 |
|
The
original Australians honoured their artists, their dancers, their songmen.
They were an integral and important part of society. But when the white
man came in 1788, he brought a new kind of society. A society of jailers
and jailed, of rulers and ruled, of wealthy and poor. There was no room
for cultural workers. Promoters of such sinful activities as theatre were
apt to find themselves arrested, journalists and poets were likely to
end up in jail.
But
in this prison settlement, this alien land, something new began to emerge.
Men and women began to accept their new environment, to feel part of it,
even to love it. They began to think of themselves as part of a new, and
hopefully, a better society. They wanted to share their knowledge of,
and their feelings towards, the new land. An Australian consciousness
began to emerge. Writers, artists, actors, dancers, singers and cultural
workers became important in the process of finding out what it meant to
be Australian.
But
the Society was still the one that had little room for writers. It was
based too much on caste and privilege, on acquisition and profit, on bowing
the knee to overseas arbiters not only in commercial and financial fields,
but also in the culture field. There was a growing recognition among the
people of poets like Henry Clarence Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry
Lawson, but these three and others like them had to face poverty, loneliness
and despair.
| Southern men of letters, vainly seeking recognition here - |
| Southern men of letters, driven to the Northern Hemisphere! |
| It is time your wrongs were known, it is time you claimed redress - |
| Time that you were independant of the mighty Northern Press. |
The
FAW Sydney Regional is one of thirty regional centres which hold seminars,
workshops, literary discussions and competitions throughout Australia
on a monthly basis. Plus there is an Isolated Writers Regional.
Sydney
City FAW was founded in 1928.