Interview with Geoff Page

Interview with Geoff Page (GP) – Taped 3/7/15

By Michael Byrne (MB)

MB: Geoff, I’m going to read out what I believe to be twelve facts about you, comment on any or all of them if you like.
– You were born in Grafton, NSW on the 7th of July, 1940.
– You attended the Armidale School.
– In 1959, you spent three months in National Service.
– You completed an Arts Degree from the University of New England.

GP: And a Dip Ed.

MB: And a Dip Ed.

MB: – You moved to Canberra in 1964 and taught English and History in local schools.
– You were head of English at Narrabundah College from 1974 – 2001.
– You have written numerous collections of poetry. How many?

GP: Oh, about twenty-two.

MB: – You run poetry readings at The Gods Café on the ANU campus.
– You consider yourself to be an agnostic.
– You have an interest in jazz music.

GP: Yeah, definitely.

MB: – You review poetry for The Canberra Times.

GP: And for a few other places like The Australian as well.

MB: – You have read and spoken about poetry in a number of countries overseas.

GP: Particularly in Europe, but also in a number of other countries like the U.S. and New Zealand and Korea.

MB: And now a few questions about your life.

MB: You taught English and History in Canberra schools from 1964 – 2001. In your early years of teaching, a counter-culture was around.

GP: Ah yeah, I guess so – just starting, just starting.

MB: Did you do anything that they did?

GP: (laughs).

MB: For example, did you . . .

MB: a) Take a stance on the Vietnam War?

GP: Ah, yeah I was loosely associated with the anti-war movement. I didn’t do anything very dramatic or dangerous though. But I was opposed to it, yeah. I thought it was a war that wasn’t worth our fighting, you know, it wasn’t worth the cost. That position turned out to be more or less right because the other side won and established a fairly boring tyranny for the next twenty, thirty years.

MB: b) Did you repudiate bourgeois values?

GP: Not entirely no. But I sort of questioned them a little bit. That’s a bit hard to define – what are bourgeois values? Certainly I didn’t accept them all.

MB: c) Did you embrace eastern philosophy?

GP: I don’t really know a great deal about Eastern philosophy. Like Buddhism, I don’t know very much about Buddhism or Taoism. I do know a little bit of twentieth century Asian history though.

MB: d) Did you take recreational drugs?

GP: I decline to answer that. (Laughs).

MB: Okay, okay. No comment.

GP: Yeah, virtually none.

MB: Okay, cool.

MB: Also during this time, you hung out with Australian poet Michael Dransfield. What was he like?

GP: Oh right, well, he had a strange way of talking, you know, he had a sort of a hippy way of talking – everything was ‘amazing’, you know. He had long frizzy hair and he was incredibly enthusiastic about everything. He would be manic when you look back at it. He was a bit unrealistic but he had a very definite talent and the best of his poetry, I think, has gone the distance. And the best of his drug poems are very true about drug addiction.

MB: Now to politics, if I may. Namely your poem ‘Kokoda Corrective’. In the poem, there is a quote from Prime Minister Paul Keating under the title. Keating is speaking at Kododa in 1992. He says and I quote, “It was here young Australian men fought for the first time against the prospect of the invasion of their country.” You point out that Aboriginal men did this sooner, citing Old Pemulwuy of the Eora, Yagan on the Upper Swan, Windradyne out Bathurst way and Pigeon in the Kimberley as examples of this.

MB: Do you know if Keating saw the poem?

GP: I’ve never heard that he did. I like to think that he did. On one thing we can say is that he probably didn’t write his own speech – probably Don Watson actually wrote that speech. And Keating could have corrected it or sent it back to the speechwriter. I mean I think that Keating is one of the best Prime Ministers we’ve ever had – one of the top two or three, but I just disagree with him on that point. I don’t know why he made that gaffe – it’s really the gaffe, you know.

MB: And holding Keating to account was the goal of the poem?

GP: The goal of the poem was not so much to criticise Keating. Just to remind people that there was such a thing as the frontier wars, there was such a thing as Aboriginal resistance – unsuccessful obviously and sporadic and ill-organised. But there was a resistance and I think this should be widely recognised – particularly in the War Memorial, where it’s completely ignored.

MB: Of course, you’re not the first Australian poet to write about Keating. Forbes had a good poem about him called ‘Watching the Treasurer’. Forbes also described Bob Hawke’s hair as a “cunning mechanical contrivance”!

GP: (laughs) I can’t equal that, that’s pretty good!

MB: Of course, this is not the first poem of yours to show empathy for Aboriginal people.

GP: No, that goes back quite a way. I became particularly concerned with that issue – starting in 1988 with the bicentenary which was way too triumphalist, and ignored Aboriginal prior occupation and ignored Aboriginal contribution to our mutual history and so on. The book came out in 1996 / 97. It’s called The Great Forgetting, which was illustrated by an Aboriginal artist called Bevan Hayward Pooaraar. It’s got nearly all of the poems I wrote about that issue in it.

MB: In ‘Armidale Tableau, 1968’ from Monologues for 88, you (in your youth) pause at the town’s main square. Nearby is a granite cross to the Great War Christian dead with and I quote “two black youths on the steps below it / sharing a bottle wrapped in the news.” The younger aboriginal “falls away sideways under the cross”.

MB: Was the New England area of your youth as racist as this?

GP: Ah yeah, I think it had been racist from the beginning, since the initial attacks in the 1840’s on Aboriginal people in that area which was similar to Western Victoria or Central or Northern Queensland – around about the same time, maybe a little bit later. The racism I’m trying to get at in that poem is how the Aboriginal people have taken on themselves some of the white racism. So they’re half accepting the white criticism – particularly at that time around the early to mid-sixties, much less the case now.

MB: You have admirably protested against Aboriginal racism in your poems just by giving them the time of day – for example, in your poem ‘Ballad for Joseph Hartmann’. Sometimes you have gone a bit further. Have you ever experienced criticism for your non-racist stance in your poetry?

GP: I’ve had quite a few arguments with my family, like my mother and some of my siblings about the situation of Aboriginal people – what should be done and what shouldn’t be done. That’s an ongoing argument, I mean they’re not particularly racist – they just have more conservative opinions than I do. I don’t think I’ve suffered from my stance on that issue – it’s not unique and quite a few people agree with me.

MB: In poems such as ‘Broken Ballad’ and others you examine the relationship between belief and non-belief in God. You yourself are an agnostic.

MB: Why are you an agnostic and not an atheist?

GP: Because I think that atheists are way too confident, the same as more fundamentalist Christians – I don’t think you can be that confident. Doubt, in particular about cosmological issues and theological issues and so forth, is an important thing to have. If you don’t have doubt, then you are probably wrong. So I think that some people present agnosticism as sort of an easy cop out, sitting on the fence and so forth. But I think in some ways it’s one of the more realistic positions you can take. There are some sort of progressive Christians that don’t differ from me substantially and a lot of them have a big agnostic streak. They know they are less than certain about what they claim to believe in so they’re not really dogmatic, you know.

MB: You say at the end of your poem ‘Heaven’ and I quote: “I love the sad, / agnostic god / who taught me how to doubt”. Do you think the world needs more doubters (such as yourself)?

GP: Yeah, way more, I mean contemporary secularism particularly in Western Europe has developed a lot. There’s been a lot of progress on some issues as a result of that and Christianity has sort of become much, much less dogmatic, in general even though there’s still dogmatic sections of it, you know. So, what was the original question again?

MB: Ah, do you think the world needs more doubters?

GP: I think it would be a happier place if people had more doubt. I mean I don’t think you don’t want to be in chronic doubt where you say there’s no such thing as human rights. I think that there probably isn’t such a thing as human rights – human rights have to be negotiated. People have to kind of argue with other people and reach a consensus about what their entitlements are. There’s no absolute foundation, God didn’t say you’ve got the following human rights and you don’t have the following other ones – there’s no absolute foundation, I’m sort of anti-foundationalist like that.

MB: Now to wrapping things up. In your recent anthology – The House is Not Quiet and The World is Not Calm, you give two poems (‘Clairvoyant in Autumn’ and ‘Codicil’) to describe how you would like to be buried.

GP: ‘Clairvoyant in Autumn’ is essentially about another person’s burial back in 1979.  But it’s also about my own cremation and how people might respond to that.  ‘Codicil’ details exactly how I want my ashes distributed.

MB: Why do you want your ashes scattered in the Clarence River?

GP: It’s a beautiful river, I haven’t wanted to live there through my life, but I do go back there regularly. And my family – a significant proportion are still living on the Clarence River, and those have, for want a better word, have some sort of spiritual connection with it. Even though I’m totally secular I just feel a strong sense of attachment to that river at various places, and I suppose a series of landscapes really, waterscapes, that I identify with. But I’m not all sentimental about working the cattle stations and so forth, you know, I don’t want to live there and live that life. And I don’t mean to live there in a remote place and write poems by myself, you know. I like to go down to coffee bars and talk to people.

MB: Finally, ageing, I feel, is a little like batting in cricket. What’s it like being seventy-four not out?

GP: (Laughs).

MB: Well, you’re soon to be seventy-five not out.

GP: Yeah, next week, next Tuesday. Well, I’m pretty thankful to have such a reasonable length of time on earth and practising my vocation. I feel I’ve been pretty lucky, really, many people have been less lucky than I. There is such a thing as luck and you don’t deserve your luck – I mean you have to be in a position to take advantage of the luck that you get. If you’re behaving in really self-destructive ways then if you get a little bit of luck you won’t be able to turn it to anything.

MB: Well, thank you for your time.

GP: No worries, Michael.