Writing in North Queensland

Abstract

This paper was read at the Seminox on North Queensland Writing held by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (Townsville), August 2-3, 1980.

The title of my talk listed in the programme by Professor Heseltine is 'Writing in North Queensland.' Now I have not prepared an erudite or even non-erudite paper on writers like Herbert, Devanney, Naish - I leave that to the experts; actually when I first spoke to Professor Heseltine about coming, he suggested I talk about the way I went about gathering material for and writing Hunting the Wild Pineapple.

What I feel I should talk about is not writing in North Queensland. This is not a barbed remark addressed to other writers - it is a remark addressed to myself. I forget who it was who once said that one of the prerequisites for creativity is a sharp climate with frost. Steinbeck said, in Travels with Charlie, that he liked 'weather', not climate. And I think that is largely true. Over the last few weeks I have been trying to think of great music or writing or art that has come straight from the equatorial line. And I am not speaking of those who write or compose or paint after they have had their passionate affair with the tropics and moved safely back to a cottage in Kent, a brownstone walk-up in Manhattan or even a terrace house in Balmain or South Yarra. Apart from Gauguin I can think of no one. Perhaps the real reason that Rimbaud gave his
genius away at twenty-two was not that the springs had dried up but that he was working as, a trader in North Africa. True, Delius lived for some time in Florida - but that is not equatorial - and the fruits of that visit appeared later. There is in these Edenic latitudes a somnolence that is hard to conquer; an overpowering sense of what Mrs Aeneas Gunn called 'the land of plenty of time.' And the frightening aspect of postponement here is that the morrow brings a repetition of the idyll; there is no climatic change and the blue, yellow, green - the heat, the fecundity - become part of an unalterable ballad in nature. The fecundity is all in nature and not in the mind. And that was part of what I was trying to describe in Pineapple.