Jindyworobak Movement

The Jindyworobaks found inspiration in the Australian bush ballad tradition, Kangaroo (1928) by D. H. Lawrence and P. R. Stephensen's The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936), and shared a vision similar to that of some of their contemporaries in the arts, such as author Xavier Herbert, artist Margaret Preston and composer John Antill.

[1] Starting off as a literary club in Adelaide, South Australia in 1938, the Jindyworobak movement was supported by many Australian artists, poets, and writers.

Arguably, the movement failed to make a lasting impression, and its erosion signalled the arrival of modernist painting in Australia, as well as jazz.

Brian Matthews wrote during the 1980s that: Ackland argues in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature that the movement "reactualised debate on Indigenous culture, and promoted local talent in its annual anthologies".

[6] The movement's lingering influence has also been identified in the poetry of Peter Porter, as well as Patrick White's Voss (1957) and Randolph Stow's To the Islands (1958).

He hums a song, a Mapooram, A song to close things up, or bring things out A song to bring a girl, a woman from that tree The Australian literary historian Brian Clunes Ross has written on one of the common criticisms of the Jindyworobaks, one that has persisted through the decades, through people of radically different political stripes, namely that of the Jindyworobaks' relationship with Indigenous Australians: Ivor Indyk has suggested that the Jindyworobaks were looking for a kind of pastoral poetry, harking back to an Arcadian idyll which was removed from the early pioneer period, back to the pre-colonisation era.

Guilt, as a burden of white history, is felt again in the division between the settlers and the land itself, despoiled by greed and incomprehension", in spite of her trying to inaugurate a "white dreaming", while the landscapes of Ingamells are: "aflame with energy, but they are also uninhabited, save for the ghostly remnants of Aboriginal tribes, and more frequently, the cockatoos and parakeets whose bright colours and raucous cries express both the power and the alien character of the land.

Written, as opposed to transcribed, indigenous literature did not appear in print until the 1920s when David Unaipon, a Christian from Point McLeay mission, South Australia, published a large body of work.

Unaipon, despite coming from South Australia, is not mentioned in the works of the Jindyworobaks, so it is hard to say how much of an influence his book Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines had on the movement.