Australian verse novels

Some thirty verse novels have been published in Australia since the mid 1970s,the number accelerating through the nineties into the turn of the millennia, yet little has been written about this phenomenon. Even in the USA, where Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986) made a considerable splash, discussion of the verse novel has focused on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1823-31), with the occasional scholar worrying how to define the paradoxical genre. For the purposes of this essay, a verse novel is defined as a work the poet has chosen to call by that name, or any extended verse narrative that can be assessed in terms of both its versification and its handling of basic novelistic properties like character, plot and point of view. It is not difficult, using these means, to determine that what Douglas Stewart called the 'Voyager Poems' of Slessor, FitzGerald, McAuley and Webb were not prototypical verse novels; that Rex Ingamells's The Great South Land (1951) is a nationalist epic with no novelistic allegiances; that Laurie Duggan's The Ash Range (1987) is a William Carlos Williams-style documentary. The input of the Australian poetic tradition into the Australian verse novel has been oblique, the stronger lines of influence descending from the central English canon.