Back to this writer’s Contents page

Philip Mead

David Campbell (1915–1979)

This piece is about six printed pages long.

David Campbell is a lyric poet of Australian rural life, and of love and war. Like Judith Wright and Francis Webb, he contributed in distinctive ways to developments in Australian poetry. Born in the year of Gallipoli (like Judith Wright), Campbell was descended on both his mother’s and father’s sides from long established grazing families in New South Wales. Critics of Campbell’s work have frequently noted the ‘squatter pastoral’ strand in his writing and its obvious relation to his family’s history as pioneer settlers, his childhood on isolated sheep stations, as well as his own farming experience as an adult in the Monaro district of Southern New South Wales. In the words of Manning Clark, in the eulogy he delivered at Campbell’s funeral, he belonged by birth to the ‘Old Australia.’ When he first published poems like ‘Harry Pearce’ and ‘The Stockman’ in the mid-1940s Campbell was working within the native, ballad tradition of Australian poetry, one of the ‘New Bulletin’ group of poets.

David Campbell was born in 1915 on his parents’ grazing property ‘Ellerslie’, near the town of Adelong, west of Canberra. His father, Alfred Campbell trained and practised as a doctor as a young man (F.R.C.S. Edinburgh, 1900). At about the time of his marriage, Alfred Campbell returned to pastoral management in partnership with his brothers. Campbell’s mother, Edith Madge Watt, was a descendant of the Blackman family, another longstanding New South Wales grazing family. Campbell was educated by a series of governesses at ‘Ellerslie’, in company with his three sisters, Dorothy, Madge and Diana. In 1930, he was sent to The King’s School in Parramatta, Sydney where he excelled at sport. Among other outstanding accomplishments at King’s, he was in both the First XV in rugby, the first VIII in rowing and was Captain of the School in 1933 and 1934. In 1935 Campbell went up to Jesus College, Cambridge where he initially studied history, but then changed to English. Here, also, he excelled at sport, playing rugby for Cambridge against Oxford and, famously, for England in two tests in 1936 (against Wales and Ireland).

At Cambridge, Campbell began to write poetry, publishing poems in 1937 in both Chanticlere (the Jesus College magazine) and the Cambridge Review. He was encouraged to do so by his tutor E.M.W. Tillyard, by Arthur Quiller-Couch and by his compatriot poet friend at Cambridge, John Manifold. His two ‘Out Back’ poems date from this time. While these early works hark back to the Australian ballad tradition, Campbell was also absorbing Yeats, Lorca, Machado, and French symbolist poetry, ‘trying to couple,’ as he wrote in the preface to his Selected Poems (1973) ‘the bush ballad and my early memories with the traditional ballad and early English lyrics.’ He completed his BA (majoring in English) in 1937.

At Cambridge, Campbell also learned to fly, as a member of the University Air Squadron, and shortly after the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, he joined the RAAF. He spent the war flying bombing, reconnaissance and supply missions over New Guinea and Timor, as Commanding Officer of 1 Squadron, 2 Squadron and 32 Squadron as well as training RAAF pilots at airforce bases in Gippsland and outside Darwin. His poem ‘Men in Green,’ published in 1943 (in the Bulletin), arose out of his flying experience in New Guinea. Below is the version of the poem from Campbell’s first published volume Speak With the Sun; he revised the poem later. It remains one of the finest examples of Australian war poetry:

Oh, there were fifteen men in green,
Each with a tommy-gun
Who leapt into my plane at dawn;
We rose to meet the sun.

We set our course towards the east
And climbed into the day
Till the ribbed jungle underneath
Like a giant fossil lay.

We climbed towards the distant range
Where two white paws of cloud
Clutched at the shoulders of the pass;
The green men laughed aloud.

They did not fear the ape-like cloud
That climbed the mountain crest
And hung from twisted ropes of air
With thunder in their breast.

They did not fear the summer’s sun
In whose hot centre lie
A hundred hissing cannon shells
For the unwatchful eye.

And when on Dobadura’s field
We landed, each man raised
His thumb towards the open sky;
But to their right I gazed.

For fifteen men in jungle green
Rose from the kunai grass
And came towards the plane. My men
In silence watched them pass;
It seemed they looked upon themselves
In Time’s prophetic glass.

Oh, there were some leaned on a stick
And some on stretchers lay,
But few walked on their own two feet
In the early green of day.

They had not feared the ape-like cloud
That climbed the mountain crest;
They had not feared the summer’s sun
With bullets for their breast.

Their eyes were bright, their looks were dull,
Their skin had turned to clay.
Nature had met them in the night
And stalked them in the day.

And I think still of men in green
On the Soputa track,
With fifteen spitting tommy-guns
To keep the jungle back.

After the war, Campbell returned to farming on the property ‘Wells’, on the outskirts of Canberra. In 1961 he moved to Palerang, near Bundgendore, and by the beginning of the 1970s was living on a small farm outside Queanbeyan, ‘The Run’.

Campbell’s first collection of poetry, Speak With the Sun was published in 1949 (simultaneously in London, by Chatto & Windus and in Toronto, by Clarke, Irwin) and contained a ‘Glossary of Australian Terms.’ It was generally greeted with acclaim by Australian critics, who noticed the poetry’s distinctive use of language: a make-over of the native ballad form (arrived at through Yeats) and a compactness of imagery, with surrealist or at least symbolist inflections. Campbell’s characteristic gestures of delight and celebration of the natural world are also established. In 1983, the critic R.F. Brissenden unpacked the influence of Henry Vaughan, from whom he took the title of Speak with the Sun, on Campbell’s early poetry (“‘Speak With the Sun”: Energy, Light, And Love in the Poetry of David Campbell’).

Between 1949 and 1970 Campbell published The Miracle of Mullion Hill (1956), Poems (1962) and a collection of short stories, Evening Under Lamplight (1959). He also edited an annual anthology of Australian poetry in 1966 and the anthology Modern Australian Poetry in 1970 and became poetry editor of the Australian newspaper in 1964, all of which consolidated his position as a leading Australian writer. Leonie Kramer critically surveys this first stage of Campbell’s writing life in her article ‘David Campbell’s Early Poems’ (Heseltine, 59-66). Campbell won numerous awards for his writing during his lifetime, including the Henry Lawson Australian Arts Award (1970), the Patrick White Literary Award (1975), the New South Wales Premier’s Prize (1980) and the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Christopher Brennan Award (1980). But as R.F. Brissenden points out, by the early 1970s, his work ‘though charming, craftsmanlike and idiosyncratic, [appeared] slightly passé’ (“Introduction” 2). With the publication in 1970 of The Branch of Dodona and Other Poems 1969-1970 Campbell seemed to take a leap into the present, at a time when Australian culture and writing were undergoing seismic changes. This 1970 collection is crucial in Campbell’s own development as a poet, and in his influence on the lyric tradition generally in Australian poetry. The first poem in The Branch of Dodona, ‘My Lai’ was both a powerful response to the violence of the Vietnam war and an announcement of his review of the fundamentals of his poetic language:

I was milking the cow when a row of tall bamboo
Was mowed by rifle fire
  With my wife and child in the one harvest,
  And the blue milk spilt and ruined.

One life, one field, one wife. Now the village burns
And the cow chews her cud
  Like an old man’s thoughts at evening.
  Blood is sticky. I have lived too long.

My cousin holding his elbow, unbelieving.
No, no, he has done
  Nothing, his eyes white with wonder
  As they cry, “I’ll get me that one!”

The cow is dead that I lie under,
Bodies bloat in the sun.
  Who would have thought that they would lie
  So heavily upon my heart?

The bamboo mowed in lines. Somehow this happened
Here and in my head. —
  “Put a rocket in that old cow,
  Then it’s time to line for chow.”

Campbell’s anti-Vietnam stance came as a shock to some readers, given his own history as a decorated combatant in the Second World War. But Campbell said in an interview that ‘one of the reasons I started a change of direction was the Vietnam War. We were suddenly pulled out of a rather insular way of life and had large moral issues to look at. I found myself very much against the Australian involvement there and it made me very much more aware of the general violence in the world’ (Headon 69). Campbell also became increasingly supportive of the environmental movement and hand in hand with these new directions in his public stance went an expansion of the lyric scope of his poetry. The ‘Works and Days’ sequence in The Branch of Dodona, for example, remakes what Chris Wallace-Crabbe labelled Campbell’s earlier ‘squatter pastoral’ — characterised by serenity and lyric plainness — into demythologised depictions of everyday country life and language: ‘Sheep! They’re not dumb, they know every trick in the book’. In his preface to his 1973 Selected Poems, Campbell remarked that ‘it was not until “Works and Days” that I was able to write directly about work on the land and its slow seasonal change. These poems spring from the shop of countrymen.’ The deliberate conjunction of ‘My Lai’ and the ‘Works and Days’ poems also suggests Campbell’s ambition to bring a political dimension to the lyric. The ‘Ku-ring-gai Rock Carvings’ sequence from this collection, part of the same impulse, introduces a serious awareness of Aboriginal culture into Campbell’s version of pastoral.

The four collections of poetry Campbell published after The Branch of Dodona — Devil’s Rock (1974), Deaths and Pretty Cousins (1975), Words with a Black Orpington (1978) and The Man in the Honeysuckle (1979) — before his death in 1979, represent an intense burst of creativity that is both an extension and a working out of the lyric possibilities unleashed by the Branch of Dodona volume. The poems in these volumes share some common preoccupations: the relations of memory and place as inflected by family, the astonishing minutiae of nature, aboriginal rock art (‘Devil’s Rock and Other Carvings,’ ‘Sydney Sandstone (Rock Carvings)’) and a celebration of the sexual energies and cycles of nature and art. Also characteristic of Campbell’s writing in these collections is an eclectic, even promiscuous reaching after analogous and supportive practices in other art forms — like the painting of de Kooning, Arp, Klee, Balthus, Pollock and Cezanne — in crafts like ceramics and pottery, in the lessons of line and shape from life drawing classes, in Chinese calligraphy, and in the paradoxes of modern theoretical science. In the poetry of these four collections, Campbell is never simply relying on the evocative and musical possibilities of the lyric, Australian-style, nor interested much in developing a recognisable and nuanced poetic ‘voice.’ Rather he is continually and obsessively attempting to follow the poetic impulse to its source and to push the lyric form to its logical extreme.

Campbell’s particular kind of experimentation in these last four volumes also owes something to his translation of modern Russian poetry, principally Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam (in Moscow Trefoil, 1975) but also of Marina Tsvetaeva, Olga Berggolts, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaia and Yunna Morits (Seven Russian Poets, 1979). These translations were collaborative poetic work with his fellow Canberra poet Rosemary Dobson and with the native Russian speakers and scholars of Russian poetry Natalie Staples, Olga Hassanov and Robert Dessaix. The influence of Ted Hughes’s poetry, including his advocacy of contemporary European poetry in translation, is related to this aspect of Campbell’s remaking of his poetic self, post-1970. At Cambridge, when he was first beginning to write poetry, Campbell had been interested in both the native tradition of Australian poetry and in contemporary European models. His late, collaborative translations of Russian and other European poets is another sense in which Campbell was, late in his creative life, working with the fundamentals of a poetic with which he had begun.

Critical reception of Campbell’s work was summed up in the tributary collection of essays edited by Harry Heseltine in 1987. Since then, one of the most useful readings of Campbell’s work and its cultural context is available in Susan McKernan’s chapter ‘The Writer and the Crisis: Judith Wright and David Campbell’ in her critical account of post-war Australian literature, A Question of Commitment (1989). There, McKernan judiciously readjusts Buckley’s account of the ‘New Bulletin’ school and carefully identifies the different aesthetic trajectories and values of Wright, Stewart and Campbell. But arguably, Campbell remains best known for his poems of the 1940s and 50s, ‘Windy Gap,’ ‘Harry Pearce’, for instance, and war poems like ‘Men in Green.’ Critical reading has yet to come to terms with the lyric energies and experiments of Campbell’s late poetry which have important relations to the revisions of the pastoral tradition in Australian poetry represented in the formally innovative work of Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield and John Kinsella.

References and select critical readings

Brissenden, R.F. “Remembering David Campbell”. Quadrant 24.1-2 (1980): 16-20.

———, “‘Speak With The Sun”: Energy, Light, And Love in the Poetry of David Campbell.’ Mirko Jurak, ed. Australian Papers: Yugoslavia, Europe and Australia. Ljubljana: Edvard Cardelj University, 1983. 203-15.

———, “Introduction”. Harry Heseltine, ed. A Tribute to David Campbell: A Collection of Essays. Kensington, New South Wales: University of New South Wales Press, 1987. 1-6.

Buckley, Vincent. Essays in Poetry, Mainly Australian. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1957.

Clark, Manning. David Campbell 1915-1979: Words spoken at his funeral. Canberra: Brindabella, 1979.

Dobson, Rosemary. “A Rare Poet of His Time”. Age 4 August 1979: 24.

Headon, David. ‘Balancing More Plates on the Tip of a Wand: David Campbell’s later Poetry.’ Harry Heseltine, ed. A Tribute to David Campbell: A Collection of Essays. Kensington, New South Wales: University of New South Wales Press, 1987. 67-86.

Heseltine, Harry, ed. A Tribute to David Campbell: A Collection of Essays. Kensington, New South Wales: University of New South Wales Press, 1987. Includes a Bibliography of Campbell by Sandra Burchill with notes on the Campbell Manuscript Collection in The National Library, Canberra. 106-50.

Hope, A.D. ‘Variations on a Theme: David Campbell’s translations.’ Leonie Kramer, ed. Poetry Australia: David Campbell 80 (December 1981). 62-5.

Kinross Smith, Graeme. “David Campbell — A Profile”. Westerly 3 (1973): 31-8.

———, “The Poetry of David Campbell”. Southerly 25.3 (1965): 193-8.

Kramer, Leonie J. “The Surreal Landscape of David Campbell”. Southerly 41.1 (1981): 3-16.

———, ed. Poetry Australia: David Campbell 80 (December 1981). Includes an “Autobiographical Sketch” by Campbell, letters about Campbell from John Manifold, and other reminiscences.

———, “Campbell, David Watt Ian (1915-1979)”. Australian Dictionary of Biography. Volume 13: 1940-1980 A-De. John Ritchie, Gen. ed. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993. 356-7.

McKernan, Susan. A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years After the War. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989.

Page, Geoff. “David Campbell: The Last Ten Years”. Australian Book Review 15 (1979): 21-3.

Robinson, Dennis. “David Campbell’s Poetic Mind”. Australian Literary Studies 11.4 (1984): 480-92.

Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. Falling Into Language. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990. 7: “Squatter Pastoral”.

Wallace-Crabbe, Robin. “David Campbell: An Appreciation”. Overland 79 (1980): 55-9.

Interview

Hart, Kevin. “New Directions: An Interview with David Campbell”. Makar 11.1 (1975): 4-10.

Papers

David Campbell’s papers are held in the National Library of Australia, MS5028 (17 boxes), index available via the following URL:
http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms5028

Philip Mead
— University of Tasmania

The URL address of this page is
http://www.austlit.com/a/campbell/mead.html