Articles

Writing History with the Imagination

Susan Kruss, author of Calico Ceilings: The Women of Eureka (Five Islands Press 2004), explores the genre of historical poetry and some of the issues she discovered that confront the writer of this genre.

Historical poetry is not new. Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the Greek invasion of Troy. Since then, poets have written about historical people and events in various ways.

The anonymous ballads ‘Battle of Otterbourne’ and ‘Sir Patrick Spence’ seem to be based on real historical happenings. More recently, we have Tennyson’s ‘The charge of the light brigade’, Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ and Heaney’s ‘The strand at Lough Beg’. However, the thematic book-length collection based on a real historical character or event seems all but non-existent, unless perhaps we count Tennyson’s ‘Death of Arthur’ as a ‘book’ – and then we would have the issue of whether Arthur is an historical person or part of an imagined fantasy realm.

In recent years, however, Australian poets such as Dorothy Porter in Akhenaten (UQP 1992), Barry Hill in Ghosting William Buckley (Heinemann 1993) and Jordie Albiston in Botany Bay Document (Black Pepper 1996) and The Hanging of Jean Lee (Black Pepper 1998) have opened up new ways to think about historical poetry.

Dorothy Porter’s Akhenaten is a wonderful collection of lyrical poems that together as a collection tell a story, but this story is not spelt out for us in the book. Rather, we deduce the history from the poetry. This book broke new ground, and for me, as for other writers in Australia, it showed that historical poetry could be lively and interesting, and well written.

Barry Hill’s Ghosting William Buckley uses a range of forms and highly crafted poetic language to create a narrative which uses lyric devices in a book divided into sections, with a photographic representation at the beginning of each section, and excerpts at the end of sections from John Morgan’s account of Buckley’s life written in 1852.

Jordie Albiston has shown us that modern Australian poets can rediscover and retell stories in new ways that reveal not only new perspectives, but new information. Jordie’s use of rhythm, form and internal rhyme in these poems is also interesting and a breaking of new ground in terms of experimentation with what can be done poetically.

The past two years have seen several books of historical poetry published in Australia. There is my own Calico Ceilings: The Women of Eureka (Five Islands Press 2004), Adrienne Eberhard’s Jane, Lady Franklin (Black Pepper 2004), Winifred Weir’s Isabella (Five Islands Press 2003) and Miriel Lenore’s Drums and Bonnets (Wakefield Press 2003). In addition, there are individual historical poems and groups of poems within collections, such as Ian C. Smith’s Bounty sequence in These Fugitive Days (Ginninderra 2003).

Why the resurgence of interest in historical themes? My own view is that as the bicentenary has come and gone, we are realising that our early history is in danger of being lost if we do not research and record it. Genealogy is flourishing, with an increasing number people writing family histories and tracing family trees. For many people, it is the discovery of stories that is important – family stories, and how one’s own family fits into history.

As well as poetry, Australian historical novels are being published (Roger Macdonald’s Mr Darwin’s Shooter, Alan Atwood’s Burke’s Soldier, and several of Debra Adelaide’s novels spring to mind). And there are books of narrative history, such as Robyn Annear’s Gold and Bearbrass.

So why write historical poetry, historical fiction, or narrative history, rather than traditional academic history? Firstly, writing poetry, fiction or narrative history allows one to imagine beyond the ‘facts’ in a way that writing an academic history book does not. A creative writer wants to go beyond the facts, to use that wonderful part of the brain that fires out all kinds of ideas and imaginings.

A historical novel can allow the author to imagine a minor character or a series of conversations or events, based around what is known but using imagination to create stories.

Historical poetry, on the other hand, is often not narrative, though it may include narrative, but its focus is on asking questions like ‘How would it have felt?’ ‘What would it really be like?’ A poet can use all the senses to answer these questions – to recreate the mud, the dust, the smells, the sounds, the shapes, the colours and the emotional responses.

Of course, the historical novel or narrative history also uses imagination to recreate these scenes. So how does the writer of historical poetry differ from the writer of historical fiction or narrative history? The difference probably lies in the economy of language, the use of metaphor, and the use of rhythm and sound in a poem – that is, the things that differentiate poetry in general from other types of writing.

It is also quite likely that in a collection of historical poetry the whole story is not told. Events and characters may be omitted, and the poet may use narrative only as an underpinning for the poems, or may only glance obliquely at the narrative in passing.

A book of historical poetry is more likely to be drawn together by a series of interwoven threads that appear in different poems throughout the book. These could be images, motifs or ideas that are repeated or appear in different forms.

The poems in Akhenaten, as we have suggested, are lyrical poems. Apart from a brief description of Akhenaten’s life in the Introduction, no other historical information is provided except what is contained within the poems. And yet, for the reader, there is the sense of reading a story as one progresses through the book. The Hanging of Jean Lee works in a similar way as the events of Jean’s life unfold.

How much historical information to include in the book is another, related but different, issue for the writer of historical poetry. Unlike the historical novel or narrative history, a poem can only contain so much ‘information’. A poem overloaded with information is in danger of becoming a very bad poem, yet some knowledge of history can add to the reader’s enjoyment.

Botany Bay Document in some instances contains brief pieces of information slotted between the title and the poem. Isabella contains a very few quotations placed at the beginning of poems. In both of these books, the poems are close to standing alone.

Adrienne Eberhard in Jane, Lady Franklin presents the poems first, then follows with an Afterword, a chronology, and Notes to the poems. The poems often form sequences and the book is divided into sections about different aspects of Jane Franklin’s life.

Miriel Lenore’s Drums and Bonnets is divided into two parts. The first part, ‘The land of Macha’, contains poems written about the author’s visit to Ireland to try to find out about her great-grandmother’s life there. The second part, ‘The land of Gold’ contains poems about the author’s great-grandmother’s arrival in Australia and her life on the Ballarat diggings. There is a chronology of the great-grandmother’s life at the back of the book, but there is no other information.

Initially, Calico Ceilings was a book of poems with a chronology and brief introduction outlining the historical events of Eureka. I felt that it was not enough. The first readers who saw the manuscript asked things like ‘What about this poem about women on the goldfields reading books? Weren’t they illiterate? Have you just imagined they could read?’ or ‘Well, was this woman real or did you make her up?’ These were not the kinds of questions I hoped readers would ask, or the kinds of wonderings that added to understanding.

I tried footnotes, and then endnotes. They were clunky, written in the tone of academic history, and would probably have few readers. As I struggled with this dilemma, Ron Pretty, my publisher, suggested the addition of pictures. I think perhaps he had in mind photographs of individual women, but the only ones still in existence were taken many years later, of elderly women.

So I decided to look for contemporary artworks that included women. One of the pleasures of creating this book was a lovely stage of exploring paintings and sketches. I selected some sketches by Eugene von Guerard and S. T. Gill, took some photographs at the Old Ballarat Cemetery and the Eureka Monument, and discovered a lovely painting of the Bakery Hill meeting, painted at the time of the 100 year anniversary of Eureka in 1954.

Meanwhile, the problem of historical information remained. My son James came to the rescue, suggesting that I put information in the text of the book, in appropriate places in between the poems. This required a complete re-think of what should be included and where. I searched for original quotations wherever possible, so that the book became a collage of documentary information, artworks, and poems. I believe it works, and responses from readers have been a delight. The poems could stand alone as a text, but the reader experience would be less satisfying.

The inclusion or not of narrative, and the placement of historical information either in the poetry or in addition to the poetry, are not the only dilemma faced by writers of historical poetry.

A poet researches differently perhaps from a historian, in that the poet is searching for the moment, the detail, the phrase or the image that grabs the imagination and says, yes, there is a poem here! The historian, on the other hand, is concerned to provide a comprehensive picture, in which events are contextualised and reconstructed. So although a poet writing history will probably research the same sources in the same way as a historian, the things the poet takes from the research will be different. In some cases, if there is enough to form the poem, historical events before or after may be irrelevant.

However, having said that, a poet who writes historical poetry without thorough research runs the risk of writing fantasy where the history is twisted or inaccurate. There is no reason why a poet cannot write historically located pieces that are purely imagined, but there is then the next dilemma: does one state in the manuscript that one is fact and the other imagined, or does one mix them up and let the reader wonder?

Different poets have different views. In Calico Ceilings, I wanted the reader to know what was historical and where I had used imagination to fill the gaps or take it further. My motivation here was an intense admiration for the women I was writing about, and therefore I didn’t want to pretend that I had invented their stories. I wanted readers to know these women were real, and the events were real. But I also wanted to go further than the facts of their lives, into how they might have thought and felt, and what they might have said, and so I wanted readers to know that at this point the poems represented my imagining. Where direct quotations from the women were taken from letters or documents, I put these in italics so that readers would know that these were words the women actually said.

Creating voices from another time is fascinating, and occupied much of my thoughts while I was writing the book. How did people speak? I read diaries and accounts of incidents. I thought about speech patterns, foreign dialects, and use of colloquialisms. My eventual decision was to use these sparingly, partly because they are difficult to read, and partly because I found the use of unnatural (to me) speech rhythms made the poems seem artificial. What I did enjoy was writing a ‘dialect’ poem that used a lot of quoted speech from an Irish woman in a sly grog tent, writing a dialogic where two voices are interwoven so that the poem forms a conversation, and writing in the personas of some very different women, some imagined and in some cases using quotations from original documents as the basis for the voices.

Whether to write in first person or third person is another interesting aspect of writing a book of interlinked poetry. I chose to write some poems in each, simply because that seemed appropriate for the poem at the time of writing. Where I did create first person voices, I found this required me to have an imagined picture of the woman speaking that was sufficiently intense to create a unique voice that seemed to me to fit the personality of the woman whose thoughts I was imagining. Having once ‘heard’ the voice, it was fun to write a sequence in that voice.

Winifred Weir in Isabella effectively uses the voices of the two main characters throughout, but there is also interspersed the voice of the ship’s surgeon who writes about the women in third person, though his own thoughts are rendered in first person. There are several other characters who also comment on the events and the women, providing a range of perspectives. The two main women’s voices in Isabella are distinct, almost contrasting, so that they spark off each other in an extended dialogic.

Adrienne Eberhard in Jane, Lady Franklin writes in the first person, as she assumes the persona of Jane. Barry Hill in Ghosting William Buckley also writes in the first person, in the recreated voice of Buckley. Miriel Lenore in Drums and Bonnets writes first person poems where the speaker is the author searching for her great-grandmother’s past, and third person poems about her great-grandmother.

Another interesting issue in writing historical poetry is the extent to which one is writing history and the extent to which one is creating or reinforcing a myth or legend about our early history. This is particularly the case with Eureka, where there is historical fact on the one hand, and the retelling of the story in newspapers and other publications in a way that almost turns it into a legend. A similar issue arises when writing about Ned Kelly.

I was asked at one point whether I thought Eureka was a stand for democracy or a pointless rebellion. Was it something we should ‘celebrate’? Oddly, after all the reseach and the hours I had spent reading various theories, I didn’t really have a view. What interests me as a poet is the stories of the women, their lives, their strength, the motifs of their lives, and the silence of their voices for so long. The events of Eureka impinged on those lives, in some cases changing them forever. I don’t know whether we should ‘celebrate’ the events of Eureka, though I do think we should ensure that they are not forgotten. But I am certain that the lives of the women should be celebrated.

My intention in Calico Ceilings was to explore the women’s lives. I did not expect to find what I found – the amazing strength the women displayed, the sheer variety of experience. Have I romanticised their lives? Perhaps, though I have consciously explored the dark side – the dust, the mud, the deaths of children, the poverty, the prostitution, the sly grog. Have I added to the legend that has become ‘Eureka’ in the public consciousness? Possibly. But I hope if I have, that it has been done in a good way – one which adds to the body of literature and adds to collective understanding of what Eureka might be about.

This article was published in WriteOn, Victorian Writers Centre magazine, 2005 and an abbreviated version was published in the newsletter of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.