Staging the suburb : imagination, transformation and suburbia in Australian poetry

Abstract

The suburbs are an important element in the physical and imaginary landscapes of this country. They are where more than 95% of the population lives and makes its home; and they have become integral to our imagining of the average citizen and their hopes, dreams and political inclinations. But this formulation does not capture the imaginative and dramatic uses to which the suburbs have been put, or their changing representation in literature and criticism. The two Australian poets that I consider in this thesis "" Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter "" were writing about suburbia in different eras, and against different conceptions of the space, yet both use the suburbs in passionate and theatrical ways. Harwood was writing mostly in the conservative Menzies era, when literary depictions of the suburb tended to portray it as stultifying, homogenous and dull. She often works with pseudonymous personae "" including a suburban housewife, exiled academics from Old Europe and a young radical "" and with recurring characters to satirise assumptions about suburbia and the people who inhabit it; or charges her more personal suburban poems with a range of competing and contradictory emotions, and with claims for the coexistence there of art and domesticity, transcendence and routine. Porter's poetry mostly dates from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium, an era with a more sympathetic view of the suburbs, and their ordinariness and diversity. Her theatricality plays out in the dramatic monologues and masks that she uses to draw attention to the extreme experiences and conditions that are always a part of everyday life, and to the wild energies and vitality which can spring from ordinary objects and spaces. The thesis begins by charting the shifting cultural and historical perspectives on the Australian suburb, before moving to a close analysis of the poetry of Harwood and Porter, in order to examine each poet's complex and often ambivalent response to suburban space and the lives lived within it; the claims each makes for the imaginative perspectives, emotions and intensities that are contained within domestic environments; and the ways in which the stuff of the everyday can be used to dramatise the self and its endeavours. The argument then moves to my creative examination of these themes in the book-length collection of poems titled 'Domestic Interior.' In these poems I explore the interplay between memory, experience and place, with how places become symbolic and poetic, and how this process intersects with ideas of belonging, identity, the everyday and the imaginary, the public and the private worlds. They explore what I see as a 'featurist aesthetic' "" drawing on and subverting Robin Boyd's description of the superficial elaborations of Australian suburban architecture. I see this suburban aesthetic as employing small details to build lively and multivalent spaces and scenes, by surrounding them with layers of symbolic objects, apprehended details, memories and sensations.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English