HISTORY AND MYTH IN AUSTRALIAN VOYAGER POETRY

Text topic: Literature and Truth

Text author: Тијана Парезановић

One of the most significant contributions of the twentieth-century Australian poetry was the invention of the so-called “voyager poetry”. The term, which refers to poems about mariners, maritime adventures, exploration and discoveries, reached its most complete expression in the oeuvre of Kenneth Slessor, arguably one of the most celebrated Australian poets, who is largely considered to be the first authentically modernist voice of Australia. In presenting his most famous poems, such as “The Atlas” and “Five Visions of Captain Cook”, and describing the process of literary mythmaking on which they are based, this paper will rely on Roland Barthes’s definition of contemporary myth as a second-order semiological system. One of the most prominent features of contemporary myth, according to Barthes, is that it distorts historical reality by transforming history into nature. This paper proposes that Slessor uses the same process of distortion in his voyager poems, rooting them in historically or geographically approved facts, only to render those facts universally acceptable as archetypal situations or mythical categories. Our second proposition is that Slessor’s process of mythmaking is ideologically motivated by the rising national sentiment in the aftermath of World War I. Slessor’s major poems were written between 1927 and 1932, the period when Australia strove to establish its political and cultural identity independent of the imperialistic British influences. The analysis of the poems aims to show how available historical and geographical data are universalized in Slessor’s poetry and how they consequently transform history into nature. Whereas historical truth is lost in the process, universal truth is emphasized as a legitimate expression of the state of the modern man.