Welcome to the launch of Growing Up with Mr Menzies by John Jenkins. The book is John’s 20th – five years in the making!

John has achieved something that is very difficult to do: he has intermingled lyric poetry - poetry of the perceived moment - with a type of narrative public poetry, a poetry that is about history and the social context, yet nowhere does the poetry seem forced or laboured. Nor does the book split in two, considering the tension of the demands of the different modes of poetry.

And there are a number of poems, including the fabulous Six O'clock Swill - that unites a version of young John with a version of Mr Menzies - where the two modes are interlinked. (I presume he is named Mr Menzies rather than Prime Minister Menzies because the man was more than the role.)

This afternoon I want to focus on a number of poems that are representative of the book as a whole as a way of introducing the book to you and as a way, also, of claiming importance for the book.

Growing Up with Mr Menzies is a major work of art. I'm not aware of that many recent books of poetry that ambitiously attempt to engage with both personal and public history.

What catches my attention most of all about this wonderful book is indeed the sense of wonder, of joy, of elation - all those Summery moments when the world seems bright and new and fresh and limpid and dulcet, creamy even. That sense of childlike wonder is caught in these two lines from the poem Beautiful Strange Moment:

‘Even- thing was here and new!

I was amazed, just to be!’

There's a lovely sense there of the possibilities of being - and here are the simple and charming lines that follow:

‘I knew this with new gumboots on.

It was winter, and smoke drifted

from chimneys all down the street.’

So now let's encounter more of the poetry straight away. I want to focus to start with on all those delicious moments from pure golden Summer that are likely to take readers back to their own sublime moments of childhood and adolescence.

I'll read a number of extracts from a very beautiful and true poem called Sunbathing Box Hill Baths, subtitled Puberty is liquid.

‘This summer crowd-mix sounds rolls round me half asleep

on fresh towels in hot sun breathe evenly, a drift-away away…

I am merging with found conversations drift away

under gum shade and fir-pines beside this pool…

I'm part of what all the others hear, also stretched out here

I follow insects, more rapid rising cicadas glissando…’

This beautiful delicate celebratory mode is interrupted, appropriately, by the charged staccato energy of the following:

‘I am blah-blahed by announcements

woofing from a public speaker box…’

And that's exactly the right place to go as a writer - the musicality, the gentle elegiac humour and the use of counterpoint are all delightful! Then there's a return to a longer-lined rhapsodic mode:

‘I drift away to almost sleep, where cool air flirts the pool

into its fresh, clean vanilla wash…’

(Note the muscular yet delicate verb 'flirts'.)

‘This sun is summer honey over my cooling body.’

What a fabulous line last line that is - fourteen syllables, seven strong beats; it encapsulates in one perfect line the essence of teenage sunbathing, sunbaking, sun-worship.

The poem is celebratory, the speaking voice is in tune with its surroundings, aware of the wonder of being alive - the harsh realities of life which encroach into the world of a number of the other poems are nowhere to be found in this particular poem. Box Hill Baths is a poem of sheer joy - it reminds me of Baudelaire's phrase 'luxe, calme et volupte', Matisse's Joy of Life painting and early Sydney Nolan - the Nolan of Moonhead and the Luna Park paintings - in terms of the lyricism and the innocence and the openness to experience. It is a poem that grabs personal history by the scruff of the neck and channels it into a lyric mode.

Let's now turn to one of the poems about Menzies in order to give you a taste of the public poetry - a type of poetry, which presents its own unique challenges to any writer. These extracts are from the last poem in the book called Script and Postscript:

‘A life-long avid reader, young Robert steeped himself

in the British classics, and histories of glorious deeds of empire,

those lands and proud red borders on the map: the sun unset

but setting, and felt pages of an era turning; and we would turn

to him, in time, to take a stand against its dissolution.’

Then we move from a biographical poetry such as thee above to a poetry of interpretation, such as below:

‘Some recall this time as airless, dull and backward-looking,

and more than just a little too British for independence.

Others still imagine his Golden Dream, sans rot - stability,

certainty and prosperity on a vanilla atoll, God Save the Queen.

Certainly, he enjoyed many years at the top. Time after time,

Robert rolled out the old red scare and wrapped up the ballot.

He bowed out in 1966, on Vietnam's brink - after inflaming

the Americans to stake their tragic, mistaken stand there…’

In reading John's book I was reminded of Robert Lowell's fabulous book Notebook, detailing both his personal history and the history of his times as it was happening; an almost journalistic poetry - a mixing of fiction and fact and lyricism.

The challenge is how to make the words work simultaneously as art, as history and occasionally, as commentary. What historical writing sometimes fails to do is to take us into the emotional heart of lived experience - often there can be all bone and no marrow, no juice. What poetry and fiction can do is to recreate a mood and a feeling of real intensity about the lived past because the words and rhythms are so multivalent, so evocative.

Some of John's poetry takes me back so quickly to my own past it's like the power of scent - you know when you smell a fragrance, say jasmine on a hot summer's night and you're catapulted immediately back 20 years. Smell is a great way to recapture lost time - but then so is poetry.

I hear the plaintive cry throughout John's poems of something like – ‘How did it all slip away? How did it disappear so fast?’ The poet's response is not simply to mourn but to do something about that loss: to recapture via words and thus to reinvigorate past lived experience.

Then there's a poem like Six O'clock Swill, which is an intermediary imaginative linking poem between Menzies and the young John. In the poem the two heroes of the book meet so the young John may gain wisdom from the older man, who is like a guide to one of Dante's outer circles of Hell. Menzies in the poem becomes the stable father figure replacing the increasingly erratic and distant real father, as presented through the poems at least.

Here's the start of the poem. There is an engaging John-Brack-like, pictorial quality to the wordplay and also note the way he captures Menzies' characteristic tone of voice:

‘Mr Menzies takes me by the hand, glancing at the clocks of

Flinders Street Station. It's ten to six. He eyes the display

of hats at the corner, picturing himself in dove-grev Akubra,

but shakes his head. `W cross, and stand outside the doors

of Young & Jacksons, unseen by the working men who reel

from every door to leave their pile of steaming sick retched

into the gutter, spit and stagger, then barge a way back in,

through blasts of beer fumes and drinkers pressing forward,

elbow-tight, back to the bar. `` Ahem, young man, this is not a pretty

sight, yet salutary. Do you know that word?" (I nod.) Menzies

melts straight through two big plate-glass doors, and I follow;

his hand is cool in mine. Though we are invisible to it, the crowd

falls back from us. "Just as well, or they might make a fuss,

seeing their PM in this unseemly den." The reek of men in singlets

and boots erupts. Summer air-, sweet with nausea and foam...’

So as you can see, these are poems of cultural specificities and private intensities. What John does really well is to capture a delicate mood - all of us are always living within private moments and simultaneously we are intertwined with public events and with a present living history; we are both atomised and part of a collective culture whether we wish to be or not.

Public figures shape us in ways we often have no control over. We always belong to ourselves and we belong to our times.

John's book is a powerful reminder of the shaping processes at work: family, the social milieu and the larger settings of time, and history.

History says John in a poem called Shining Years is ‘a watch, a plaything’; it is something that ‘goes bob bob bob, it sweeps air silver’. I like the playful pun on Menzies' first name.

And now, finally, as a way of finishing I would like to read one last extract that seems to me to sum up the enterprise of this book:

‘The story you invent from memory says where you

come from, have been, are finally going.

It says why you! And why not. And how we all fit

into bigger memories, called history and culture…’

John's book is Proustian in the best sense. And now to another John. Hearty congratulations to John Leonard for investing time and money and passion and belief into the continuation of the history of Australian poetry and congratulations to the designer Sophie Gaur.

The only other thing now is to end with the traditional ceremonial flourish:

By the power invested in me I now declare Growing Up with Mr Menzies well and truly launched out onto the stormy tides of the watery world. May the good ship of Jenkins & Menzies find calm seas, a gentle breeze and fortune in the shape of numerous prizes.

Good evening and thanks for listening!

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The central character in Growing Up With Mr Menzies is named Felix Hayes; whom Antoni Jach calls "young John" in his launch speech. But the author - while always respecting the reader's ownership of a text as primary - says he intended the book as fiction, rather than autobiography.