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Currajah (news & notes)

Adrienne Eberhard, Jane, Lady Franklin, Black Pepper Press, Victoria, 2004.

Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence

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Jane was the wife of Tasmanian colonial Governor, Sir John Franklin. They arrived in Hobarton in 1837, and now poet Adrienne Eberhard provides a rich, well-researched sketch of Lady Franklin’s Island life and activities.

Eberhard is a talented writer, reaching deeply into her character’s psyche and using Jane as the "voice through which to explore Tasmania." The book contains a heavy-boned historical exoskeleton, made up of nearly twenty pages of timelines, references and an exposition of each chapter and poem. Most collections would not need such a crutch, and it can constrict the reading—but in this case it generally serves to enrich, and allows the reader make fullest sense of the poems’ context.

Coming from England, Jane is enveloped and overwhelmed by her new "fecund and teeming" environment. She makes sense of the landscape through the filter of Europe, and describes scenery in familiar similes—in the way that European names are superimposed upon natural landmarks: Lake St Clair, Mt King William, Frenchman’s Cap.

Although her response is rooted in her heritage, embodying the sensibility of the times, Jane is alive to nature:

…it is their noisy presence that pleases me most:

the crew of black cockatoos shredding banksias,

like men drunk on wine,

and the early morning hail of song

from the wattle bird

that wakes me every time.

(`Passion’)

The landscape is an active participant, and frequently galvanizes the poetry. Jane attempts to fuse the language of her heritage and the world she is confronted with:

Regal

birds like royal barges,

Sleek, black, streaming,

their red beaks a slash

of unexpected colour, like rich

brocade crossed with satin.

(`The River’)

Nature’s creepers intrude everywhere, and the words often succumb to piled-on adjectives and similes. Occasionally, it is hard to separate Jane straining to convey her experience from the poet failing to avoid cliché or didacticism ("the broad sweep of river," "rivets the eye," "vivid, arresting, real," "Imagine, if you can…"). The bland rhetoric, however artful, can obscure character and deaden poetic effects.

At its best, Eberhard successfully reveals her character’s deep conflicts. `Daughters,’ a chapter about Jane’s attempt to adopt an aboriginal girl, conveys the mindset and limitations of the poet’s nineteenth-century subject: "We thought to tame you / to mould your mind / make you curtsy, say please and thank you" (`Mathinna’). From the childishly limited emotional palette of her meeting ("She’s here! She’s here!... / Oh, to cuddle her") to her eventual abandonment of the girl ("somehow you escape me… / your heart is wild. / You were never really mine"), the effect of Jane’s rationalisations and incomplete understanding is complex and poignant.

There are less satisfying chapters, such as `The Female Factory’ and the strained sonnets of `George Augustus Robinson.’ Eberhard’s sequence, `Laudanum,’ treats Jane’s addiction as if it were a gentle haunting. Her nineteenth-century sensibility limits the portrayal of her own drug dependence to swoony hokum: "Enormous softness, and a languor… exquisite sense of abandon." (The word "abandon" recurs, suggesting that the desertion of her child has returned to trouble her mind.)

The character’s irritating, class-based contradictions are also uncovered in `The Overland Trek,’ tracing her experience of the month-long surveying expedition cleaving a path from Lake St Clair to Macquarie Harbour. For Lady Franklin—borne upon a palanquin for some of the way—it is a journey of elite pleasures: "We enjoy the river slowly… try our hand at fishing… sojourn at Port Harvey." Yet her trip is underpinned by expendable convict bearers. Although she sentimentally acknowledges their efforts (loyal through storm and starvation, they have earned a place in heaven), the carters are commonly made invisible with the passive form: "We are encamped," "the plum cake I’ve had carried all this way…" Her bargemen—"crafty with the ways of the river," she patronises—are inconveniently swept away and drowned, "leaving us to wait and shiver."

Successful, too, is the `Magic of Stones’ section, in which the period’s intellectual conflicts are portrayed through scientific theories of the day. Again, there is over-descriptiveness ("Black cliffs rise at the sea’s edge, / massing fatly with the round bellies of clams") and rhetorical flourishes ("How do the stones speak?... / I long to hear their song"). However, `Catastrophism’ is a fine poem, and Eberhard interestingly explores the uneasy struggle between science and biblical literality.

All the geology and botany of the Island is "brushed by wind" and the surface changed completely aeon by aeon. Wind also blows through other chapters. Both aboriginal sequences end this way, black history in Australia unrecorded, "dispersed in the wind."

The book ends not with a bang but a half-hearted, self-effacing curtsy:

now there is only wife, waiting, waiting

for a heroic return from the white lands

where I can never lead

nor even follow

(‘leaving it all behind’)

To her credit, the author never loses sight of the contradictions and limitations of her character.

This is a highly appealing book. Such a conceit, sustained over the length of a full collection, might grow tedious in other hands—but Eberhard has produced intelligent poetry that is both engaging and historically enlightening.