AustLit

This is probably the most shabby move of a scholar in the archive: to publicly present drafts which are mutant variations of what we have known as a superbly finished poem. In this unexpurgated version of 'The Last Outlaw' Forbes takes literal aim at a wider range of the bogeys of Captial and Colonialism and their svelte expertise in managing image economies and dreams of ideal habitats. Risked here is a certain sexism in the 'spunky bank manager's wife' and the barbed racism of aboriginal people 'lying through their ritually knocked-out teeth.' Commenting upon Forbes’s handling of white colonial mythic types in Australia, such as the ANZAC, or the larrikin, or the digger or the unionized worker, Adam Aitken observes that the poet ‘ ...  might breathe life back into this ailing patriarchal leviathan. Like comedians making racism into a joke, it’s a fine line, and Forbes was always aware of this line, this risk, this flirtation with a position that risked a failure of critical intent.’ Forbes's caricatures are risky, being both sympathetic and problematic, but all such sketches are self-aware and self-mocking, yet this does not let the poet off the hook, we even get the sense that he wants to be on the hook, pierced.

The poem attacks Kelly as a technological amplifier of mythos: a boombox to broadcast an untroubled masculinist 'Australia,' yet contains within it the jeopardy of displacing one authoritative voice with another. The final version of the poem is a tight-rope walk, where every step is deliberate, consequential, and telling of grace. In these ‘stunt’ versions, of which there are five or six variations, Forbes keeps the poem pumping clots of witty rage about the corruption and complicity of mining, politics, economics and the entertainment industry, keeping the figure of Kelly as the alloyed lynch-pin of ‘how we see ourselves.'

Uranium Mining (yellow-cake), Rupert Murdoch, Les Murray, the Banks, West Australian Premier Charles Court are all targets of the Forbes flamethrower. This method of direct nominal engagement is tempered (sublimated?) in the final version to make it less like a didactic sermon and more like a dark frolic through the superstructures of power that would use the Bushranger as a sentimental decoy, and the poem’s point is brutally simple: what is behind the Kelly mask is not a rebel or a hero or a proto-Aussie larrikin but a gold mine expressed as systematic gouges in the sacred turf. The original rapaciousness of settler culture is often conveniently displaced to rest with large anonymous forces, and the idea of Australia as a potential space for a blokey utopia, freed from the ancestral restraints of feudal or industrial Europe, is undone by the poem, which suggests that the great democratic ethos of Australia for the squatter and the ticket of leave man has always been: ‘get the gold!’ Kelly was a cattle duffer and horse thief before he became a bank robber: an illicit entrepreneur. One might protest that Kelly’s career was driven more by impulses of survival rather than surplus, but the figure makes us question ‘Our’ share in the squandering…

James Graham, an early settler in Victoria from Scotland, in a letter home to his family in Fife, detailing an overland journey from Sydney to Melbourne, was compelled to observe that in Australia “money is the great idol, and for it they will…undergo any hardship”  Overland Letter Manuscript 25 http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/archives/the-overland-letter/)

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