Conditional Culture

by Rex Ingamells, Ian Tilbrook

Rex Ingamells' "Conditional Culture" launched the Australian poetry movement known as the Jindyworobaks. Arguing for Australian writers to support an Australian culture based on their own country, and not that of overseas (British) influences, Ingamells looked to the Australian Aboriginals for a model as to how to relate to the continent.

The book includes a commentary on Ingamells' position by Ian Tilbrook.

24 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

The son of a Methodist minister, Rex Ingamells studied at the University of Adelaide where he developed a fascination with Indigenous Australian culture. By the 1930s, the cultural practices of First Peoples had been largely eradicated by white colonisation. Ingamells is considered the founder of the Jindyworobak Movement in Australian poetry, a group of young Anglo poets who sought to use the relationship of Indigenous Australians with the land as a model for how white Australians should write and think. The movement rejected many of the prevailing trends of British poetry, which were popular with mainstream Australian poets.

Ingamells published at least eight volumes of poetry and two novels in addition to his lead role in the Jindyworobak movement, which flourished from 1938-1953, including a yearly anthology of poetry. His final great work, the poem "The Great South Land" won the Grace Leven Prize and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 1951. To support his writing and his growing family, Ingamells held a variety of jobs including a lecturer, publisher, and salesman.

Ingamells died in a car accident shortly before his 43rd birthday.

Reviews

[Sammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There has indeed been enough sincere appreciation of distinctive beauty in Australian nature to suggest that those who see little are prejudiced. The mental and emotional training of such people is invariably patterned on Old World cultural conventions."

"From [Adam Lindsay] Gordon, the Englishman writing about Australia in an English way, to [Henry] Kendall the Australian writing about Australia in an English way, thence to [Henry] Lawson and [AB] Patterson, the Australians writing about Australia in an Australian way... [or rather, we should say] writing about Australia in a larrikin Australian way. What we now want is Australians writing about Australia in a literary Australian way."

"The first chapter in Australia's story tells of courage, endurance and triumph; but it tells also of failure, of misery, degredation and bestiality, of situations and incidents innumerable."

"To ensure imaginative truth our writers and painters must become hard-working students of aboriginal culture, something initially far-removed from the engaging and controlling factors of modern European life."