Jane Liddell-King - Poet
Artist Statement
In March 2018, I was lucky enough to become the first poet to be appointed as ‘Artist-in-Residence’ at Strathnairn. The experience changed my world view. My writing is still playing catch up.
40 years earlier, artist Nancy Tingey OA and I had met in Cambridge. We bridged the 10 000 miles between us with long letters and occasional meetings. After my husband’s death in 2012, I promised Nancy that if she arranged an exhibition of our latest collaboration ‘Juxtapositions’, I would, at last, join her.
Two days into my stay, Nancy took me to the Woodstock Conservation Reserve and we walked to Shepherd’s Lookout. Gazing down from this Northernmost viewing point of the Murrumbidgee River, I heard children far below splashing in the water. Their laughter drifted towards me.
As we walked through the reserve, wondering at hanging bark and patterned stones, Nancy gave me the names of the eucalypts and pines. Listening to these English words, I wondered what the First People had called them.
It was the beginning of my continuing Strathnairn work. Fragments of stone tools surface at Woodstock. And I wanted to unearth the equally slight traces of the Ngunnawaal language still recalled by the descendants of those to whom for some 60 000 years this land had belonged. Did anyone still remember this language or had it been erased?
Weeks later, Nancy and I were guests at Canberra University at a symposium on ‘Indigenous Australian Story and Creative Writing.’ I heard writer, Paul Collis, a Barkindj man assert to a student, “You’ll learn far more on country than ever you will here.” I told Paul of my experience at Shepherd’s Lookout: “I could see those children: diving and swimming. I could see their faces: dark eyes, dark curls.”
Unfazed and unblinking he said: “You have met with the spirits.” I felt undeservedly honoured.
From Cambridge I sent him a poem:
RIVER
(for P.C. )
On that day
Just before the greater light warmed the darkness
Reddening the empty seas and hills
He found He couldn’t rest
Rivers flowed in the recesses of His mind
A thousand particular clamouring voices
Need flooded His being
For a creature made in His own unimaginable image
Another listener
And at that moment when unforeseeable He could have cried
The light threw three shades of red on the river
which called to him
To get on with making
And He heard himself saying
Give me time
And the river went quiet
Perhaps this was harder than forming oceans
Or greater and lesser lights
Or separating light from darkness
Or hearing His own voice break the galactic silence
But the red river mud
Veined with ochre and black and white came to mind
Saying
Make something of me
Make me live
And He could see himself shaping a creature in one of His original images
Days later red mud formed in our image lay drying
And He felt himself trembling in case it cracked open
Or the river swept it away
Or a rock buried it
And He gave it the kiss of life
And He felt the dark skin quicken with a pulse
And He watched the dark eyes open
Under the smooth eyelids
And He heard breath
And saw the fluency of blood fill feet and fingers
And the soft part of the thighs
And the cupped ears almost hidden by damp curled hair
And the broad nose
And He wanted to hear this new being speak a name
Which was mud
red mud
Adamah
A bloodline ab origine
Out of the soft mouth of the river
And, in turn, Paul sent a poem to me.
Rivers speak a different way...
When I spoke with 'men of God' –
with priests and true believers,
I asked ‘em "Does God speak to you?"
“Oh Yes!” they said. . .
“Which way? What lingo?”
Blank looks open blank mouths with blank sounds.
"God doesn't speak like that. . ." they told me.
“Oh?”
“No. He speaks silently.” they replied.
“Ah.” I said “Like rivers. . .”
Their blank looks left blank mouths uttering blank sounds.
I looked at the Murrumbidgee, watching life.
Jane wrote: I felt more than that, gazing into that River. . .
Well, that’s how Rivers speak -
held by the grip of trees and with silent spirits,
turning blanks to banks of sound.
Thanks to Nancy and to Strathnairn and the imaginative people I met, years of work has opened before me.
Jane Liddell-King