When Australians travel overseas, they cross—in the words of an economist—‘into statistical anonymity’. The figures are speculative, but for more than two decades demographers have estimated that, ‘[o]n any given day, there are approximately one million Australians outside Australia’. Though mostly concentrated in the cities of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, Australia’s diaspora is ‘widely dispersed across every continent’. Australians can be found just about everywhere—and the same goes for Australia’s poets.

The contention of this paper is that Australia’s emigrant and travelling poets constitute a far more complex phenomenon than past scholarship might lead us to believe. Moving beyond the critical literature’s overwhelming focus on the figure of the ‘expatriate’ (or ‘expat’), this paper addresses the strikingly divergent ways in which Australian poets have found themselves in ‘the countries of others’ (to borrow a phrase from the title of Leïla Slimani’s recent novel, Le pays des autres, and Patrick McGuiness’s Other People’s Countries) and asks what it means when these poets discover that, as Ellen van Neerven puts it in Comfort Food, ‘poetry travelled with me / like rivers / I didn’t ever eat alone’.

How, for instance, should we approach the poems Oodgeroo Noonuccal wrote on a British Airways sick bag while held hostage in a hijacked plane in Libya? What to make of Corey Wakeling’s efforts to become a second-language Japanese writer, or Jaya Savige’s feeling of ‘being a postcolonial satellite-creature transplanted to the European imperial mothership’? And how, today, should we understand the neglected modernist poetry of Lola Ridge, described in one of her first US publications as ‘a young Australian poet […] not without fame in her own land’? This paper examines these questions through a synthesis of archival research and original interviews with dozens of Australian poets. It aims to open new lines of enquiry into the remarkable, varied, and sometimes neglected histories of Australian poets overseas.  

Louis Klee is a fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. His writing has been widely published in venues such as the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), the New German Critique, Textual Practice, The Monthly, and The Sydney Morning Herald, and received awards such as the A. D. Hope Prize and the Peter Porter Prize. He is currently a JUNCTURE Fellow at the Sydney Review of Books, ‘a fellowship program presenting a series of new essays on Australian and international literature by leading critics’. His first degree was a Bachelor of Philosophy in philosophy at the Australian National University, where he was a National Undergraduate Scholar. More recently, he completed a PhD funded by the John Monash Cultural Scholarship.