In the fifty-page poem ‘Journal of a Surgeon’s Wife’ (1976), Grace Perry explores the inner world of a ship’s surgeon’s wife in the convict days. Uprooted from England, she endures six months on a boat, then the disturbing realities of everyday life in the penal colony. She feels her husband is trapped:

‘Your stone house

is another kind of prison

colonnades and fireplace

were shaped by convicts

no less free’

Soon her husband leaves her, pregnant, to work on a transport: a year-long round trip at least. The bush closes in and all colour bleaches from her life. She decides to go England. As the ship waits in Sydney harbour for a favourable wind she miscarries, and misses the journey home…

‘And the bridge drying warped

drought disfigured many things

I gave up listening for the logs to rattle

watching for the girl in muslin

the swim the river

walk this way

the child I have mourned

shining in her hands’

Grace Perry was a significant figure in Australian poetry. Founder of South Head Pres and Poetry Australia, she was a GP in the Five Dock area of Sydney for many years. Born in Melbourne in 1927, she published her first poetry book at 15, then graduated in Medicine from the University of Sydney in 1954. She was awarded the NSW Premier’s Award for Special Services to Literature in 1985, and an AM in 1986.

Perry kept her GP life separate from her (reportedly argumentative) poetry life. This was not the case with her rural property at Berrima, which I believe gave her the insight to write the excellent study of loneliness in the bush that the ‘Journal’ is.

A famous study of that subject is Henry Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’. Both these texts use conversation as a tool for story telling. In Lawson it is represented as dialogue in vernacular 19^th century Australian English. Perry, however, uses conversation as a structural device in her poems. The lines are broken up in the way she would say them into a microphone at a poetry reading. Her ‘free verse’, then, is tightly controlled by the sound of the words. She is a lyric, naturalistic, narrative poet.

Consider: Can one ever truly escape the rules? Is there such a thing as ‘free’ verse?

Why is Perry so concerned to record the voice of the wife? After all, surely the surgeon’s life is the interesting one?

Earlier poems

Perry wrote several other books of poetry before the ‘Journal’, often using formal verse structures. ‘Foetal Stethoscope’ comes from her 1967 book ‘Frozen Section’:

‘My ear to earth receives the liquid murmur

of a generation moving in its sleep;

faintly through the metal mouthpiece issue

secrets that the budding blood should keep.

Within the differentiating mass

the uncertain image of the future swells

while flesh repeats our seaborn heritage

in ritual patterns of dividing cells.

In these unruptured membranes we shall wait

the rhythmic journey to the light at last;

cockled in sealed caverns, our lives beat

against that dark wave rising from the past.

Consider: Which do you prefer, the free or formal verse?

References and further reading

Perry G (1976) Journal of a Surgeon’s Wife

Perry G (1967) Frozen Section Edwin and Shaw

Lawson H The Drover’s Wife

updated: 22/03/2010