This ten verse poem is a testament to a distinctly Australian invention, Aussie Rules football. Football is portrayed as a religion, is food and drink, is the life-cycle itself. Football nourishes the young and renews the old. Its mythology is life-sustaining. It brings "salvation", the punch-line of the poem.
The poet sprinkles the language of football liberally: "barracking...Carn ... streamers...scarfed ...Demons...Saints...ladder...final term...three-quarter-time...boundary fences". The argot of the grandstands is heard in Carn the Hawks.. Carn the Cats...Carn the Bombers." Dawe likens the initiation of a baby to the game when he is held aloft at his first game as spectator like young wrigglers swimming to the surface in the flood of light and sound in the roaring heaven ("empyrean"), of the MCG no doubt. This football has epic and heroic connotations.
Dawe's tone is ever so slightly mocking but gently so. He respects the strength of football's cultic life and the life-sustaining qualities it offers. He knows it is a life-giving religion offering an initiation, a journey, a wedding, a honeymoon and salvation. He does not deny its worth nor does he fully side with its rituals. He respects the fact that Australian football is a perpetually renewing mythology and although the dancers change, the dance goes on.
I enjoyed this poem and rate it a public statement of a fact. The power and passion of Victorian football in its homeland is wonderful to behold. Dawe records it all for prosterity.
by G. Smith: 26/8/97
See also Noel Rowe Modern Australian Poets 1994, Ch. 3 A821.309 ROW
An appreciation of "Homecoming" by Bruce Dawe
Dawe here dramatises the homecoming of Australian veterans' bodies from Vietnam. This is clearly an anti-war poem, reproducing in the seventies the sentiments of the First World War poets.
In 25 lines of broken verse presented in one demanding stanza, Dawe recounts how "they are bringing" home the bodies "in deep freeze lockers"... zipped up "in green plastic bags" "bringing them home, now, too late." He picks out the rituals and consequences of this event on a relatively stable and uncaring society back home (in Australia). Ironically, he celebrates their coming home across the curvatures of the globe and across the international borders as they fly homeward bound. Homecomings are usually consoling and familiar particularly in the American culture where "home' acquires very many strong associations of rest, trust and identity. But here the term is deliberately turned upside down as the dead return home - a telling commentary on the VN war and what it destroyed.
The diction is plain like prose, the pace is relentless and the tone is ironic. The drama of the historic present moment is expressed in many present participles: "picking... bringing....rolling ... whining..." In 25 lines, the poet drives us across many details, many particulars in the fixed drama of death. Dawe's point of view is not uncritical. We are enjoined not to be passionless spectators but to feel this great injustice to our young men. The irony is that the young are brought back to the old ridiculous curvatures of our old continent's coasts and into the cities and small towns where they were raised. Thus a spider web of grief "in his bitter geometry" spreads across the land catching us all.
Dawe uses powerful oxymorons to highlight the bitterness and irony of what is happening: "sorrowful quick fingers heading south", and "bringing them home now, too late, too early" to emphasise that their return is premature and "the mash, the splendour" their napalm deaths are unnatural paradoxes. Dawe drives home the conviction that the whole war is a contradiction: "(dead) fingers are tracing a course southwards" and "the howl of their homecoming" (in the jet engines) mocks a ticker tape parade they are owed if they had returned as homecoming living victors. No wonder they receive only "mute salute" from dogs not their fellow countrymen.
I like it when a poem has a central focus. Dawe's deft writing plays powerful chords on our emotions: the injustice of killing young men and its overwhelming reality is delivered in many observable details. Rather than say I enjoyed this poem, let me say I appreciate what it is doing and rate it a powerful indictment of Australian involvement in Vietnam. It is a memorable poem.
by G. Smith 26/8/97; 486 words
Notes by this author Greg Smith