Poet of the Month 098: RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP

 

RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP

2018

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT WATER BRINGS

 

 

we are learning archaeologies of loss

rummaging along edge of island

turning each gift left by the tide

 

meanwhile, unseen at the edge of the atoll, fifty-eight

Tamils are escorted in; navy ship grey, fishing boat festive

jubilant in sunlight

 

within the lagoon’s still waters officers

insist on life jackets, clothing refugees

in orange irony

 

from SIEV to zodiac, zodiac to Customs, Customs to shore

shore to bus, they are watched, guided, guarded

a headline brews

 

but here we are oblivious, searching amongst the seaweed

finding thongs, whole bulbs and bottles, a toy soldier

minus his head

 

later, we drive through palms beneath tall towers of cloud,

past the Quarantine Station where the bus has just arrived

and the dust will not settle. 

 

from the 2018 UWA collection

The Sky Runs Right Through Us

 

 

Use the link below to read more about West Australian poet and writer RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP:

https://fremantlepress.com.au/contributor/renee-pettitt-schipp/

 

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Poet of the Month 077: KATE JENNINGS

Poet of the Month 045: NICULINA OPREA

 

 

Poet of the Month 022: FAY ZWICKY

 

Poet of the Month 094: LES MURRAY

 

LES MURRAY, c 2001

 

 

 

THE PAST EVER PRESENT

 

 

Love is always an awarded thing

but some are no winners, of no awarding class.

Each is a song that they themselves can't sing.

 

For months of sundays, singlehanded under iron, with the flies,

they used to be safe from that dizzying small-town sex

whose ridicule brought a shamed evasion to their eyes. 

Disdaining the relegated as themselves, they eyed the vividest

for whom inept gentleness without prestige was slow.

Pity even the best, then, when they're made second best.

 

Consider the self-sentenced who heel the earth round with shy feet

and the wallflower who weeps not from her eyes but her palms

and those who don't master the patter, or whom the codes defeat.

 

If love is always an awarded thing

some have cursed the judging and screamed off down old roads

and all that they killed were the song they couldn't sing.

 

 

 

from

Fox Dog Field 

(1990) 

A sometimes controversial figure in Australian literature for his anti-academic, anti-liberal, anti-modernist, anti-abstruse attitude to poetry, Les Murray rose from humble beginnings — he was born in the tiny New South Wales town of Nabiac on 17 October 1938 and spent his formative years in the nearby town of Bunyah, to which he permanently returned in 1985 after travelling extensively in Europe and the UK — to become one of the country's leading literary exports and its most internationally lauded and widely read poet. 

 

Murray grew up on his father's dairy farm where he developed his lifelong love of nature.  His world changed drastically, however, when his mother died of a miscarriage when he was twelve — an event that sent his father spiralling into severe grief-fuelled depression, an affliction that Murray himself would fall victim to in later life despite his natural ebullience and the Roman Catholic faith he adopted after marrying fellow student Valerie Morelli in 1962.  (They would remain married until his death and produce five children together.)

 

After graduating from the University of Sydney with a degree in Modern Languages Murray worked for several years as a translator at the Australian National University in Canberra.  Having decided at the age of eighteen that he wanted to be a poet, he published his first poem in the nationally distributed magazine The Bulletin in 1961.  Ten years later, having published the collections The Ilex Tree (1965) and The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969) in the meantime, he left his job to devote himself to poetry full-time, publishing more than forty collections along with many works of criticism plus two verse novels and a short but telling memoir of his struggle with depression titled Killing the Black Dog (2011) between 1972 and his death in 2019.

 

Murray also won several prestigious literary awards, including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (in 1984 and 1993), the Griffin Poetry Prize (in 2001 and 2002), the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (he was also awarded the Order of Australia despite being an avowed republican) and the TS Eliot Prize (despite his negative response to Eliot's work) for his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems. 

 

 

Use the link below to read the obituary of Australian poet, editor and critic LES MURRAY (1938-2019):

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/01/les-murray-obituary

 

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Poet of the Month 086: TONY BIRCH

 

Poet of the Month 076: OODERGOO NOONUCCAL

 

 

Poet of the Month 072: JUDITH WRIGHT

 

 

Poet of the Month 086: TONY BIRCH

 

TONY BIRCH

 

 

 

 

 

BLACK OPHELIA

 

 

deny the cross

the holy word

deny the gun

 

the wire and hoe

caste and colour

theft of ground of bodies

 

go and be and be

with the drifting river

with the spirit water

 

go

 

to the water

the water

the water

 

go

 

Black Ophelia

shimmering within

a sheet of glass

 

whispered lips to beating heart

she sounds — always was

always will be…

? 2021

 

 

 

Australian novelist, poet, academic and political activist Tony Birch was born in 1957 and grew up in what was then considered to be the slum area of Fitzroy in the city of Melbourne.  Of mixed indigenous, Barbadian convict, Irish and Afghan heritage, Birch worked as a telegram messenger after being expelled from school and then as a firefighter.  He left the latter profession in 1987 to enroll as a mature age student at the University of Melbourne and went on to win the Chancellor's Medal for the best PhD dissertation in the Arts in 2003.

 

In 2006 Birch published his debut novel Shadowboxing.  This was followed three years later by Father's Day, the first of four widely praised story collections.  His literary reputation was cemented with the publication of his second novel Blood in 2011 which saw him shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award.

 

In 2017, two years after receiving the inaugural Dr Bruce McGuinness Indigenous Research Fellowship at Victoria University, Birch received the Patrick White Literary Award for his contributions to Australian literature.  His bestselling novel The White Girl appeared in 2019 and was followed in 2021 by his fifth story collection Dark As Last Night and Whisper Songs, his debut volume of poetry.  In December 2022 Birch was named the third Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.  

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a 2019 interview with Australian novelist, poet, academic and political activist TONY BIRCH:

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/07/tony-birch-on-the-white-girl-no-aboriginal-person-i-know-is-intact

 

 

 

 

You can also use this link to read more poems by TONY BIRCH:

 

 

https://redroompoetry.org/poets/tony-birch/ 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 076: OODGEROO NOONUCCAL

 

 

Poet of the Month 047: DEREK WALCOTT

 

 

Poet of the Month 077: KATE JENNINGS

 

Poet of the Month 077: KATE JENNINGS

 

 

KATE JENNINGS

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:

 

 

 

https://poetrysydney.org/kate-jennings-book-of-rememberance/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 069: ROSEMARY TONKS

 

Poet of the Month 076: OODGEROO NOONUCCAL

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 072: JUDITH WRIGHT  

 

 

Poet of the Month 076: OODGEROO NOONUCCAL

OODGEROO NOONUCCAL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WE ARE GOING

 

 

 

They came in to the little town
A semi-naked band subdued and silent
All that remained of their tribe.
They came here to the place of their old bora ground
Where now the many white men hurry about like ants.
Notice of the estate agent reads: 'Rubbish May Be Tipped Here'.
Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.
'We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers.
We belong here, we are of the old ways.
We are the corroboree and the bora ground,
We are the old ceremonies, the laws of the elders.
We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the tribal legends told.
We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games, the wandering camp fires.
We are the lightening bolt over Gaphembah Hill
Quick and terrible,
And the Thunderer after him, that loud fellow.
We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon.
We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp fires burn low.
We are nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.'

 

 

 

1964

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Australian black rights activist, poet, environmentalist and educator Oodgero Noonuccal was born 'Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska' on 3 November 1920 in the Queensland city of Brisbane.  Her father Ted was of Noonuccal descent while her mother Lucy was the product of a union between an Aboriginal woman and a Scottish immigrant.  Their daughter, the second youngest of their seven children, grew up in a settlement near Dunwich on North Stradbroke Island or 'Minjerribah' as it was known to its traditional owners, the Noonuccal people.  She was educated at the Dunwich State School, leaving at the age of fourteen to take up employment as a domestic servant, a job for which she was paid substantially less than a white employee of the same age and sex would have been paid at the time.

 

 

Kathleen Ruska, as she was known until 1943 when she married Bruce Walker, a childhood friend whose people came from the Logan and Albert Rivers region of Queensland, served in World War Two as a signaller and administrator, eventually rising to the rank of Lance Corporal.  She had already begun to write by the end of the war but, after giving birth to a son named Denis and the breakdown of her marriage, had to put her literary ambitions aside to focus her energies on raising him.  This saw her return to domestic work, primarily for the Brisbane doctor Sir Rafael Cilento and his family.  In 1953 the doctor's son became the father of her second son Vivian.

 

 

In the late 1940s Kath Walker joined the Communist Party of Australia, the only party which openly opposed racial discrimination in a country which still treated its indigenous people as third class citizens.  She remained with the party, learning how to plan and organise and write speeches, until its leadership began to interfere with the latter activity, leading her to resign.  She subsequently joined the Brisbane Realist Writers Group where she was encouraged in her literary endeavours by fellow member James Devaney.  It was Devaney who sent a selection of her poetry to Dame Mary Gilmore, the 'grand old lady' of Australian literature.  Walker would eventually go on to win the literary medal named in honour of her fellow poet.

 

 

Walker's first volume of poetry, titled We Are Going, was published in 1964 by the Brisbane-based Jacaranda Press whose reader, the poet Judith Wright, had been its greatest and most outspoken champion.  It was the first volume of poetry ever published by an Aboriginal Australian and was followed in 1966 by a second volume titled The Dawn Is At Hand.  Although her work was dismissed by some critics as 'protest poetry,' this didn't prevent Walker from becoming the second highest selling poet in the country and using her public profile to become a tireless campaigner for Aboriginal land and civil rights.  She also tried to enter politics in 1969 by standing as the federal Labor candidate for the safe Liberal seat of Greenslopes.  She ran again for State Parliament in 1983 as the Democrat candidate, again without success.  Despite these defeats, she remained a powerful presence in both Australia and internationally, visiting Fiji, Malaysia, the United States, Nigeria and China to speak out for her people and against racism in whatever form it took.  She also became an actress, appearing in Shadow Sister (1977) and The Fringe Dwellers (1986), serving as advisor to director Bruce Beresford on the latter production.

 

 

In 1988 she co-wrote the script for The Rainbow Serpent Theatre with her younger son Vivian — a project which saw them renounce their white names and take the traditional names Oodgeroo (paperbark) and Kabul (carpet snake) to replace them.  Her son died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991 but, despite her grief, she continued to campaign for land rights and reconciliation until her own death from cancer on 16 September 1993.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read two more poems by indigenous Australian poet OODGEROO NOONUCCAL (1920–1993):

 

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/oodgeroo_noonuccal/poems/4601

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 072: JUDITH WRIGHT

 

 

Poet of the Month 063: GABRIELA MISTRAL

 

Poet of the Month 053: TOETI HERATY

Poet of the Month 072: JUDITH WRIGHT

 

 

JUDITH WRIGHT

31 May 1915 – 25 June 2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FAILURE OF COMMUNION

 

 

 

What is the space between,

enclosing us in one

united person, yet

dividing each alone.

 

 

Frail bridges cross from eye

to eye, from flesh to flesh,

from word to word: the net

is gapped at every mesh,

 

 

and this each human knows:

however close our touch,

or intimate our speech,

silences, spaces reach

most deep, and will not close.

 

 

 

 

date unspecified

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following information appears on the artsQueensland website.  It is re-posted here for information purposes only and, like the poem re-posted above, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.

 

Judith Wright was a Queensland resident for more than 30 years.  Born in New England in regional New South Wales, Judith settled in Brisbane as a young woman. She lived for a time at 100 Sydney Street, New Farm and worked as a statistician at the University of Queensland (a job she was completely untrained for) while she wrote the first of the poems that were to make her famous, among them Bullocky and The Moving Image.

 

In Brisbane she met and fell in love with philosopher Jack McKinney, and in 1945 they bought a small cottage on Mount Tamborine. They later moved to a nearby house which they named ‘Calanthe’, after a white orchid which blooms on the mountain in December. They shared 20 happy years together on Tamborine, until Jack’s death in 1966.

 

During the 1950s and 60s Judith’s fame as a poet grew, although she also wrote children’s stories, books of criticism, and Generations Of Men — a novel about her grandparents who were early settlers in Queensland’s Dawson Valley. She wrote most of her works in the mountains of southern Queensland.

 

Judith’s deep love of the Australian landscape, and her growing distress at the devastation of that landscape by white Australians, led her to help form the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in the mid-1960s, an early and powerful conservation group. She fought to conserve the Great Barrier Reef, when its ecology was threatened by oil drilling, and campaigned against sand mining on Fraser Island. Along with her deep awareness of environmental issues, Judith became an ardent supporter of the Aboriginal land rights movement.

 

In 1975 Judith moved south, to Braidwood in New South Wales and soon after she and Nugget Coombs helped form the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, an organisation dedicated to helping spread the word about the need for land rights and a treaty among white Australians. Judith continued to fight both for the environment and for Aboriginal land rights until her death in June 2000 at the age of 85. Shortly before her passing she attended a march in Canberra for reconciliation between white Australians and Indigenous people, full of hope that the tide might at last be turning.

 

Judith Wright has been called ‘the conscience of the nation’ for her commitment to the environment and Aboriginal land rights. Nevertheless, it is for her poetry that she is best remembered, poetry which has helped shape Australia’s perception of itself as much as her tireless battles have helped to save it.

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by Australian poet JUDITH WRIGHT (1915–2000):

 

 

 

https://www.poemhunter.com/judith-wright/biography/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 062: EITHNE WILKINS

 

Poet of the Month 022: FAY ZWICKY

 

Poet of the Month 002: MARIANNE MOORE

 

 

   

 

Poet of the Month 064: HARRY HARBORD 'BREAKER' MORANT

HARRY HARBORD 'BREAKER' MORANT

9 December 1864 – 27 February 1902 

 

 

 

SHORT SHRIFT

 

 

I can mind him at the start ––
Easy seat and merry heart!
Said he, as he threw a glance
At the crawling ambulance:

 

'Some day I'll be on the ground
And the van will hurry round!
Doc will gravely wag his head:
"No use now! the poor chap's dead!"

 

'Every man must, soon or late,
Turn up at the Golden Gate:
When we weigh in –– you and I ––
How can horsemen better die!'

 

On that sunlit steeple course
He lay prone beneath his horse,
Never more his pal may ride
By that gallant horseman's side.

 

'Reckless fool?'  What matter, mate?
All his time he'd ridden straight ––
Went (smashed 'gainst that wall of sod!)
Spurred and booted to his God.

 

Carve in stone above his head
Words that some old Christian said:
'Grace he sought, and grace he found
'Twixt the saddle and the ground!'

 

 

 

 

1902

 

First published in The Bulletin

 

 

 

 

There are few figures in Australian history more controversial and, more than a century after his execution for the crime of murder by a British army firing squad on 27 February 1902, more divisive than the stockman and poet who called himself Harry Harbord Morant.  

 

Born Edwin Henry Murrant in the English county of Somerset on 9 December 1864, Morant arrived in the northern Queensland town of Townsville aboard the SS Waroonga in 1883 and soon established himself as a larger than life figure in the Australian bush, as renowned for his gentlemanly manner and skills as a  horseman –– talents which earned him the nickname 'The Breaker' –– as he was for his gifts as a poet and his reputation as a hard drinking ladies' man.

 

Morant had been living in adopted homeland for sixteen years –– telling assorted tall tales about himself and his family history, consorting with his fellow newspaper published 'bush balladeers' AB 'Banjo' Patterson, Henry Lawson and Will Ogilvie, and even finding time in 1884 to marry (and be thrown out by) future anthropologist Daisy O'Dwyer –– when, in October 1899, he dropped everything to enlist in the Second Contingent of the South Australian Mounted Rifles.  The British Empire, of which South Australia was a directly controlled colony as was every other future state of the Commonwealth of Australia prior to the Act of Federation passing into law on 1 January 1901, was now at war with the Boer-controlled South African colonies known as the Republic of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.  As a loyal healthy Englishman who had a way with horses, joining up to help the Empire fight the independence-seeking rebels was viewed by Morant as the only honourable course of action open to him.  Joining up would also allow him –– a man who never became an Australian citizen –– to return to England free of charge once he had served his country long enough to qualify for what was termed 'home leave.' 

 

Morant and his regiment arrived in the Transvaal in February 1900 where his superior riding skills soon saw him selected to carry dispatches first for the war correspondent from the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph and then for Colonel Lowe, his Commanding Officer.  He was soon transferred from Lowe's staff to that of General French, Commander of the Cavalry Brigade, under whom he saw action in Middelberg, Belfast and Barberton.  (He had already fought at the Battle of Diamond Hill and several other locations while serving under Lowe.)  Now promoted to the rank of Sergeant, he requested six months leave and returned to England where he befriended Captain Percy Frederick Hunt and allegedly became engaged to either Hunt's sister or the girl who was to be Hunt's future sister-in-law (sources disagree).  It was Hunt who persuaded him to abandon his plan to quit the army and rejoin him in South Africa as an officer of a semi-guerilla unit known as the Bushveldt Carbineers, the unruly and nearly mutinous Squadron B of which Hunt had recently assumed command of.  

 

Morant enlisted as a Lieutenant in this unit and along with his fellow Lieutenant, an Australian named Peter Handcock who hailed from the western New South Wales town of Bathurst, immediately set out to make it a disciplined, regulation obeying fighting force –– a plan which did not endear them to their men, several of whom were subsequently discharged after ambushing a consignment of rum being transported to Fort Edwards, the BVC's farmhouse headquarters located several miles north of its main garrison in the town of Pietersburg, by a third newly arrived 'upstart' Lieutenant.  Morant's unpopularity did not prevent him from becoming an effective deterrent to the Boers or from becoming 'like a man demented' after learning that his CO and best friend Hunt had been killed during a tactically unsound attack on an enemy stronghold known as Duivelskloof [Devil's Gorge] on 2 August 1901.  

 

Determined to avenge Hunt's death, Morant led a patrol which eventually caught up with the Boers a little before sunset.  Impatient for revenge, he gave the order to fire on the enemy too early, warning them of his intention to attack and allowing all but one of them to escape.  Floris Visser, the only Boer prisoner captured during the engagement, was wounded in the ankles during the ensuing exchange of gunfire –– a fact which did not prevent Morant from rigorously interrogating the man before forming a firing squad and executing him, citing the words of Lord Kitchener, Commanding General of the British forces in South Africa, as the justification for his decision.  'Take No Prisoners!' had been Kitchener's alleged proclamation to the Empire forces.  Morant chose to take the General's words literally, ignoring the fact that Visser had technically been a prisoner of war after being captured, thereby making his execution an act of murder under military law.

 

 

LT HARRY MORANT, c 1899

 

 

The slaughter did not end with the death of Floris Visser.  On 23 August Morant led another patrol which intercepted a group of Boer prisoners being taken to Fort Edward for questioning.  He ordered the men to be lined up by the side of the road and shot, their deaths witnessed by the Reverend Carl August Daniel Heese, a South African born, German-speaking missionary.  A week or so later, reports reached Fort Edward that Reverend Heese's corpse had been discovered on the road between the post and Pietersburg where he had supposedly gone to report Morant's activities to his superior officers.  It was later revealed that Morant had either personally killed or ordered that Heese be killed before leading yet another patrol, co-led by Handcock and including a young Australian trooper named George Witton, which had been responsible for the executions of another group of disarmed Boer prisoners.  A rare visit from Morant's CO, General Lenehan, resulted in Morant being sent to arrest a notorious Boer-Irish leader named Kelly whom he brought in alive following a successful two week search and capture operation.  Morant then requested a fortnight's furlough so he could travel to the South African capital Pretoria to attend to the personal affairs of his deceased friend Captain Hunt.

 

Morant returned from Pretoria to find himself immediately placed under arrest and facing court martial charges arising from a letter, signed by fifteen of his own men, which accused him and several other members of the Bushveldt Carbineers of six separate atrocities including the executions of the Reverend Heese, more than a dozen disarmed Boer prisoners and even three children who had been part of a convoy approaching Fort Edward with the intention of surrendering itself to the British garrison.  Morant was cast as the ringleader of these activities, with his Australian subordinates Handcock and Witton cast as his all too willing accomplices, and committed to stand trial for his actions in a Military Court of Inquiry.  

 

The first phase of this trial began in Pietersburg on 16 January 1902, during which the damning testimonies of several of Morant's own men were heard and questioned by Major James Francis Thomas, another Australian who had been named defending counsel to the three accused soldiers.  The trial was then relocated to Pretoria where Morant was tried on the most serious charge, the murder of the non-combatant Reverend Heese, of which he was found not guilty.  But he, Handcock and Witton were found guilty of the other charges brought against them and unanimously sentenced to death, with the court decreeing that all three sentences should be carried out as soon as possible.  Witton, the youngest of the convicted men, soon had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment by Lord Kitchener who refused to do the same for Morant and Handcock, signing their respective death warrants personally. 

 

When Thomas tried to appeal directly to Kitchener he was told by the General's aide that the General was away and not expected to return to headquarters for quite some time.  Thomas then pleaded for a chance to lodge an appeal with the King, only to learn that the Crown had already approved the death sentences and no power on earth was capable of rescinding them.  While denying the convicted men the right to appeal was grossly unfair and probably illegal, it made no difference in the end.  Morant, Handcock and Witton were granted permission to spend a final evening together on 26 February 1902, time which Morant mostly spent writing as Witton later recalled.  Witton himself was removed in manacles at five o'clock the following morning for transportation to England where he was to serve his commuted sentence in Lewes Prison in the county of Sussex.  He would serve a total of twenty-eight months in gaol before eventually being released on 10 August 1904. 

 

A short time after Witton was removed from their shared cell, Morant and Handcock were led out to the yard and, both having refused blindfolds, executed by a firing squad consisting of troops selected from the Queen's Own Cameron Highland Regiment.  Their bodies were buried side by side in a common grave in a Pretoria cemetery which lay neglected until 2002 when a small delegation travelled from Australia to South Africa to witness the placement of a new memorial stone, the inscription of which was taken from Chapter 10, Verse 36 of the Gospel of St Matthew:  'A man's foes shall be those of his own household.'  (The verse is misquoted, appearing as 'And a man's foes shall be they of his own household' in the King James Bible.) 

 

Was Morant a vicious cold-blooded killer or were he and his comrades Handcock and Witton what the latter described as a 'Scapegoats of Empire' in his controversial book of the same name published in 1907?  Did Morant's grief at the loss of his friend Hunt –– 'The best mate I had on Earth' according to a note written on the eve of his execution –– justify the murders of what may have been upwards of twenty unarmed Boers, one of whom was a clergyman and at least three of whom were children?  It needs to be remembered that Morant, for all his loyalty to Hunt and to King and country, was also something of a self-invented con man, as adept at running out on unpaid bar bills –– something he did several times in Australia and at least once in South Africa, causing a Cape Town hotelier to write to Admiral Sir George Digby Morant, a man Morant had falsely claimed to be his father, demanding restitution for services provided in the amount of £16 –– as he was at masquerading as a dashing well-bred gentleman.  While this behaviour does not prove that he was a murderer, it does cast serious doubts upon his credibility and personal integrity. 

 

The truth is that Morant was never the gentleman he pretended to be.  He was the son of the Master of a workhouse, a place where the indigent and those who forfeited on their debts were sent by local English authorities to 'earn their keep' by doing menial, often backbreaking work for which they were 'rewarded' with substandard food and a bed of loose straw.  While there is no doubt that Morant's case was bungled by the British Army, there is also little doubt that he ordered and/or directly participated in the deaths of Visser, Heese and many defenceless Boer prisoners.

 

The other significant thing about Morant, of course, is the posthumous status he has gained in Australia as an authority-defying folk hero.  As his defense counsel Major Thomas reminded readers of The Sydney Morning Herald in a letter written to that newspaper in June 1923, the man he unsuccessfully defended in 1902 '…was not Australian, he was an Englishman who came to this country for "colonial experience".'  This fact is often overlooked by Morant's idolaters, as is the fact that he returned to England, not to his adopted homeland, after completing his first tour of duty in South Africa and apparently had every intention of remaining in England until he was persuaded to return to the war by his friend Hunt. 

 

Like his predecessor the Irish-Australian bushranger Ned Kelly –– somebody else misleadingly portrayed as an 'innocent victim' of English oppression who was 'driven' to a life of crime and eventually to murder by 'cruel circumstance' rather than by temperament and opportunity –– Morant's treatment at the hands of the British (his own countrymen) became a focal point for the resentment harboured by the 'Young Country' of Australia for the 'Old Country' of Great Britain.  Morant was and is viewed by many Australians as the prototypical 'lovable larrikin' who ran afoul of 'the Poms' and paid the ultimate price for following the contradictory orders handed down by his superiors.  The view of him as an 'innocent' victim of circumstance continues to serve as effective propaganda for those who wish to see him exonerated for his crimes and pardoned by the Crown despite strong evidence which suggests that he was, in fact, guilty of every offence he was charged with and perhaps several more into the bargain.

 

While Morant's death by firing squad may have made him a martyr in some eyes –– thanks in large part to Witton's 1907 book and the 1978 play Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts by Kenneth Ross which was successfully adapted into the popular and award-winning Australian film Breaker Morant two years later –– it remains a highly romanticized image of a man who, while capable of producing fine and sensitive art in the form of poetry, was clearly not above committing criminal acts against unarmed civilians during wartime.  Morant was not the first person to embody these contradictions and nor, sadly, is he likely to be the last.  He seems to be the perfect example of a desirable myth supplanting an undesirable reality, a phenomenon enhanced by his work as a poet which, while reasonably popular in its day, does not appear to have stood the test of time as well as that of his more famous contemporaries AB 'Banjo' Paterson and Henry Lawson.  It remains unlikely that the truth about Morant and what really happened out on the veldt in 1901 and 1902 will ever come to light, despite the many books which have been written about him since the success of Breaker Morant made his case a cause célébre in a nation so bereft of homegrown heroes that it felt compelled to make one of a convicted English war criminal.

 

 

 

BUTCHERED TO MAKE A 

DUTCHMAN'S HOLIDAY

In prison cell I sadly sit,
A d––d crest-fallen chappie!
And own to you I feel a bit ––
A little bit –– unhappy!

 

It really ain't the place nor time
To reel off rhyming diction ––
But yet we'll write a final rhyme
Whilst awaiting cru-ci-fixion!

 

No matter what 'end' they decide ––
Quick-lime or 'b'iling ile,' sir?
We'll do our best when crucified
To finish off in style, sir!

 

But we bequeath a parting tip
For sound advice of such men,
Who come across in sailing ship
To polish off the Dutchmen!

 

If you encounter any Boers
You really must not loot 'em!
And if you wish to leave these shores,
For pity's sake, DON'T SHOOT 'EM!!

 

And if you'd earn a DSO,
Why every British sinner
Should know the proper way to go
Is: 'ASK THE BOER TO DINNER!'

 

Let's toss a bumper down our throat, ––
Before we pass to Heaven,
And toast: 'The trim-set petticoat
We leave behind in Devon.'

 

 

Also known by the titles

 

  In Prison Cell I Sadly Sit

 

The Last Rhyme and Testament of Tony Lumpkin

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES 

d––d = polite form of 'damned' 

 

'b'iling ile' = 'boiling oil' as a Cockney might pronounce it

 

Dutchmen = alternative name for the Boer

 

DSO = Distinguished Service Order, a British military decoration

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by British horseman, bush balladeer, soldier and war criminal HARRY HARBORD 'BREAKER' MORANT:

 

 

https://www.poemhunter.com/harry-breaker-harbord-morant/

 
 

 

 

You may also like to visit Breaker Morant: Justice Denied, a website operated by Australian barrister, solicitor and author JAMES UNKLES who continues to try to obtain pardons for MORANT, HANDCOCK and WITTON from the British Government after an apology was issued to their descendants by the Australian House of Representatives on 12 February 2018 acknowledging that an injustice had been perpetrated against them during their trial.   

 

 

This followed the rejection of an appeal submitted by UNKLES to the British Crown in 2010 and a decision made in May 2012 by NICOLA ROXON, the then-serving Attorney-General of Australia, that the Australian Government would not be pursuing the matter with the British any further.  In a letter to UNKLES, she explained that 'Despite the time that has passed… I consider seeking a pardon… could be rightly perceived as glossing over very grave criminal acts.'  The debate remains ongoing.

 

 

 

 

 

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