WEARNE, Alan (Richard)

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Nationality: Australian. Born: Melbourne, 23 July 1948. Education: Monash University, Melbourne, 1967–68; La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, B.A. 1973; Rusden College, Dip. Ed. 1977. Career: Has worked as a high school teacher in Melbourne, and for the Australian Public Service. Labour candidate for Victorian State Parliament, 1979. Poetry editor, Meanjin, 1984–87. Awards: Australia Council fellowship, 1974, 1978, 1984, 1986, 1987; National Book Council award, 1987; Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, 1987. Address: 83 Edgevale Road, Kew, Melbourne, Victoria 3103, Australia.

Publications

Poetry

Public Relations. Brisbane, Makar Press, 1972.

New Devil, New Parish. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1976.

The Nightmarkets (novel in verse). Melbourne and New York, Penguin, 1986.

Out Here (novella in verse). Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1987.

Novel

Kicking in Danger: A Damien Chubb Footy Mystery. North Fitzroy, Victoria, Black Pepper, 1997.

Other

The Puzzles of Childhood by Manning Clark. Melbourne, Department of Discussion Programs, Council of Adult Education, 1990.

George Johnston, A Biography by Garry Kinnane. Melbourne, Department of Discussion Programs, Council of Adult Education, 1991.

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Manuscript Collection: Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

Critical Study: "Melways to His Melbourne: Alan Wearne's 'The Nightmarkets'" by Peter Craven, in Meanjin (Parkville, Victoria), 46(3), September 1987.

Alan Wearne comments:

I write large-scale works, although within these works sections can be as small as, say, six lines. One hundred lines for me is, however, a small poem. My most famous work is The Nightmarkets, a verse novel that has achieved a certain fame in Australia but that overseas publishers seem to be too scared to take on board. Penguin U.K. tried thinking about the idea for a while but gave up. This annoys me, but I can understand.

There are poets whom I wish I could write like, let alone be as good as: Hardy, Stevens, Edwin Muir. But I would much rather write like myself. Anything too influenced is, at best, an unintentional parody and, at worst, decidedly second rate.

My gods are many, but Shakespeare, Browning, Byron, Frank O'Hara, Auden, Meredith (of Modern Love), Clough (of "Amours de Voyage"), James K. Baxter, Tennyson rate quite highly. Also Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, etc.

I know a little Portuguese but not enough to come to grips with Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, and Luis de Camoes as much as I would like to in the original.

Poetry is still in luck, sheltered from any Booker prize-type bullshit. Australian poetry is still lucky in that it has not the uniform "creative writing school" drabness that afflicts the United States. There is, however, a lot of garbage being written in Australia today, and, rhyming, blank, or free, doggerel is doggerel!

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The long narrative poem is Alan Wearne's métier. Out Here and The Nightmarkets are both sequences of dramatic monologues in different voices that explain focal events through differing realities. His shorter poems (one is entitled "Extracts from a Competent Novel") seem to be a flexing of his poetic muscle in preparation for these extended narratives. Browning and Meredith, among the mentors he cites, are the clearest influences, but his flexibility in using contrasting verse forms and the number of his characters make Wearne's long poems truly novelistic.

In The Nightmarkets Wearne's characters are differentiated by the use of rhyme and poetic structures. Out Here, however, relies on language for contrast. The catalyst for the speakers' stories in Out Here is the self-inflicted stabbing of a teenage boy, but as the title reflects, the core of the poem is not the re-creation of this event (a response to his parents' impending separation) but an examination of the values of a particular place, an affluent middle-class suburb. The titles of individual poems continue the emphasis on place: "Like It's Some Ghost Town," "Home," "Homes," "Out There." In the first poem a schoolteacher passes judgment on place and people: "that area hasn't community / hasn't responsibility: / who won't serve, but want to / be served."

Through multiple voices Wearne builds up a picture of the empty materialism of suburban life as viewed by both insiders and outsiders. The boy's mother, closest to understanding her life when she confesses that she "had kids not opinions," fights through her husband's infidelities to maintain her self-perception as "brisk … poised … efficient." Her narrative breaks down at the end, a combination of stoicism and sentiment: "leave me darling, but recall: I just / wanna stay here and love you remember it?" The father's narrative, situated as he is between the wife and mistress, perceptively describes the latter as his "exhilarating / dead-end," likening her to her own place: "organized efficient, neat / living-room, clean kitchen, / bathroom: the bedroom is / total shambles." While the wife and mistress fall back on clichés from popular songs to express their feelings, he turns to the masculine equivalent of friendship, in particular to his older brother, a retired football hero. The son and his girlfriend are better educated than their elders but lack experience and power, so that the only mature voice from "out here" is the last, her father's.

The sequence of voices within the poem controls and balances the narratives. The first line of the first poem, "I viewed the eddies of the Viney maelstrom," establishes the detachment and sophistication of the schoolteacher. Mother, father, and mistress are followed by two other voices from "outside," the grandfather and aunt. The grandfather, a contractor responsible for the estate but living elsewhere, upholds a crude conservatism, defends his life ("built and begat"), and surveys his family of daughters, respecting only the strong one who argues with him. The aunt, independent, radical, outspoken, despairing of her "object-addicted, middle-ground, / mothering big sister," explicitly rejects the false sentimentality of the wife and mistress: "hey, little girl, do you still / run to his arms and seek / as these songs? … sister that's shit!" The voices of the youngsters are placed seventh and eighth, positions indicative of their insignificance in the lives of the adults and of the relative unimportance of the stabbing, which is swallowed by family separation.

The Nightmarkets uses fewer speakers (six) but has a much wider number of characters. Here the theme is time (1980) more than place (Melbourne) as the radicals and others of the late 1960s and the 1970s make their way in a changing world in which "the enemy still is greed" and we hear the "endless insulting chant: / Leave it to the market forces / leave it to the market forces" ("Melbourne 1980"). Wearne's spectrum here includes the upper-class establishment, the suburban middle class, inner-city radicals, and the fringes of the underworld. Old friendships and political and sexual alliances are the filaments that stretch across a city.

The major voices are those of Ian Metcalfe, a journalist, and his brother Robert, a union official and an aspiring Labor politician, both 1970s political activists. For Robert, Wearne uses a form he describes as "formal yet adventurous":

			 The fight is the cause
			is the fight;


			 which gelled as I addressed
my branch, 'What I Believe and Why,' 'Mate?' asked that
  resident academic,
    could these events be termed "seeds of a white collar"
    				consciousness?'

Ian's form, the sixteen-line Meredith sonnet (one serves as an epigraph to the volume) with "outrageous rhymes," successfully renders a character defending his youthful idealism, hating any compromise that he makes, and still living the "pot" culture of the 1970s. These lines are from "The Division of O'Dowd"

	...(The sea might remind us
	...of love civilization, etcetera, M. Arnold-style,
but we opt
	for a counter-meal, fish, of course, at the Steam
Packet.)
	I'd on a windcheater while she took from the
backseat her jacket
 used on such occasions. We walked by Hobson's Bay till
the sun stopped.

The voice of the prostitute Terri is a series of twelve-line sonnets; of the conservative politician John McTaggart, prose; of his mother, a more formally rendered sonnet; of Robert's ex-girlfriend, now McTaggart's lover, the journalist Sue Dobbo, free verse in the first instance and rhymed couplets in the second (when she has resigned some of her freedom to accept the role of official biographer to her lover.)

Through these characters Wearne examines 1980s greed and the obsession with market forces at a time of political confusion between the 1975 dismissal of Gough Whitlam's Labor government, a watershed in Australian politics, and the 1983 election of another Labor government. Ian's role as an investigative journalist brings all of the characters together, and his connection with Terri allows Wearne to draw parallels between political life and life in a high-class brothel (the Crystal Palace). While these are not explicitly drawn throughout, they are articulated in Ian's final monologue, at his last meeting with Terri:

...We stood apart in an alcove, testing
	the order of business. Love was in the previous
   minutes;
   	correspondence, though important, had been limited;
you'd tell
	we'd get each other's vote of thanks. As for the
future? As for the future, we can muster the numbers
   required for control

Wearne's interest in people is given full play in The Nightmarkets, where even the most briefly heard voice has individuality. The narrative action is limited, but the delineation of character is deft and compelling.

—Nan Bowman Albinski