AustLit

'When my year 11 literature class began studying Gwen Harwood, the teacher gave us a hand- out with factoids about the Australian poet. She was born in Brisbane in 1920 but lives in Tasmania; she has written under pseudonyms and is rather fond of hoaxes (yet we weren’t told about her famous Bulletin acrostic, “Fuck all editors,” which would have piqued our interest); and the themes of her poetry include engagement with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (his thought summarised in a sentence), religion, music, and suburban domesticity. “I think,” the teacher added hesitantly in those days of limited internet access, “she died recently.” (It was 1997 and she had, in fact, died in 1995.) With this introduction, we began studying her poems. It was a thin framework on which to construct our literary criticism, although to be fair it is only now, decades later, that the first biography of Harwood has appeared. Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own is a rich narrative connecting and nuancing the factoids readers of Harwood have had to make do with until now. The restrictions on what could be said while her husband was still alive have lifted and a fuller story of her life is now possible.' (Introduction)