Down by the river

Larry Schwartz  
TWO poets were chatting in a cafe in Glebe last May – Robert Adamson warning his friend Martin Johnston that he was drinking himself to death. Johnston, the son of celebrated Australian literary figures George Johnston and Charmian Clift, replied that Adamson, of all people, should surely understand the reason.

Each had an albatross, Johnston said: for himself the burden of being known primarily for his famous parents; Adamson for his prison past. “What could I say?” Adamson sighed. “I said: ‘Let’s have another drink’.”

It was the last time Adamson was to see the poet, critic and novelist who once told a reporter: “When you say you want to do a profile on me, is that what you mean, or do you want to do a profile mainly on my parents?”

Johnston died a month later, aged 42. Their conversation highlights for Adamson his own frustration at being typecast despite later achievement. He is, as Melbourne-based literary editor Peter Craven recently wrote, “one of the highest poetic presences of his generation”.

A slightly built man with a mop of greying hair, Adamson is highly regarded in literary circles, and in 1990 received a record three literary awards – the National Book Council Poetry Prize and Premier’s Awards in Victoria and NSW. The awards for his fifth book of poems, The Clean Dark, are a belated acknowledgment of his stature.

Ironically, despite more than 20 years of literary endeavour, the poet is still perhaps best known for the fact that he spent much of his adolescence in reform schools and his early adulthood in jail. It irks him that he cannot shake the “prison poet” tag that attracted attention when he and painter David Rankin turned up at a Balmain pub to meet young writers, such as Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding, one day in 1967.

“They said: ‘Where did you spring from?’,” Adamson said. “I said: ‘I’ve been in jail.’ (Journalist) Wendy Bacon was there. She said: ‘Ah, fantastic’. They liked me because I’d been in prison.”

Not that this had exempted him from a tough testing to establish his credentials as a poet – “They (the patrons) were very savage critics and they didn’t take any bulls—. If it was bad they’d throw cans of beer at you.

“Halfway through a poem, one of the Glebe dadaists threw a can of beer and said: ‘It’s all bulls—, romantic crap’. And I said: ‘Come down here and say it’. Someone grabbed him and pushed him down and said: ‘Go down and tell him’. I said: ‘Do you want a punch in the head or do you want to shut up?’ He said: ‘Oh no, no’. I said: ‘You just sit there and shut your mouth’. They all went: ‘Yeah, read on Bob’.”

Adamson clapped as he gleefully recalled the incident. He said he was the”farthest cry from a prison writer you could get”, and recalled his annoyance at an early morning television show host’s recent failure to respect his request not to dwell on this aspect of his past.

Robert Adamson lives close to the old Hawkesbury riverside home of his fisherfolk grandparents, where he once sought refuge from classroom, parents and reform school. “They lived by the river and lived by the law of the river,” said the poet, who recently shifted from a terrace in Paddington.

Across the water is the dense foliage of Brisbane Water National Park. “Between the ages of nine and 19, I’d go over there,” he laughed, gesturing towards the thicket beyond his small jetty and the oyster farms on the river. “And no-one could get me. I knew every cave and trail. The cops would see me reach that shore and they would just give up.”

The poet spent his earliest years in Neutral Bay. But he was drawn to the Hawkesbury, celebrated in much of his work, and headed there whenever possible. He has finally returned to live on the river, with his wife, photographer Juno Gemes, this time a fugitive from distractions and intrusions of inner-city suburban life.

Adamson describes a return to the river in a poem called No River, No Death, which begins with the lines: “Awake after years; sudden exploding mangroves,/ alight as Mooney vanishes in mountain shade.”

“I doubt I could live without the river,” said Adamson, a keen fisherman who is so much part of the local scene he was asked to write an elegy, read as the ashes of a boatshed owner were scattered on the water. “The community doesn’t see me as a famous poet. They say: ‘Have you caught one lately, Bob?’

Now 46, Robert Adamson is sometimes linked with an American group of postwar writers known as the Black Mountain poets. They include Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and, most importantly for Adamson, Robert Duncan. He corresponded with Duncan for several years and even brought him to Australia in the 1970s. But Adamson’s influences extend beyond the Americans, to French poet Rimbaud, for example, and Australians Christopher Brennan and Francis Webb, and back at least as far as Milton.

Adamson, who learned printing skills in prison, was to become a central figure in the Sydney literary scene as president of the Australian Poetry Society and co-editor of New Poetry magazine. A natural flair for design has earned him a reputation in literary circles, and he heads his own publishing company, Paper Bark Press, with Gemes and close friend Michael Wilding.

He notes that his vocation as a poet yields such meagre financial rewards that only now, with $21,000 prizemoney, $30,000 grants and his work on university and high school reading lists, is he finally able to support himself as a full-time poet.

Although aware that the few Australians who had relied on their poetry for a livelihood had generally died of “alcoholism or symbolism or broken hearts”, he gave up a secure job with the Water Board to concentrate on poetry.

“I thought, ‘If I give up this job I’m an idiot in terms of survival. But if I don’t give it up there’s no way in the world I’m going to be a poet’. I could see that you would have to give your life to poetry.”

Adamson is the eldest of five children. His parents came from very different backgrounds, and as a boy he was closer to his father’s Irish Catholic fishing family than the upper middle-class Scottish Presbyterians on his mother’s side.

His mother was to express dismay years later at the detail in some of his seemingly autobiographical poems. “My mother, when she reads these poems, looks aghast at them and says: ‘God, he’s always been a terrible storyteller. He’s always been a terrible liar. You can’t believe anything he says’.”

Adamson said his mother was correct in saying he was “very loose with the truth”. He was a poet of the imagination, he said, and did not seek to accurately record experience.

He told of the constraints of genteel 1950s Neutral Bay domesticity fostered by his mother, and the activities that led to stints in reform school until he was expelled from the prestigious North Sydney Boys’ High in his mid-teens.

The story of his early childhood resembles a fairytale but with a cruel twist: a fascination with exotic birds was to prove his undoing and lead to brushes with the law.

“We were living near the zoo (Taronga) and I went and stole some paradise birds,” the poet recalled. “I wanted to be an ornithologist but I was hopeless at science and I couldn’t see why you needed to keep going to school and do a science degree to study birds.”

The youngster built a cage in his parents’ backyard. “I had all these exotic birds in a pigeon cage. My mother would say, ‘Where’d you get that?’I’d say I’d caught it in the park and she would say, ‘Ah, yeah’.

“I started with a lovebird. Then I got a New Guinea paradise rifle bird and she still believed it,” he laughed. “I wanted attention and, not only that, I loved the birds. I really loved them.”

He then stole some African love birds and a pair of binoculars. Already on a bond, he was caught breaking into the zoo and sent to reform school, Gosford Boys’ Home. Adamson still has vivid memories of the worst of times there, “doing hard labour and fighting to survive every day”.

With little education, he was thrilled after his release to get a job as a pastry cook at Narrabeen. Kitchen work had been the most coveted at reform school.

Bizarre though it may sound, romance led Adamson to jail. “We’d all hang around the milk bar in the billiard room at Crows Nest and there was this one girl who used to turn up, and every guy in North Sydney wanted to go with her.”

Her name was Carol. She was from Liverpool, England, and had a wonderful Liverpudlian, Beatles accent. “She had all this mascara and seven petticoats and a boy’s T-shirt with no bra, nothing. To us, she was better than Sandra Dee, you know.”

Carol and a younger sister had lived in a nearby Housing Commission flat with their mother, who later abandoned them.

“I drove her to work and went into the cake shop and, after my boss went and had his break … I took them out a tray full of chocolate eclairs and cream buns and pies.”

Later, they found a place for the younger girl to stay and Adamson, then about 20, took Carol home. But his mother had days earlier warned her children against a “floozy” she had seen at the milk bar. She told her son, who little realised the floozy had been Carol, he could not share his room with the girl

Adamson was shocked. He had planned to save enough to rent a flat and get married. “So I said to Carol: ‘Let’s go. Let’s go up to Queensland. You can live off the land up there’.” In fact, he had never been to Queensland but was convinced there were pawpaws hanging from the trees, ripe for the picking. They would sleep on the beach and he would get a job as a pastry cook.

Ignorant of conditions in Queensland, he also did not realise Carol was just 13. He had thought she was in her late teens. But when he was apprehended several months later, he was charged, among other things, with carnal knowledge.

He had already spent three months in Long Bay jail after absconding from the reform school at 18. Back to prison he went. Regarded as a troublemaker, he was to spend time in almost every jail in NSW and was 26 by the time he was released.

It was in jail that he started writing poetry. Authorities had installed speakers in each cell and he was inspired at first to write folk songs after hearing Bob Dylan sing an early song, Only a Pawn in the Game. “A bullet frawm the back of a bush … “, the poet drawled, tunelessly recalling his excitement at the time. In the exercise yard, his mates who had heard the song were unimpressed. They preferred Dean Martin and Jack Jones. But Adamson was moved to write his own songs.

The budding, but tone-deaf, folk singer showed his songs to a Jesuit priest who used to visit him. “He came back and said: ‘These aren’t songs’. I thought: ‘Oh no’. He said they were poems and he gave me the complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And I couldn’t believe it. I loved it.”

By the time he was released from a jail in Maitland, he had written 30 or 40 pages of poems. But the governor confiscated them, saying the paper on which they had been written was prison property.

Adamson later tried unsuccessfully to recall the prison poems. Significantly, the first he wrote after his release was about the Hawkesbury. These days he does not think much of that poem, called Jerusalem Bay, written at night on a typewriter bought with his wages from a factory, and read at his first meeting with Sydney writers in the Balmain pub. The influences of Dylan Thomas and Hopkins were too pronounced, he said.

So he had not included it in his latest book, a selected works published by the University of Queensland Press.

With the prison poems lost to officialdom, they are not here to reinforce associations with that aspect of his past. So the poet is that much freer to move on to other settings and preoccupations, notably the Hawkesbury, his truest home.

Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Jan-1991