1953

The concept is simple: a Tuesday afternoon in a backwater country town 400 miles north-west of Sydney. Verse poems – monologues and character portraits – coalesce around themes as pertinent to small-town Australia then, in the titular year, as they are now. The narrative is slight, the details quotidian with a twist, the rhythm consistently slow and steady, the turns of phrase turn into facts. In 1953, Geoff Page crafts a portrait of a single moment through tactile, nuanced description of the world it was born into.

Prescriptively, the opening poem describes the panoramic view to follow: ‘a web of roots, of nodes and networks / spreading underground… Our view is moving slowly right, / slow enough to count the houses.’

The characters, Page writes, ‘are from brush-strokes only; / we do not see their faces’, before (anti-)climatically inscribing their fate: ‘We see a few cars on the move / but most are parked and waiting, / patient maybe for a story, / in which they play a part’.

However, while ‘brush-strokes’ might be how the townsfolk paint themselves, for Page, they are vivid and fully-realised, if somewhat rehashed and a little predictable. There’s the dodgy real estate agent, the one who’s sleeping with the Town Clerk’s wife. There’s the tormented World War II veteran who can’t shake the night terrors, not even with the help of pills from ‘Dr. God’. There’s the Aboriginal mother of five, the youngest fathered by a white shearer who’s since shot through. There’s the wistful school teacher, the pregnant teen, the racist publican, and the forgotten spinster who hasn’t forgotten a thing – she’s got ‘the whole town’s history really / drifting sideways in my head, / disconnected, bit by bit, / back there from the bare beginnings.’ 

The predictability is maybe the point. Elsewhere, these characters and others are unceremoniously forgetting about making big plans, getting big ideas. Instead, they’re mostly accepting their lot with grace, or dismissively barracking for those who don’t. They content themselves with the whimsical pretences of the ‘Royal Hotel’, the ‘Paramount Cafe’ and the ‘Palace Theatre’; the latter which, according to the projectionist, ‘might not be a palace / but here, for just two hours, he turns / his townsfolk into kings’.

Their stories form a sometimes ham-fisted, sometimes neatly unfinished, patchwork of hearsay imagined into rumour and rumour believed enough to be history. For all the feigned melodrama, though, painfully little substantial happens. The town is coming into relative prosperity – the post-war boom – and beginning to confront changes in social conditions. But, as Shearer Jimmy, says ‘you don’t solve history in a minute’, and, as such, the caricature-like aspects of 1953 have it reading less as historical fiction and more as contemporary soap opera.

This may seem a little dismissive. Page, a veteran of many genres of poetry and prose, is a master of his form. The tensions between past and future, change and stasis, remembering and forgetting, are channelled exceptionally into the minutiae of his verse; the patience with which he reveals his hand is singularly knowing. The repetition of physical, pathological and philosophical motifs is uncanny – the eventual portrait is finally as much a picture of pathology and philosophy as it is one of history and locality – and the foreshadowing of the stark, unforgettable final reveal is itself unforgettable. But again, the unimaginative narrative is perhaps the most fertile ground upon which to explore stories with no end peopled by modest hopes and patient futures.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

1953

By Geoff Page           

Paperback, 128pp, RRP $24.95

ISBN 9780702249

University of Queensland Press

Available from 30 January