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OBITUARY
Denis Kevans (1939–2005)
Bob Fagan
Denis Kevans, known widely as Australia's 'Poet Lorikeet', died in Sydney on 23 August 2005 after complications following heart surgery.1 He was a prolific poet with a literary output stretching over 46 years. Noted left-wing author Frank Hardy once commented:
he is neither published in fashionable editions, nor set in schools, yet he reaches a wider audience than most poets ... his name does not warrant even a mention in the poetry section of the Oxford History of Australian Literature but he writes better than many poets whose names do.2
Denis Kevans wrote unashamedly political poetry and identified himself, his verse and his numerous songs, with his lifelong commitment to socialism, the peace movement and republicanism and, for at least the last 35 years, the environmental movement. |
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Of Irish-Australian background, Kevans grew up in Canberra but went to high school as a scholarship boy at St Joseph's College in Sydney. Here he excelled both scholastically and on the sporting fields in rugby and cricket. He enrolled first in medicine at the University of Sydney but soon found a greater calling to literature and politics. He returned to Canberra and the public service but remained a star performer on the cricket field, being selected by Sir Robert Menzies to play in the traditional Prime Minister's XI cricket match against the visiting English team in 1958. There is a wonderful irony in the contrast between the deep loyalty of Menzies to Australia's British heritage and the young Queen Elizabeth, and his young cricketer's deep loyalties to Australian working-class politics, Australia's Irish heritage and republicanism. |
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By 1959, Denis Kevans had re-enrolled at the University of Sydney where he completed a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Education while working on building sites and becoming a member of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). From this time, he immersed himself in the literature of Henry Lawson and A.B. Paterson, Australia's working-class history from the days of the convicts, and Australia's involvement first in Europe's Great War and, later, the war against fascism ultimately in alliance with the Soviet Union. His poetic craft developed as the Cold War was intensifying and his early poetry appeared in left-wing magazines and broadsheets and in the Tribune, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). |
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From 1960–67, Kevans made regular contributions to Realist Writer, the newly-revived journal of the National Council of the Realist Writers Groups. The journal featured work from the core of Australia's left-wing writers — verse from emerging poet Dorothy Hewett and the 'bush' and industrial poets Jock Graham, Merv Lilley and Duke Tritton, stories by Katherine Susannah Prichard, and literary criticism by Judah Waten and John Manifold. Denis Kevans contributed two poems to the first volume of Realist Writer, one about the treatment of Indigenous Australians by mainstream society ('Albert Namatjira'), the other about Henry Lawson's poetic legacy ('For Those Who Do Not Know'), although he doubted whether the Australia of Menzies' time would have given Henry a feed!3 In 1961, Kevans won first prize for poetry in the CPA's fortieth anniversary literary competition for his poem, 'Southern Melody', which presented a working-class view of Australia's European history and in 1962, at the age of just 23, he won the Mary Gilmore Medal for Poetry with 'For Rebecca', a complex poem contrasting the perpetual spring of socialism with the dark winter of fascism and genocide. |
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In 1963 and 1964, the youthful Kevans was on the editorial board of the Realist Writer sitting alongside the builders labourer and poet Ralph Kelly. Coincidently, some 40 years later, Kelly's death from a long illness came just a day after Denis Kevans died, and announcements of the passing of these 'workers' poets' were successive entries in the Sydney Morning Herald. |
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Kevans's poetry during this period reflected his immersion in Sydney's left-wing politics, the history of the working-class, industrial campaigns over wages and conditions, and the peace movement. A striking photograph of the young Kevans shows him reciting from a soapbox in Sydney's Domain during the early 1960s. While socialist realist themes and hopes for a future of revolutionary social change were clear in his early poetry, the works were rarely simple polemics. This reflected first, the enormous range of his subject matter; second, the powerful and frequently acknowledged influence of Lawson on his poetry; and third, his conviction that literature with a working-class sensibility should be deeply involved in constructing alternatives to conventional Australian histories of the 1960s which focused on governors, powerful members of the ruling class and a succession of explorers 'discovering' Australia's ancient places. While alternative scholarly readings of Australia's military and labour history remained in their relative infancy, Kevans focused on re-reading the legacy of Gallipoli and the Anzac tradition from the viewpoint of the soldier-worker: 'those men from mills and mines, from ships and farms'.4 |
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Two of Kevans's best-known poems from the Realist Writers period were 'The Roar of the Crowd' (1962) and 'The Slouch of Vietnam' (1963). In the former, Kevans takes us from the excited roar of school kids racing through the gates at the end of term, past the grown-up roars of ordinary people at the football and the racetrack, to the roar in the slaughterhouse of war, and finally to the possibilities for these to be harnessed in political action.
And I've heard the roar at the Town Hall when the delegate rose to speak
A roar to shake the merciless, a roar to raise the weak,
To raise the weak and wandering, to give eyes to the blind,
That was the roar of a tidal wave that was making up its mind.5
'The Slouch of Vietnam' was harnessed in one of those moments of collective roar, becoming well-known in the Vietnam Moratorium Movement and frequently recited by Kevans to large crowds at anti-war protest rallies. Again, the message was embedded in Australia's history:
The slouch of brave Gallipoli that blinded the digger's eyes,
The slouch of bloody Passchendaele where the shell-shock case still cries,
The martyrs hanged in Changi, the heroes killed at Lae,
But the slouch of jungle paddies is a slouch I cannot pay.6
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As in Britain and the United States, there was a strong overlap in Australia in the 1960s between these left-wing literary endeavours, the anti-war movement, and the revival of folk song as a cultural and political form — often called 'protest song'. While employed as a high school teacher in Sydney, Kevans became involved in Sydney's Bush Music Club where he frequently recited his poetry, some of which was set to music by himself and other contemporary folk singers. The Bush Music Club also counted Realist Writers like Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley as active members along with young folksingers like Chris Kempster, and there were strong overlaps with the left-wing New Theatre. Both Kevans and Kempster sang with a well-known revivalist group, The Rambleers. In 1964, one of Sydney's widely-known folk singers, Gary Shearston, released an album Australian Broadside which had a stunning impact on the folk revival in featuring contemporary protest songs with an Australian voice rather than simply recycling American protest material. The urban and industrial themes on this Shearston record reflected the literary and musical circles in which Kevans moved and included 'The Roar of the Crowd' sung to a tune written by the young poet. |
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While The Realist Writer, from 1964, The Realist had come to the end of its life by 1970, Kevans continued to publish in a wide range of alternative poetry outlets such as the Tribune, The Stirrer and Rebel Chorus, along with the journal of the NSW BLF, and Education (the journal of the NSW Teachers Federation). It is particularly significant that Kevans maintained his association with the NSW BLF which, by 1971 under the leadership of Jack Mundey, had begun to take industrial action not over wages and conditions but over environmental and social impacts of the boom in residential and commercial building which had overtaken Sydney. Along with Ralph Kelly, Kevans was one of the first to write poetry about the green bans which over a four-year period held up more than 40 development projects around the city and, more significantly, led towards the State Government's recognition of the right of residents to be consulted about property developments which might change the face of the city. The powerful poem 'Monuments' first appeared in the NSW BLF's journal in 1970 and later became a tribute to the remarkable green bans era. As he moved further into writing about environmental issues, Kevans wrote subsequent poems celebrating the path-breaking nature of the green bans, including 'City of Green' in 1978 and 'The Green Ban Fusiliers' published in 1991. |
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While, through his poetry, Kevans was a tireless campaigner in the labour and peace movements for the rest of his life, his involvement in the environmental movement was becoming deeper by the later 1970s. In 1982, he retired from teaching and moved to the Blue Mountains where he concentrated on writing, spending the next 20 or so years as a prolific poet and reader of his works at political events. These ranged from industrial disputes over the closure of Cockatoo Island docks, to numerous environmental and anti-war rallies and East Timor solidarity actions and benefit nights. From his home at Wentworth Falls, Kevans became involved in local battles over development projects threatening environmental values in the mountains. He wrote bitingly satirical poems about the involvement of local and state politicians in shady deals, including the widely-known side-splitter 'Concreto' delivered in an appropriately fake 'Italian' accent, a reference to a local member of state parliament found guilty of impersonation in a development-related scam. In recent years, such poems were often co-written and set to music with his collaborator of many years, Sydney folk singer Sonia Bennett. Many poems paid homage to the beauty of the Blue Mountains environment, to the significance of the discovery of the Wollemi Pine, and to the importance of human values in preserving unique landscapes in the face of continuous pressures for residential, commercial and tourist development. This was always done with recognition of the special relationship between Aboriginal Australians and the land. In 'Ah, White Man, Have You Any Sacred Sites' he wrote:
Ah, white man, I am searching for the sites, sacred to you
Where you walk, in silent worship, and you whisper poems, too,
Where you tread, like me, in wonder, and your eyes are filled with tears,
And you see the tracks you've travelled down your fifty thousand years.7
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Denis Kevans's output was so prolific it is difficult to do justice to it in a short reflection. Until his death, he continued to recite poetry at political gatherings large and small, to participate in musical events and folk clubs, to publish poetry in a variety of places. He would send new work — handwritten on a wide variety of recycled paper — to a vast number of correspondents around Australia, inspiring and encouraging its performance and circulation. In his verse, Kevans's command of the Australian vernacular was often uncanny. He was able to capture the rhythms of everyday Australian speech and working-class idiom both in his longer, more serious poems and in the often hilarious four-liners for which he was famous around labour clubs and gatherings of activists across the country. |
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Three collections of his poems were self-published8 while a fourth9 was published by the Left Book Club Cooperative. His work will stand as a major source for future labour historians grappling with the social and political context in which Australia's labour history has unfolded. He remained committed to recording untold stories in Australia's labour history and, just before his death, finished a biography of wharfies' union leader Ted Roach. By many measures Denis Kevans was a major Australian poet, as well as political historian, and hopefully some of Kevans's classic works will take their place in future anthologies purporting to represent the range of Australian poetry. I last saw Denis Kevans performing some of his work, with Sonia Bennett, at the National Labour History Conference in July 2005. The last lines of his poem 'Monuments' seem fitting as an epitaph:
And one day when these cities are but dust upon the air,
The pollen from our fighting hearts will bloom again somewhere.10
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Endnotes
1. Denis referred to himself as 'Australia's Lorikeet' in one of his four-line ditties and the name stuck. Other tributes to Denis are on the web at <http://deniskevans.net> where you can also find how to obtain copies of his publications and where there is news of a planned annual 'Denis Kevans Poetry Award'.
2. Frank Hardy, Sleeve notes for Denis Kevans, The Great Prawn War and Other Poems, Sydney, 1982.
3. Denis Kevans, 'For Those Who Do Not Know', The Realist Writer, vol. 4, 1960, p. 33–4.
4. Denis Kevans, 'The Unknown Soldier', The Realist, vol. 15, 1964, p. 22.
5. Kevans, The Great Prawn War and Other Poems, p. 32.
6. Ibid., p. 13.
7. Denis Kevans, Ah, White Man, Have You Any Sacred Sites?, Sydney. 1985, p. 21.
8. Kevans, The Great Prawn War and Other Poems, Kevans, Ah, White Man, Have You Any Sacred Sites? and Denis Kevans, 300 Funny Little Poems, Lorikeet Publications, Wentworth Falls, 1998.
9. Kevans, The Bastard Who Squashed the Grapes in Me Bag, Left Book Club Cooperative, Sydney, 1991.
10. Kevans, The Great Prawn War, p. 37.
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