Displaced: A Rural Life

by John Kinsella

John Kinsella’s memoir of his rural life takes us deep into the heart of what it means to belong and unbelong. The joys and travails of childhood, adult addictions, missteps and changing directions are acutely captured in poignant and poetic detail. While centred on Jam Tree Gully in rural Western Australia, the memoir also moves between Ohio, Schull and Cambridge, mixing regionalism with an international sense of responsibility. What will strike the reader are the detailed observations of daily life, the engagement with topography and flora and fauna that embody the author’s conviction that ‘all is in everything and that every leaf of grass is vital’.
In his most intimate prose work to date, Kinsella never shies from writing about the violence and intolerance of those scared of difference, and the ways in which his ethics have sometimes been met with disdain or outright hostility. But with nuance and humour he also celebrates rural community and its willingness to lend a hand.
At once tender, urgent and intelligent, Displaced is ultimately a call to personal action. ‘We all have choices to make.’ It argues through it vivid accounts of small acts of living for the values of pacifism, veganism, environmentalism and justice for First Nations peoples – the principles we just might need to heal our world.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2020

About the author

John Kinsella is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. The recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award, he has taught at Cambridge University and Kenyon College. He lives in Western Australia.

Reviews

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Kinsella is a passionate and committed individual as well as a brilliant poet, ‘Displaced’ often feels like more like a manifesto than a rural memoir. It’s a sombre and often uncomfortable experience, albeit both thought-provoking and necessary. Despite its somewhat rambling tone and frequent revisiting of key themes and arguments, ‘Displaced’ challenges and inspires the reader throughout.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Kinsella is a West Australian poet, that’s all I knew before reading this book. Now I think poetry is his weapon in the fight to live a good life, for himself and all of us living on earth, animals included.
He is deeply concerned with the natural world. He lives a life of extreme effort to protect it, the land, air, plant and animal life. His activism comprises both written and verbal forms from poetry, books, to many conversations, showing curiosity and interest in exchanging ideas wherever he goes. He’s a fascinating mixture of careful consideration of others feelings, and straight out blunt confrontations with opposing views.
One underlying belief throughout the memoir concerns the position of the Indigenous in life - he repeatedly emphasises their prominence as the rightful occupants of Australia. This is evident in his language use, place naming is treated with great respect.
His childhood, youth and early adulthood contrast hugely with more recent years, living closely with family in WA, a farmer and highly regarded academic in Australia, the UK, Ireland and the US.
There’s a thread of personal searching for belonging running through his recollections and reflections. He’s not a person to compromise his beliefs. I’ve read some of his poetry and prose since, but his writing here is the most appealing to me.

[Tracy Meszaros · Rating 2 out of 5]

I still don’t recognise the book I just read in the cover blurbs. This is a confronting, bitter, shrill manifesto in the narrative voice of a trauma survivor. There is no memoir, being set mainly in the present, but there are flashbacks to truly terrible experiences in the author’s life. It’s completely unstructured and repetitive- not in a good way - but as a performance of anger at the way Australia and Australians (both indigenous and disenfranchised) are exploited, desecrated, despoiled and brutalised, it deserves five stars.

I can only give it 2 stars because I was left feeling depressed by this litany of toxic land practices and toxic masculinity. Most importantly I was left with “what’s the point?” What’s the point of writing this text? Who is it aimed at? Me, as an Australian? Me, as a sympathetic reader? The answer to both is no. I felt as if the narrator had been writing mostly to himself. Trying to work through something.

Kinsella tries to intimate a point: poetry is his resistance, the production of words, in conjunction with his willingness to front up physically to pursue activism. But I wasn’t convinced about the poetry when juxtaposed against the inarticulate brutality he describes.

Western Australia is a different country. That’s something us east coasters know. It doesn’t mean it’s less brutal over here, and I did recognise some of the behaviour the narrator suffered from in my own childhood (contemporaneous with Kinsella’s) in a school in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. But even then, if the teachers could have detected this behaviour they would come down hard and horrified. That’s the context, though as we now know after numerous Royal Commissions an awful lot of horror, not confined to the regions or even Western Australia, managed to slip under the radar.

In the end, we know all this. So what is the point of Kinsella‘a memoir?

[Rhonda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this book because the author lived through the same years I did. He also wrote from a childhood and years working in wheatfields in Western Australia which paralelled my childhood up til the age of 18 on a wheat farm, and then a small country town for four years, on the Wimmera Mallee area in Victoria. The subtitle suggested, I thought, a memoir or an autobiography. To a certain extent it does in that the content could be described as such but the arrangement of the information and the heavy emphasis on environmental activism by the author meant that it was more to do with a personal belief system than a life. A rural life is more than activism. It is people and places and experiences, dates and photographs (hopefully). It is tall the little stuff that creates something flesh and blood and, if not chronological, is sorted under a wider range of headings than a system of belief. If the word 'Life' in the title had been replaced with 'manifesto' or something similar, it would have more accurately described the main thrust of the work. As it was, I kept getting lost, looking for a whole life story but instead getting battered with what he believed in, and why with life details as support actors. The activism itself also got lost in the details thrown in here and there about his family and where he lived, moving back and forward in time so no clear picture of his life had a chance to develop. I think if this had been written has two works - one with a broader picture of his rural life, and the second with his activist beliefs and how he lived them, I would have learnt far more, and enjoyed it more.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven’t talked about reading synchronicities for some time, but when I started reading John Kinsella’s memoir, Displaced, I couldn’t help but think of the book I had just finished, Gay Lynch’s historical novel Unsettled. Both have one word titles which play with opposites; in both cases, those opposites refer to physical meanings and more abstract, intellectual, social and/or emotional ones; and, in both, these meanings draw significantly from the colonial act of settling Australia and displacing its original inhabitants. I enjoy such wordplay that forces us to consider multiple, and sometimes conflicting meanings because it encourages a deeper engagement with the ideas being explored.

Notwithstanding this, reading Displaced was a labour of love, because it is a demanding, and often confronting read. However, I wanted to know about this man who is one of Australia’s leading contemporary poets, so I persevered. My assessment? If you are interested in how one might live life as ethically as possible with regard to justice and the exploitation – of First Nations people and the environment – that is encompassed in the long tail of colonialism, Kinsella’s book is a good place to start. For my full review, please check out my blog: https://whisperinggums.com/2020/11/15...

[Lisa]

Read first 50 pages, but it's too depressing to read at this time.
It's naïve, I suppose, to assume that rural life is a kind of refuge from the world, but I'm not in the mood to learn just how brutish it can be in rural WA.
I don't rate books I don't finish.