For the Love of Regional Areas

By Tom Clark

"The Day We Were Told to Get Back in Our Boats"
A new book explores what most Australians would lose if we they were forced to leave their country.
The poetry collection by Victoria University’s Dr Tom Clark suggests non-Indigenous Australians “have been as guests awaiting the invitation to stay” and imagines a time when they are forced to get back in their boats and leave.
“The poems are set after the nation’s non-Indigenous people have departed, their boats fanning out around the globe in search of asylum; the only ones left in Australia are fugitives running from a date with deportation,” Dr Clark explained.
For the Love of Regional Areas traces the last Australians’ lives, at home and abroad, in the years leading up to the Departure.
“It’s an attempt to remember what we thought we had forever: the landscapes, the distinctive sounds of Australian voices, the nation’s confidence and the platitudes that remind us why we belonged together,” he said.
Dr Clark said the collection also remembered the personal hopes and dreams of “ordinary, mainstream Australians” and celebrated their public achievements.
The collection is a timely initiative exploring the question of identity and belonging for all non-Indigenous Australians.
Dr Clark is a senior lecturer in communication at Victoria University’s School of Communication and the Arts. He is also author of Stay on Message: Poetry and Truthfulness in Political Speech.
For the Love of Regional Areas is available online as an ebook: www.smashwords.com/books/view/144367
A free, interactive version is also available as blog content: http://regionalareas.blogspot.com.au/
ENDS

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Clark
• Release date: Mar 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476267715

Tom Clark

Tom Clark is a senior lecturer in Communications at Victoria University, Melbourne. His mos recently published book is on contemporary political rhetoric, titled 'Stay on Message: Poetry and Truthfulness in Political Speech,' (Australian Scholarly Publishing, details at: http://www.scholarly.info/book/9781921875670/). Previously, he has worked as a political adviser and speechwriter. His PhD thesis, 'A Case for Irony in Beowulf, With particular reference to its epithets,' was published by Peter Lang (Bern) in 2003. His first collection of poems, 'OI,' was published by Cordite on Demand (Melbourne) in 2004.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

This e-book collection of poems appears in tandem with a blog version of the same lyrics and verses. The blog is available online at: http://www.regionalareas.blogspot.com/.

I freely concede that it might seem like a rather somber piece of work: a focus on that inevitable moment when Australia became no more. It is hard for Australians to imagine that inevitability, let alone accept it. But rather than wallow in the desolation of Girtie, ’Straya, a sunburned country, this collection explores the memories of an Australia once ours, of the lives we led, and of that Australianness we carry with us, even when we can no longer live in an Australia.

The cover image draws from a photograph that Sara Holquist took. It is also the subject of one of the poems.

Some of the poems in this collection have previously been published through: Cordite, Eureka Street, Honi Soit, the Melbourne 2020 program published by Ash Keating, Overland, and Platform. In republishing them here, I want to acknowledge the support of each of these publications.

I also want to acknowledge the support of my employer, Victoria University (Melbourne). VU treats creative work by its staff as of a piece with our research output, making it an extremely conducive environment in which to write and publish. Colleagues in the School of Communication and the Arts have been unfailingly supportive and encouraging.

This collection is specifically indebted to the creative input of friends Ben Cornford and Vanessa Kirkpatrick, who kindly reviewed it for me before publishing, as well as my mother Alison Clark, who has read and responded to the poems as they developed over fifteen years. I owe a particular debt to my VU colleague Sasha Henriss-Anderssen, who has helped me arrange the manuscript for publication.

The drama in these poems interpolates between a public domain, which I am honoured and happy to share with everyone who cares and has cared about Australia, and a personal life in that country and the world around it, which I am honoured and happy to share with those who know me well.

Chief among the latter group is my wife (not alleging anything proprietary by that pronoun). I dedicate this collection to Becky Batagol — with all my love and hopes