“Where’s my legacy gone?”: The chronic misrepresentation of poet Gwen Harwood

In the eyes of the media she was housewife first, poet never.

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Out of Tasmania’s Oyster Cove — where thickets meet rolling sea — poured lyrics and letters that have become canonical cornerstones. Gwen Harwood, with a musician’s ear and a matrilineal fondness for poetry, penned poems from the 1940s to 1960s that left an indelible mark on the Australian literary landscape. Despite this, the media coverage of her character and work was often dismissive, inconsistent, and disproportionately low, symptomatic of her position as a female poet: in the eyes of the media she was housewife first, poet never.

Harwood fused concerns of time’s thievery and the vagaries of motherhood against a natural Australian backdrop. Her poems are windows into her untamed feminist views: armed with her words, she dismantled patriarchal structures. If you peer at her works’ surface, the themes of a fleeting childhood and her penchant for music shine through prominently. 

In ‘“The Violets’”, Harwood sculpts a churlish child who has just woken up from a nap, grumbling that during her short sleep, the horizon stole the sun from the sky. As her subject sobs, “Where’s morning gone?”, Harwood delivers a package of nostalgia and sentimentality to the reader, who is encouraged to reach into the past to revisit a mundane but powerful childhood moment.

When it comes to high-school and university curriculums, poems like ‘“The Violets’, ‘Barn Owl’”, and ‘“Nightfall’” are repeat offenders — all lament lost time and the wistful revisitation of childhood memories. This was a key dimension to Harwood’s collection of works, but certainly not the only one. For too long, the strictures of educational curriculums and media depictions have neglected the shadowed faces of her prismed oeuvre: one being her dismemberment of narratives surrounding motherhood. 

These narratives, peddled by patriarchal limbs, centre the experience of motherhood as faultlessly glorious to restrict women to childbearing roles. ‘“In the Park’” and ‘“Suburban Sonnet’” offer a glimpse into her fiercely feminist values as she reveals the often bleak and gruelling reality of raising a child as a woman. 

Harwood’s depiction of motherhood is honest, not horrifying. Dismantling key icons of sacrosanct motherhood including Madonna and Child, Harwood reveals the damaging effects of glorifying childrearing. The mother in Harwood’s poems is unprepossessing, stretched thin while child figures are fractious. To paint an authentic image of motherhood is to undermine the societal fiction that attests to motherhood as female self-actualisation and ostracises any woman who does not have a picture-perfect experience raising their child. 

As well as her poems’ powerful content, Harwood navigated the publishing industry in a memorable manner; in the 1960s, publishing houses and journal editors were dominated by men and lined with privilege. Harwood’s character was feisty, her words silently raging against the machine. She wielded power in the publishing landscape with her use of various pen names. Delighting in deception, she created fictional alter egos to transcend the constrictiveness of the publishing industry.

She rocked the world of the Australian literary periodical the Bulletin in 1961, hoaxing the publication to fleeting delight. Concealed behind her male pen name, Walter Lehrmann, Harwood humiliated editor Donald Horne in response to prior rejection of her work. Harwood submitted two sonnets that acrostically smuggled in the indicting remarks: “SO LONG BULLETIN” and “FUCK ALL EDITORS”. 

The next day, the words “Tas housewife in hoax of the year” were seared onto the front page. In the days that followed, Harwood’s hoax was constantly compared to the Ern Malley affair, a ruse where conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart created a fictitious poet to vex the editors of the Angry Penguins journal. However, contemporary poets and commentators, including A.D. Hope, constantly downplayed the wit of Harwood’s trickery, criticising it as “insignificant” compared to the impact of McAuley and Stewart. A large part of this criticism ran on gendered lines, influenced by their perception of a female poet.

We reckon with Harwood’s life and legacy again, as it has been thrust into the light with the publication of her son’s commentary in the Australian Book Review, ‘Gwen Harwood and the perils of reticence.’ Since her passing, there has been limited discourse on her legacy. The media’s memory of her remains dismissive, due to restricted access to her correspondence. The seeming reticence of her literary executor again belies her philosophy whilst she was alive: one of forthcomingness and excitement to pen an autobiography. Her son’s commentary exposes aspects of Harwood’s marriage and her experience of coercive control. Although it does not paint a full picture of Harwood’s home-life and character, it chips away at the statue of truth. 

Considering the contemporary media and societal reluctance to champion women and the arts, Harwood’s legacy may never be fully enlivened to the degree it deserves. As time passes, we may be granted glimpses of secrets untold; we can also bear witness to other apertures in her poems. There lies some beauty and responsibility in the mystery, as we are tasked with uncovering what has been buried.