Journal of the Plague Year Issue 2: In memorial Bruce Dawe

Amidst the challenges of this week, we haven’t acknowledged the death of a great Australian and someone connected with our MSC Story:the post, Bruce Dawe. He taught Fr Frank Brennan SJ at Downlands and Frank wrote on his Facebook page yesterday—

Our most grounded, accessible, and humane Australian poet Bruce Dawe has died. May he rest in peace. Bruce was a teacher at my boarding school in Toowoomba in the 1960s. He wrote the foreword of my first book. He was a great inspiration, especially his poetry that both confronted the bad old days and ways of pre-Fitzgerald Queensland and commemorated the continuing dispossession and alienation of Indigenous Australians.

I remember teaching Dawe’s poetry for many years and he saved me from the worst Year 12 English lessons at Joey’s as a young teacher, with poems like “Weapons Training”, “Homo Suburbiensis” and “Life Cycle”. The kids got it straight away. Dawe became a Catholic in 1954 while teaching at Downlands—not that it matters so much in a less-sectarian age, but perhaps it’s another example of our spirituality touching a fellow traveller at a profound level. Dawe’s poetry is marked by a deep understanding of the human heart and the ordinary man.

Permit me one poem in remembrance, so appropriate for the season. It’s the last line that does it, don’t you think?

And a Good Friday Was Had by All

Bruce Dawe

You men there, keep those women back
and God Almighty he laid down
on the crossed timber and old Silenus
my offsider looked at me as if to say
nice work for soldiers, your mind’s not your own
once you sign that dotted line Ave Caesar
and all that malarkey Imperator Rex
well this Nazarene
didn’t make it any easier
really-not like the ones
who kick up a fuss so you can
do your block and take it out on them
Silenus
held the spikes steady and I let fly
with the sledge-hammer, not looking
on the downswing trying hard not to hear
over the women’s wailing the bones give way
the iron shocking the dumb wood.

Orders is orders, I said after it was over
nothing personal you understand -we had a
drill-sergeant once thought he was God but he wasn’t
a patch on you

then we hauled on the ropes
and he rose in the hot air
like a diver just leaving the springboard, arms spread
so it seemed
over the whole damned creation
over the big men who must have had it in for him
and the curious ones who’ll watch anything if it’s free
with only the usual women caring anywhere
and a blind man in tears.