I was very honoured to review Ann-Marie Priest’s wonderful book My Tongue is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood for TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses last month. It’s published now and you can read it here.
It took me some time to read and digest this incredible, meticulously researched and detailed biography of one of Australia’s most significant poets of the last century. There seemed a lighthearted wink from Gwen Harwood (and perhaps Ann-Marie Priest too), towards the end, where Priest recounts the poet declaring her hatred for writing reviews: “It seems insulting to praise or dismiss in a few pages work that has taken years to write” (p.313) which sums up my thoughts exactly. For a while I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to do justice to this very accomplished biography! As a result, my review could not be described as succinct but I wanted to give this book the time and attention it deserved, as its author does to her subject.
As a Tasmanian, this book was particularly enjoyable as there are so many familiar names and sites. Gwen Harwood’s Hobart of the 1950s and 1960s was also the Hobart my own parents grew up in. While I was reading it, I asked my father if his parents, who were very much part of the town’s artsy set (his words) at the time, had known the Harwoods. He couldn’t recall, but when I mentioned James McCauley, a close friend of both Bill and Gwen Harwood who is mentioned often in the book, his eyes lit up.
“I bought a car off his widow in 1977,” he said. “Mrs McCauley on Sandy Bay Road. A grey Holden FD. Nice little car.”
I also asked a friend of mine, a writer who lives in New Zealand now but who was raised in Hobart, if she had known Gwen Harwood too. It seemed likely, as she was a budding poet in the early 1990s. She smiled and told me about a workshop Gwen gave at Elizabeth College when she was doing her HSC.
“She read my poem aloud to the group and said she liked the imagery. I then started writing to her. I still remember her address.” Her memories were that Gwen was more than willing to make time for anyone who showed an inclination for writing, which Ann-Marie Priest also mentions. I include these two anecdotes here to illustrate my great amusement at the inter-connectedness of life in Hobart which is still very much a thing - you might not know the individual personally, but you’ll only ever be a few degrees of separation away :)
Thank you again TEXT for asking me to review this amazing book, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in poetry, feminism, twentieth-century Australia, or all three!
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