The Jindyworobak Movement was an Australian literary group active in the 1930s and 1940s. Most members were poets who wanted to help create a culture that was uniquely Australian by including Indigenous Australian themes, language, and myths. The group aimed to "free Australian art from outside influences that limited it" and to make art that reflected the Australian landscape and an understanding of Australia's history, including its ancient, colonial, and modern periods.
The movement began in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1937, when Rex Ingamells and other poets started the Jindyworobak Club. Ingamells explained the group's goals in a speech called On Environmental Values (1937). The name "Jindyworobak" comes from the Woiwurrung language, once spoken near modern-day Melbourne, and means "to join" or "to annex." James Devaney used the word in his 1929 book The Vanished Tribes, where he claimed it was taken from a 19th-century vocabulary. Ingamells chose the name because it felt unusual and symbolic. The group was sometimes called "Jindys," and this name referred to its members, including Nancy Cato, Ian Mudie, and Roland Robinson.
The Jindyworobaks were inspired by Australian bush ballads, the book Kangaroo (1928) by D. H. Lawrence, and The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936) by P. R. Stephensen. Their goals were similar to those of other artists of the time, such as writer Xavier Herbert, artist Margaret Preston, and composer John Antill. However, the movement faced criticism for being too focused on Australian culture and for being overly nationalistic. More recently, it has also been described as racist for using Indigenous culture without proper respect. The group published The Jindyworobak Anthology every year from 1938 to 1953. A collection of the first ten years of this publication, called The Jindyworobak Review (1948), was later released. A detailed history of the movement, The Jindyworobaks, was published in 1979.
Origins and aims
The Jindyworobak movement began as a literary club in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1938. It was supported by many Australian artists, poets, and writers. These individuals were interested in Indigenous Australian culture and the Outback, and they wanted to help white Australians better understand and appreciate these aspects. Other factors influenced the movement, such as white Australians feeling disconnected from their European roots, the economic problems of the 1930s, the growing number of people living in cities or suburbs instead of rural areas, the impact of the First World War and the coming of World War II, and the rise of early mass media like radio, recordings, newspapers, and magazines. A strong sense of place was especially important to the Jindyworobak movement.
Rex Ingamells wrote Colonial Culture, a prose statement of the movement’s beliefs, in response to a call by L. F. Giblin for Australian poets to portray Australian nature and people as they are, not through a European perspective. Soon after, the first Jindyworobak Anthology was published.
In 1941, poet and critic A. D. Hope criticized the Jindyworobaks, calling them "the Boy Scout school of poetry." He later apologized in Native Companions in 1975, saying he believed some apologies were needed for his earlier comments. Others, like R. H. Morrison, mocked the movement with terms like "Jindyworobackwardness." Hal Porter described meeting Rex Ingamells, who offered him a "porter gaff" (a type of drink) and encouraged him to join the movement, which involved using words from Indigenous languages to express ideas about Australia.
Although the Jindyworobaks focused on Australian culture, not all members were Australian. For example, William Hart-Smith, sometimes linked to the movement, was born in England and lived most of his life in New Zealand after spending a decade (1936–1946) in Australia.
Collections of Jindyworobak works were published until 1953.
Influence and aftermath
Some people believe the movement did not have a lasting effect, and its decline showed the rise of modernist painting and jazz in Australia. No Indigenous Australians were part of the movement, but it helped increase interest in Indigenous Australian art.
In 1975, Judith Wright wrote in Because I Was Invited that the movement succeeded in bringing poetry into public attention. Many respected figures in Australian literature, some still alive today, began their careers through the Jindyworobak movement.
In the 1980s, Brian Matthews wrote about the movement. Ackland, in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, said the movement "restarted discussions about Indigenous culture and helped local artists through its yearly poetry collections."
Leading poet Les Murray supported the Jindyworobaks' goals and jokingly called himself "the last of the Jindyworobaks." The view of Australia in Eleanor Dark's 1941 novel The Timeless Land is similar to the Jindyworobaks' perspective. The movement's continued influence can also be seen in the poetry of Peter Porter, as well as in Patrick White's Voss (1957) and Randolph Stow's To the Islands (1958). In Australian cinema, director Charles Chauvel's vision of Australia, shown in films like Jedda (1955), has been compared to the Jindyworobaks' ideas.
Musicologist Roger Covell, writing about composer Clive Douglas in 1967, said, "if there ever was a musical Jindyworobak, it has been Clive Douglas." John Antill is also described as a "Jindyworobak composer," especially for his ballet Corroboree. In the 1980s, rock bands like Midnight Oil, Goanna, and Gondwanaland created music inspired by Aboriginal culture, reflecting the Jindyworobaks' earlier efforts.
Jindoworobaks and Aboriginality
A wirrigun, a clever person, sings about that tree. He hums a song, a Mapooram, a song that can close things up or bring them out. It is a song that can bring a girl or a woman from that tree.
The Australian literary historian Brian Clunes Ross has written about a common criticism of the Jindyworobaks, a group that has been discussed by people with different political views. The criticism is about how the Jindyworobaks viewed their relationship with Indigenous Australians.
Ivor Indyk has suggested that the Jindyworobaks were trying to create a type of poetry about peaceful rural life, similar to an idealized past before colonization. He argues that they ignored the fact that Australian novelists had already explored this theme. However, unlike the Greek version of this idealized world, the Australian version is not filled with peaceful scenes but is instead marked by the effects of colonization, such as death, loss of land, and misunderstandings between white settlers and Indigenous people. He also notes that Judith Wright felt a heavy sense of guilt about the history of white people in Australia. This guilt is reflected in the way settlers and the land are described as being divided by greed and lack of understanding. Despite her efforts to create a new way of thinking about the land, called a "white dreaming," the landscapes described by Ingamells are filled with energy but are also empty, except for the remains of Aboriginal tribes and birds like cockatoos and parakeets. These birds are bright and loud, showing both the power and strangeness of the land. There is little mention of social or cultural connections to Indigenous people, and no clear sense of history in these descriptions.
It is possible to debate whether the Jindyworobaks aimed to help white people understand Indigenous culture or to connect with the land, which Indigenous Australians are often seen as being closely tied to.
The greatest influence of Indigenous culture on the Jindyworobaks came from stories that white folklorists and anthropologists had collected and written down. Written Indigenous literature, as opposed to stories that were only recorded by others, did not appear in print until the 1920s, when David Unaipon, a Christian from a mission in South Australia, published many works. Unaipon continued writing until the 1950s, by which time the Jindyworobaks were no longer active. Unaipon was the only Indigenous Australian writer published during the Jindyworobaks' most active period. Another Indigenous writer, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), was not published until the 1960s. Although Unaipon's book, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, was published during the Jindyworobaks' time, it is unclear how much influence it had on the group, as Unaipon is not mentioned in their works.