John Anderson — a Memoir

“Stop the car,” he would call, then clamber out onto an unremarkable roadside to find the thing he was looking for — a wildflower, an insect, a fungus, or, down a slope in a hidden gully, a particularly fine specimen of gum tree. Sometimes it required an effort of imagination to see what he saw, sometimes the revelation was powerful and immediate.

Driving in the bush with John Anderson was a slow business and stops were frequent. He was a teacher. Often he would simply gaze and point. Such gestures were irresistible. He was a student of nature, a committed discoverer of gems in abused and neglected places. He was also one of the best Australian poets of his generation.

Anderson, physically, left a vivid impression. Tall and rangy, with long brown hair and dark hooded eyes, he moved with an awkward grace, approaching people with a hesitancy that masked the extrovert’s love of company and attention. He had no interest in money or possessions — apart from books, small artworks and found objects that he collected. He loved to travel, and knew most of Australia. He walked, he slept on the ground in the open, he knew places intimately.

John Anderson was born in 1948 and grew up on an orchard in the Goulburn Valley near Kyabram, Victoria. His mother’s love of literature inspired him to write; his father inspired his interest in nature. He knew he was a poet from an early age. His two preoccupations came together in his life’s project: to create a poetry of the Australian landscape. His early poems are exuberant and witty; they don’t take themselves seriously. But through the seventies he became aware of the importance and seriousness of his theme. His writing acquired a foundation of careful research as he studied his subject, maintaining copious notes in the innumerable exercise books that accompanied him on his travels. He recognised that we were not made for the world that we have made; we are organic and belong more truly to the natural world. He set out to describe that world so that people could place themselves within it.

Anderson’s poems are often didactic, seeking to indicate the neglected spaces that people have shunned, and urging reconciliation with the natural world. This is no yearning for a lost Arcadia nor New Age rejection of technology; it is a desire for the integration of our two worlds, for completeness.

He travelled widely in Europe, Asia and New Guinea but he found the subject of his poetry in his native land. In Australia, Europeans and their culture were still in transit. In two hundred years they had changed the landscape utterly; they had been in such a hurry to master this strange continent that many things were lost before they were recognised. Few European Australians have achieved an organic relationship with the land, and the uneasy feeling lingers of a people perched on the rim of a vast unknown, their over-confident philistinism evidence of deep disconnection.

Anderson’s poetry argues persistently, quietly, for people to make connection with the natural world, to value the roadside things they drive past, to value and relate to their landscapes as they value and relate to one another.

Many Australians still experience the feeling of being in a backwater, of being carps in the antipodean stream. Internationalism has been embraced by many, and has provided some solace, but no sense of identity. Anderson’s poetry seeks to create an integrated identity applying the English language to the Australian landscape. Integration of European and native is still unusual in Australian public life, where a Prime Minister can refuse to apologise for two centures of abuse for fear of lawsuits.

Anderson’s is by no means a solitary voice. More and more people are finding spiritual values in the countryside, more and more are seeking a deeper knowledge of the land that was an adversary to earlier generations. Sustainable agriculture is widely understood and practised now, and landcare is a primary concern of many farmers. Millions of ordinary Australians desiring reconciliation have made their own private apologies to the Aboriginal people. Now is the time for Anderson’s poems to speak to this wider audience.

Unlike Les Murray, who writes of a people and their culture, and for whom the landscape is an element in a human narrative, Anderson celebrates his land for its own sake; he writes landscapes. His is a poetry of particular places. He rediscovers the sacred in natural things, where the sacred always ultimately resides.

His method is to reveal the landscape as something other than the despised and abused hillsides and weed-choked watercourses that we disregard in our daily lives. He names things and their relationships — the gum trees in moonlight, in a mystical alliance with the stars; glints and sparkles in the leaf litter at midday; birdcalls. He uses dreams and dream images to evoke the sacred in these everyday things.

He develops a cosmography of natural forms: the lanceolate gum leaf mirrored by the lanceolate parrot; the round pebble tortoise mirrored by the river stones. He sees how natural forms complement and repeat one another, and argues that surely we too can be part of this complementation, this shaping and accommodation.

His short lyrics are full of bush music — the whispering grasses and grass birds, the violet magpie songs; while deeper rhythms are developed in the longer poems, the rise and fall of the mountain ranges, the tides, the seasons.

Anderson’s poems have a natural clarity, but often he pushes words beyond everyday syntax to describe the experiences whose expression lies at the limits of language — the gestures, the strange juxtapositions that arise in dreams. He retains the words of dreams and explores their multiple suggestions. He exposes deeper levels of human consciousness and understanding, and lays bare those underlying connections, the filaments of desire that touch the rocks, reach in to the hollows and bind us to the stars. Our love, our capacity to love, depends on our love for the natural world. That is our hope for completeness. Anderson knew, and said over and over, that we could be here, in this world, fully, completely, if only we could give our attention to the natural world around us. An attunement. A walk along the creek.

His beautiful lines are more beautiful because they are unexpected: he doesn’t strive for them; they arise naturally in their places — the holy trees, the cascades of stars and the river redgums by the river. In his last poems, among them the haunting pantoums, he writes with poignancy, and an awareness of his mortality.

John Anderson was well-known in Melbourne poetry circles for twenty years or more. In the mid-seventies he was introduced to the New Poetry scene by Kris Hemensley, and Robert Kenny, who published his first book, the bluegum smokes a long cigar in 1978 in the Rigmarole series. He was a frequent reader at poetry festivals, published in many Australian poetry magazines, and read on radio, but seventeen years passed before his second book appeared: the forest set out like the night (Black Pepper, 1995). He wrote slowly and worked on poems for long periods before he was satisfied with them. Even then, publishers were luke-warm. His preoccupation with landscape did not attract them much in the eighties, and his writing was not considered mainstream.

The tide turned in the nineties, and in recent years his work has received tributes from all quarters. He was awarded a major Australia Council grant in 1996 to pursue a study of gorge landscapes. His third book, The Shadow’s Keep (Black Pepper, 1997) was published just prior to his death and received considerable acclaim. Anderson died suddenly of leukaemia in October 1997, shortly after returning to Melbourne from a three-month tour of the Hamersley Ranges in Western Australia. A Selected Poems is in preparation.