Australian Great War poetry as the subject of a PhD thesis in Gdansk, Poland

Who on earth would have thought that an Australian from Sydney would be living in Gdansk, Poland, and doing his PhD on Australian Great War poetry? Every year I have been in Poland, I have been forced to celebrate such days as Anzac Day, Armistice Day, VJ Day and various other Australian Days on my own; I usually just go to the local church and say my beads. But here I am writing about a subject that few Poles will have heard anything about, let alone know the greatness of. It should perhaps be noted that few Australians know much about it as well, though, this is slowly changing now, but we won’t dwell on this. I was lucky enough to do a lot of good research in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where my sister, God bless her, helped me get through the mountain of letters and journals. She has also helped me a great deal by typing many of the almost unreadable handwritten poems I found. However, the best thing in terms of research I did, was to create a facebook page. It has been no end of help in my research, and I have met many incredible people who have helped me along the way. One of the true soldiers of research I’ve been lucky enough to meet, and befriend, is Lucy London. A fellow researcher of Great War poetry in general, and a person with seemingly un-resting research energy. There are many other people I must thank, but that will be in the gratitude page of my thesis.

It came as a tremendous surprise to me, but when I began my studies into Australian Great War poetry, I found it almost impossible to find much information on the subject. There were no web-sites which dealt exclusively with Australian Great War poetry. All of the sites I found that did have Australian poetry from the Great War, also had large amounts of English poetry. It was nice to read, but had little to nothing to do with my subject. Then there were the papers and articles. Again, this proved to show just how little was written on the subject, making one think that Australia had been all but forgotten when it came to the poetry of the Great War. I then remembered when I was at school and when we studied Great War poetry, it was always British. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Wilfred Owen and the rest of them, but I was writing a thesis on Australian Great War poetry, not English Great War poetry. As I had been told, this had been done so much, that there wasn’t really anything new to add. But Australian poetry seemed to be almost unheard of. The few papers and articles I did manage to find proved to be quite useful, but none of them covered the ground I was interested in. There were some about female poets, and some a bit more general, but few and far between.

In my research I have come to find that the canon of Australian Great War poetry (AGWP) was far bigger than anyone could have expected. Researchers I know in England, such as Lucy London, have found that the number of English poets from the era is huge, and as she researches, gets bigger. I have found the same thing in Australia, and the number of poets goes into hundreds, and even thousands. The poets I have found number well over 400, and it is quite correct to assume that this number would be far higher if I were to have access to the countless letters and dairies which scatter Australian wardrobes and attics, which are just waiting to find the light of day.

It is hoped that the thesis of which I am writing will become a definitive work in the canon, and help facilitate further research; even research into Australian 2nd World War poetry. However, it certainly appears that the Great War produced much more poetry than any other war, so it must become the nexus prototype between poet and researcher.

Slowly the research has snowballed and grown with more articles and conferences. Some articles have now been published, but many others are in the long process of research and writing.

It has been a strange adventure doing most of my research in Poland for this thesis, however, this has gone a long way to making Australian Great War poetry, as well as Australian literature, better known outside Australia. I have been shocked sometimes to realise that not many Australians know much, if not anything about Australian Great War poetry, but I hope this will change soon. Some schools in Australia have certainly begun reading the canon. Notably a primary school in South Australia, Colonel Light Gardens Primary School, who have been working well with young students in this area. Hopefully more schools will start reading Australian poets instead of exclusively English poets in their school studies.

However, this can only happen when and if there is a resource for teachers and students to refer to. That’s why AGWP has such social media pages as facebook, twitter, pinterest and a blog, as well as the web-site. These pages were formed to aid my own research into Australian Great War poetry, and have proven to be useful in developing sources and contacts for the collation of this canon of poetry. As a result, all of this will further help me in my own research.

However, the very thought of an Australian writing a thesis on Australian Great War poetry, not in Australia, but in Poland, is something of peculiar interest in itself. If this paper was was in Australia, certainly that would be a good thing, but the fact that it is being written in Poland is just phenomenal. The reason I believe this is because now, Australian war poetry, as well as Australian literature in general, is more likely to be looked at abroad. The audience is bigger, and the results might just be that Australian literature is considered with more intrinsic value on a world stage, where the subject of English literature is dominated by British and American writers. So, my hope is that, in some way, this thesis on AGWP, when it is finally written, will help facilitate a favourable reckoning for Australia literature.