Jindyworobak Movement

The Jindyworobak Movement was a nationalistic Australian literary movement that sought to promote aboriginal ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. They were active from the 1930s to around the 1950s. The movement intended to combat the influx of "alien" culture, which was threatening local art.

Name

Encyclopedia Brittanica claims poet and novelist James Devaney coined the name in his 1929 book The Vanished Tribes. "Jindyworobak" is supposedly from the phrase jindi woroback, meaning "to join" or "to annex" in the Woiwurrung language formerly spoken round Melbourne. This is said to have been sourced by Devaney from a 19th century vocabulary.

Poet Rex Ingamells, who can be seen as the founder of the movement applied it to the group in 1937.

Origins and aims

Starting off as a literary club in Adelaide, in 1938, and it was supported by many Australian artists, poets, and writers. Many were fascinated by Aboriginal culture and the Outback, and desired to improve the white Australian's understanding and appreciation of them. Other features came into play, among them white Australia's increasing alienation from its European origins; the Depression of the 1930s which recalled the economic troubles of the end of the 19th century; an increasingly urban or suburban Australian population alienated from the wild Australia of the Outback etc; the First World War and the coming of World War Two and also the coming of early mass market media in the form of the radio, recordings, newspapers and magazines. Sense of place was particularly important to the Jindyworobak movement.

Ingamells produced Colonial Culture as a prose manifesto of the movement, and shortly after the first Jindyworobak Anthology came out.

One of the most prominent works of the movement is Xavier Herbert's Capricornia of 1938. It describes the early pioneer movement in the contemporary Northern Territory, Australian values, and white settler relationships positive and negative with the natives, as well as the native culture itself.

Influence and aftermath

Arguably, the movement failed to make a lasting impression, and its erosion signalled the arrival of modernist painting in Australia, as well as jazz. Few, if any Aborigines were members of the movement, but it did indirectly spur the contemporary burgeoning aboriginal art in the commercial market.

Judith Wright wrote in Because I was Invited in 1975 that the movement had succeeded in bringing poetry into the public arena:

"One thing the movement did achieve was to make verse a subject of debate and argument. Opposition movements sprang up, and brought into the quarrel most practising poets of any stature. The Jindyworobak's tenets were discussed, and their more extravagant aspects such as such as recourse to 'Aboriginality' was ridiculed, even in the daily newspapers (which at that time were scarcely arenas for literary debate)."

Members of the Jindyworobak Movement

• Nancy Cato
• James Devaney
• Xavier Herbert
• Rex Ingamells
• Ian Mudie
• Les Murray
• Roland Robinson
• Judith Wright

See also

• Scottish Renaissance - a nationalistic movement of the same period.
• Harlem Renaissance - a reassertion of black identity in the USA.

External links

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