray is very different to White. Robert was the first winner of the Patrick

White Award, at White’s direction, for they knew each other. Robert says that when he first met Patrick White “His mouth was

like a folded warrant for someone’s arrest”. Invited to dinner for the first time, Robert found White “inclined toward me aggressively, with the

demeanour of a buzzard whose appetite was about to return”. He displayed “a smile as bleak as moonlight on a drought-stricken paddock”.

 

Aside from in Patrick White’s face, this brilliance of imagery is found everywhere in Robert’s poetry, and it is integral to his

belief in the value of things in and for themselves. Unusually in the Western poetic tradition his imagery does not point to a

spiritual meaning beyond the physical. “Things as they are are what is mystical”, he writes, in a deliberately perverse use of the

word “mystical”. “Do not believe those who have promised … that something can be better than the earth”. “Our only paradise

is the ordinary: to be fed by what is really here”... “things are worthy … of ultimate stature”. Thus he seeks a poetry of clarity,

of a certain wonder and quietude before the external world without the self imposing itself on the world. “Our only place / is to

be what we are, to be the dust / of this world”. His poetry also celebrates the sensory qualities of the things of the world,

particularly in nature: sensory awareness is at least as essential as intellect for perception and understanding: “the world has

weight / and colours and contours, / it has a particular / content, and light”. Fascinated by painting, Gray has the best eye in

Australian poetry: a propped piano lid becomes an “urgent sail, far from home”, Venice’s Grand Canal “can seem a swan, / with

its throat stretched out”.

 

Robert does have one defiant poem that is a kind of negative creed. It’s titled “Illusions” and includes:

 

                   That humans are a special creation, above the animals. That there is progress in att. That there have been works of att produced

                   in Hollywood. That the specialist in a subject sees it more clearly than does a layman with common sense. That there is a ‘self.

                  That Post-Structuralist Theory is of some significance. That an requires theory.

 

You can see that his is a defiant, independent intellect, but he has consistently sought an art of sincerity, clarity and sensory

awareness, a poetry of humility and celebration that is accessible to all readers. Many readers of his work have pointed to his

interest in Buddhism, and he is one of the very few Australian writers drawn to Asian culture because of its philosophical

beliefs. As part of this stance, he is also profoundly concerned with connections, and this is another function of his imagery, in

which different elements of the world are likened, but never yoked by violence together. He has a poem titled, appropriately for

this occasion, “Acceptance Speech”, which in its final stanza “accepts all that is / as indivisible; sees it is dependent / on

everything in time”. Thus we get poems such as the haiku,

 

                 The sky, thick with stars, is the floor of a saucepan that’s about to boil

 

in which there is a touch of humour as well as indivisibility.

 

His poems though, also frequently contain a less-recognised sense of poignancy, perceptions edged with a sense of longing.

The whole poem “A Stranger” reads:

 

                  I saw how she envied, when she looked out of the bus, that football, even, which they had skyed as in all their lunchtimes, and

                  which came dropping past the silver tanks, safely, to someone’s arms.

 

Another of Robert’s poems declares, “What is most needed is that we become more modest,” but in the effort to make him less

so in the past he has won NSW and Victorian Premier’s Prizes, the Adelaide Writers Week Prize for Poetry, the previously

mentioned Patrick White Award, a number of Literature Board grants, and now, to add to the collection, the Australia Council’s

highest honour, the Emeritus Award, which I now ask him to come forward and accept.

 

               The Australia Council Writers Emeritus (http://www.australiacouncil.go.au/grant/writers emeritus award

               literature) acknowledges the achievements of eminent literary writers 60 years of age and over who have made

               outstanding and lifelong contributions to Australian literature. The award is valued at $50,000.

 

              The 2011 award was presented at a ceremony at the Australia Council for the Arts on Friday, 25 November 2011. Please

                read the media release (http://www.australiacouncil.gov.aua/=117462) for more information about Robert Gray and the  2011                                        award.