Rodney Hall

(1935- ), born Birmingham, England, came to Australia after the Second World War. He graduated from the University of Queensland in 1971 and has worked as a freelance script-writer for television and radio, as an actor, as film critic for the ABC, as a youth officer for the Australian Council for the Arts, and as a tutor and lecturer in music and creative writing. Poetry editor of the Australian 1967-78, he was poetry adviser to the publishers Angus & Robertson, 1972-75. He has travelled extensively in Europe, Asia and the USA, and for a long period has been actively involved in Aboriginal affairs. He was chairperson of the Australia Council 1990-93, and was made OAM.

A prolific writer, Hall contributed to Four Poets (1962) and has published the volumes of poetry Penniless till Doomsday (1962), Forty Beads on a Hangman's Rope (1963), Eyewitness (1967), The Autobiography of a Gorgon (1968), The Law of Karma (1968), Heaven, In a Way (1970), Romulus and Remus (1970), A Soapbox Omnibus (1973, winner of the Grace Leven Poetry Prize), Selected Poems (1975), Black Bagatelles (1978) and The Most Beautiful World (1981); the novels The Ship on the Coin (1972), A Place Among People (1975, a prize-winner in the Cook Bicentennial Celebrations Competition), Just Relations (1982, winner of the Miles Franklin Award); Kisses of the Enemy (1987), Captivity Captive (1988, winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award), The Second Bridegroom (1991) and The Grisly Wife (1993); and studies of the artist Andrew Sibley in 1968, and of the writer who has influenced him most, John Manifold, in 1978. He has also edited several significant collections of Australian verse: New Impulses in Australian Poetry (q.v., 1968, with Thomas Shapcott), Australian Poetry 1970 (1970), Poems from Prison (1973), and The Collins Book of Australian Poetry (1981); a collection of Australian poems and paintings, Australians Aware (1975); and three collections of Michael Dransfield's poetry, Voyage into Solitude (1978), The Second Month of Spring (1980) and Michael Dransfield. Collected Poems (1987). He has also written the text of the photographic collection, Australia - Image of a Nation 1850-1950 (1983) and a meditative travelogue, Journey Through Australia (1988). Other awards won by Hall include the Barbara Ramsden Award (1982) and the Poetry Society Prize (1975).

Hall's poetry, ironically detached and frequently witty, is characterised by economy of form and diction, a wide range of tone and a familiarity with myth and legend. His concern with technical virtuosity, especially his use of free, flexible verse-forms and associated patterns of imagery, was evident from the first. Particularly striking is his development of the form he has termed a 'Progression', which consists of a series of short poems, sometimes as many as sixty, each of which is capable of standing alone, but which together form a tightly related unity resembling a single long poem.

Hall's novels emphasise the range of his interests, each one developing a different idea of the novel. The Ship on the Coin is a satiric allegory that attacks the apathy, crudity and blindness of bourgeois society; A Place Among People is a more conventional 'imagist' novel, that is deliberately open-ended and suggestive. In Just Relations he has created a White mythology around an Australian country landscape that is almost as pervasive and substantial as Aboriginal mythology. Set in Whitey's Fall, a small decaying town with a gold-mining past and peopled by a remarkable group of elderly eccentrics, the novel gradually develops a dense web of relations that persuasively knits past, present and future into a pattern of meaning. The Second Bridegroom and Captivity Captive are the first and last books of a trilogy in which Hall explores the culturally produced meanings of Australia by its Eurocentric invaders. Set in the 1830s, The Second Bridegroom is a convict's first-person account of his escape into the NSW bush after being transported for forgery. Protected by a tribe of Aborigines, with whom he lives for some years, he finds himself inexplicably involved in their ceremonies and forced to contend with conflicting ways of knowing the world. Some of the opposed categories which the novel explores by means of the narrator's extended meditations are notions of the primitive and the civilised, order and chaos and colonised and coloniser. Captivity Captive uses a historical incident, the mysterious murder of three members of a family on a NSW farm in 1898, as a springboard for exploration of the general theme of captivity, from the cultural imprisonment which perennially sanctions the slaughter of war to the primitive tyranny of family relationships. The Grisly Wife completes the trilogy. Set in 1868 (the other two books are set in 1838 and 1898 respectively), The Grisly Wife is narrated in free-flowing style by Catherine Byrne, daughter of an Anglican clergyman and wife of Muley Moloch, a preacher, prophet and ex-bootmaker. The revolting odour associated with Moloch's trade, most vividly presented in a scene in which he takes Catherine into a tannery, resembles the unpleasant otherness of the imposed British culture in Australia; as Catherine observes, the bush 'didn't like the smell of us'. Moloch leads a group of women disciples, known collectively as the Houshold of Hidden Stars, to the south coast of NSW, where they found a religious commune. Replicating the familiar biblical story of virgin birth, but ironically undercutting it, The Grisly Wife is also a feminist novel in that the women eventually cast out the patriarch. Hall has emphasised that throughout the trilogy he has been concerned to show the shifts in perception of Britain as 'home'; perceived as close by in The Second Bridgroom, it is remembered selectively in The Grisly Wife and 'only gesturally' in Captivity Captive Kisses of the Enemy, set in Australia's near republican future, opposes the careless squanderings of the country's political and business leaders to the subversive perceptions and actions of a few unblinkered individuals. Particularly well received in the USA, Hall's work has been translated into German, Swedish, Danish, French and Chinese.

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