20 May 1948 – 1 May 2021
THE PROPERTIES OF WATER
I.
Stamp as you walk on the sand.
It is hot, but not too hot, when hot
is the only alternative.
Stand at the water's edge. A wave tackles
your knees, and you lean against it.
Run, lifting your feet high, one after
the other, through the push
and pull, into the midriff of a wave.
Gasp your wits together. Quickly,
under the next wave. It fumes
and your dark head bobs in the swirl.
Swim. Roll with an ocean-going gait.
Elbows rib the air with cathedral strokes.
This is all the freedom you ever wanted.
Over your shoulder, a wave swells.
Kick hard, harder, arms windmilling.
The wave rushes you from deep-water
shadows to figurehead triumph. For a sweet moment
you are the wave.
The wave turns bully, smacks
down hard on the shell grit of the sea bottom
and tries to drown you.
Play possum, lie doggo, let the wave
have its way. It is only sport.
The wave, after all, will boil to nothing.
II.
Narrow beans became Narrabeen became
a suburb belly up in the salt and the sun.
Couch grass presses the pavement apart.
The sand learned its tricks from Houdini,
and anything that isn't flesh, and some
that is, rusts. The beach is as resigned
as a misused wife, and even less forgiving.
The lagoon stretches indolent limbs
and casts a calculating eye on the tide.
III.
Narrabeen is the beach of my childhood,
sentiment's favourite.
We surfed until we shone.
Our eyes stung. Our skins smelled of sun.
We lapped our way to dreams of Olympic fame
in the pool cemented to the rock of the headland.
We trudged from Long Reef to Warriewood and back,
uncomplaining explorers in training for life.
Narrabeen billows in my memory, sets sail
for innocent times. Remember Lot's wife,
and I do, I do remember her.
Stand long enough on the headland looking out,
you see the future.
Spring 1987
It was not as a poet but as an editor of poetry that Kate Jennings — born Catherine Ruth Jennings in Temora, a small town in the Riverina region of New South Wales, on 20 May 1948 — first made her mark on the Australian literary scene. She edited a 1975 collection of feminist poetry titled Mother I'm Rooted which caused great controversy at the time for its depictions of women struggling against the oppressive power of a male-dominated society, following it that same year with Come To Me My Melancholy Baby, her first solo collection of poetry.
Editing what was deemed by the male establishment to be such a strident if not dangerous publication was by no means Jennings's first brush with controversy. In 1970, while attending a protest march against the Vietnam War at the University of Sydney, she made a now legendary speech attacking those who dismissed the concerns of women as being trivial and irrelevant, famously comparing the number of men who had died in the war with the number of Australian women who had died after receiving illegal abortions. The speech is often cited as the starting point of the second wave of feminism in Australia, carrying forward the work of Germaine Greer and other feminist writers who rose to prominence in the Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1979 Jennings moved to New York City where she continued to write, publishing articles and opinion pieces that shone a sometimes unwanted spotlight on both Australian and North American society, particularly their financial sectors which she gained first-hand knowledge of while employed as a speechwriter to a male Wall Street executive. This followed her 1987 marriage to graphic artist Bob Cato, a man twenty-five years her senior, and Cato being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1991. 'Life never ever turns out like you think it will,' Jennings observed in a 2008 interview. 'But illness costs a lot in the United States, and I was advised that for the first time in my life I had to earn proper money.' These experiences would later form the basis of her second novel Moral Hazard which appeared in 2002 and went on to win her the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the NSW Premier's Award and the 2003 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Like her first novel, Moral Hazard was also listed as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Jennings remained in New York following her husband's death in March 1999 and continued to write, publishing a variety of articles and books including Stanley and Sophie (2008), a memoir about her dogs in which she describes her life in the city in the wake of 9/11 and reflects on the role of feminism in the twenty-first century, and the collection Trouble: Evolution of a Radical – Selected Writings 1973-2010 (2010) containing the best of her work about politics, feminism, language, finance and literature. Despite having published only two relatively short novels, she was still deservedly regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers when she died on 1 May 2021 at the age of seventy-two.
Use the link below to read a short essay about Australian poet, essayist, novelist and speechwriter KATE JENNINGS posted in the online archive of Poetry Sydney:
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