John Shaw Neilson

In a Footscray is a cemetery. Beset on one side by the rapacious noise of the mad and bad Princes Highway (Geelong Road), on another by the moody bulk of long ruined by free trade factory. On a further flank is a Goods Railway Line with its spewing Diesels rattling containers of trade near weatherboard houses full of histories that have seen better days. In this place, rests John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942). Hardly known to either literary snobs or curious English lit' students, he is an Australian original not diluted by pretence or pomposity.

I had come here to pay my appreciation to a man only known to me through words. Yet, this place is quite unlike you'd expect of meccano granite blocks set in hushed tones. Nothing here is hushed despite the pathetic lamentations of fading inscripts that compose to a drift away audience losing through years. The dead are in the majority, as you would expect, but there is no room left for 21st Century bookings. Recent additions that have arrived are constricted to ash scatterings testated now by minuscule memorials. The Trustees are glad of the cremation trend, for it makes good accounting in the short term. The cemetery writ is of plastic flowers, as only the Sun can fade their adieu leaves. The lawns are neat and do not complain as a jet aircraft roars indifference overhead. Beside the maintenance shed, old wooden handle shovels of gravediggers are rusting in the July air - it's all mechanical now anyway. A quiet sob is heard from a bowed head standing beside a plaque, "Born, died, much loved, father of ...". Gates close at 4:30pm.

Nations too are represented by religion: Presbyterians in the corner, unfussed Catholics discreetly between Church of England with its Anglican newcomers. There is Methodists with their brevity often confused with Presbyterians and those glum Wesleyans. The disbelievers, they have a plot here and there, not far from where pompous mausoleums scowl with outrageous claims.

The Hour of Parting

Shall we assault the pain?
It is time to part:
Let us of love again
Eat the impatient heart.

There is a gulf behind
Dull voice and fallen lip,
The blue smoke of the mind,
The grey light on the ship.

Parting is of the cold
That stills the loving breath,
Dimly we taste the old
The pitiless meal of Death.

Born at Penola, South Australia into dire poverty and indenture. Neilson grew up in the ruthless South Australia and Victoria margin lands of hardscrabble tenant farming, interspersed with brief, cheap jobs. His education was the Bible, Shakespeare, Hood and especially Burns plus occasional Newspapers weeks old, with their absurd adherence to Empire. His childhood was punctuated by constant moving in his father's search for work and a gnawing hunger that gave him meter and muscles. For years his labour was itinerant imposed by look down class that would not enable him to settle or be secure of the next meal let alone a dry roof. Yet the boy became a man, aware of his poetry despite the landscape's endeavours to mash him. In the Outback, in the Mallee country of north-eastern Victoria, sunlight can be criminal by day to underfed eyes that would then frown by pen under the wick of feeble candlelight. By 1905 his eyes were shot but not his voice, his recitation of the muse. But Australia was cruel in his time to classic originals, unaware of the chaos of modernism. What use is this poor bred labourer of poetry with regular iambic? He was mostly dismissed as bumpkin, patronised by some, edited ruthlessly by others who presumed they were better in the Art. Still he wrote, unlimited, dogged, and certain:

The song will deceive you, the scent will incite you to sing;
You clutch but you cannot discover: you cannot go down to the spring.

The day will be painted with summer, the heat and the gold
Will give you no key to the blossom: the music is old.

It is at the edge of a promise, a far away thing;
The green is the nest of all riddles: you cannot go down to the spring.

The truth is too close to the sorrow; the song you would sing,
It cannot go into the fever: you cannot go down the spring.

from 'You Cannot Go Down to the Spring'

Beset with uncertainty and ailing eyes, enough was enough and by needs and merit, helped with old age he ended his days as an elevator attendant in a drab City office of a Government Department until near 70, exhausted by the struggle just to live, his genius ceased.

Despite his narrow unknowing, a few more do know of him, I know. His works are in print and feature in Australian antholgies despite seventy years removed with his place amongst the versers more than just a miscellany. At Footscray Cemetery, where tears still flow by terse Presbyterians, lovingly tended lies John Shaw Neilson, Poet.

Further reading: 'Jock - the life story of John Shaw Neilson' by Cliff Hanna: University of Queensland Press (1999) 321 pp paperback.

Notes:

Footscray Cemetery is located 9 kilometres/5 miles from the Melbourne CBD and is one of the oldest suburban cemeteries with gravesites dated back to the 1880s.

The principal inscription on Neilson's gravestone is a stanza from one of his poems. The lower quote is from Millet. As best I can discover the Millet refers to Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) a French Painter of the Barbizon movement centred in rural France noted for its realism.

The 'Heart of Spring' refers to an early slim volume of Neilson's poems published in 1919 and a poem of the same name shown below:

Heart of Spring!
Spirit of light and love and joyous day,
So soon to faint beneath the fiery Summer:
Still smiles the Earth, eager for thee alway:
Welcome art thou, soever short thy stay,
Thou bold, thou blithe newcomer!
Whither, O whither this thy journeying,
O heart of Spring?

O heart of Spring!
After the stormy days of Winter's reign,
When the keen winds their last lament are sighing,
The Sun shall raise thee up to life again:
In thy dim death thou shalt not suffer pain:
Surely thou dost not fear this quiet dying?
Whither, O whither this thy journeying,
O heart of Spring?

O heart of Spring!
Youth's emblem, ancient and unchanging light,
Uncomprehended, unconsumed, still burning:
Oh that we could, as thou, rise from the night
To find a world of blossoms lilac-white,
And long-winged swallows unafraid returning ...
Whither, O whither this thy journeying,
O heart of Spring?

ps

better viewed large in order to read the gravestone's inscriptions