Death of a father

He didn’t know what had struck him,

            poleaxed on my bed;

Moira my mother calling out Jim,

            half of his heart half-dead.

 

Then he knew what had struck home;

            I’ve done it this time he said,

sorry, his last words an apologising groan,

            half of his heart not dead. 

 

Dr Hibberd is a senior Australian playwright. He is regarded as one of the grandfathers of Australian popular, vernacular, and social realist theatre. His ‘popular’ plays from 1967 to 1972 encountered the phenomenon of the bloke and the sheila. Plays like ‘The Les Darcy Show’, and ‘One of Nature’s Gentlemen’ used settings considered a little seedy to confront, and to open up to question, our everyday behaviours. Audiences were shocked or amused, but either way they responded to the dramatist’s power. 

In his introduction to his 1976 collection ‘Three Popular Plays’, he talks about his conception of the new theatre, having an entertaining digs here and there: 

‘None of these plays stoop to psychological explanation, something I am not very good at; it also bores me to death. They strive to work emblematically through scenic action and extroversion, an agglutination of facts, fibs, images, songs, occasions, jokes, straight lefts, and inexplicable distemper.’ 

He notes that arts funding leans towards satisfying the tastes of the wealthy, and that malaise in the arts persists in Australia despite ten years of effort. 

‘Indeed, that this basic brand of theatre calls for general expositions, encouragement and propagation is a sad comment on the sate of our histrionics: its conservatism, snobbishness and derivativeness still endures behind token and superficial gestures towards the indigenous. The different and dangerous is quickly sprayed and blandified by the establishment, or else politely ignored.’ 

Hibberd is fascinated by humanity and it’s foibles, especially the darkest of our foibles. He has a number of historical plays that use a sort of quick collage of characters and events, distorted if necessary by the necessities of exciting writing, such as the often-performed ‘A Toast to Melba’. One imagines his favourite painters follow the style of Otto Dix; his novelists might include Christopher Isherwood with his masterpiece about pre-war Berlin ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’. Like many others, Hibberd has a horrified fascination with the rise and fall of the Nazi regime: the artistically and politically fertile time between the two world wars; the horrors that followed. 

In his two poetry books he has a set of poems after Charles Baudelaire, the Frenchman who dug into the depths of the human soul in his famous book ‘Fleurs de Mal (Flowers of Evil) in 1869:

The Wind of Madness 

‘I have felt the wind of the wings of madness,’ wrote

Charles Baudelaire in his book My Heart Laid Bare.

Insanity is a swirl: the brain twists as if on a rope:

a tumbleweed, small round tree, whipped by violent air.

Once lunatics were frogmarched, banished, to the sea,

where another brand of wind propelled their ships of fools.

Next they were confined, like masochists in monasteries,

or half-eaten lepers, in dungeons too maggoty for ghouls.

The Age of Enlightenment saw them released on sprees

of anarchy, orgies, noonday masses, lampooning officialdom.

So, once again these putative fruitcakes were seized,

certified, manacled, and caged in humourless asylums.

More recently we have inserted needles, alcohol, and slit

lobes, tried coma, electric shock, drugs: for brains on stilts. 

 

from Salt and Pepper Sonnets 

Eva

grandmother

 

Eva shrivelled, following that somnolent pneumonic death.

Once indefatigably buoyant, an irreducible woman,

as pillowy as the suet dumplings she cooked. He left

her profoundly puzzled, cast adrift in some no-man’s

zone. She paddled cautiously around, or sat, a loose sack

on his frayed chair- her repartee and wit, Cork-sharp,

now blank and blunt. Her hair hung like grey flax.

Her loud gregariousness became a cloaked silent harp

at dinners, afternoons of whist, even family affairs.

She toured Australia in a bus of merry widows. A ploy

which worked for a few weeks…then that cavernous stare.

Her widowhood her biological loss had exterminated joy,

and in it’s place colonic cancer grew: a huge unexplained

tumult. Suet-white, Eva joined her husband in boiling pain.

 

The rhyme scheme here is classic Shakespearean sonnet, the scansion relaxed (ie: it is not the strict ‘di dah di dah di dah …’ of iambic pentameter). There are many versions of the sonnet to keep the specialists amused for years! Hibberd’s skill as a writer is revealed in his tanka about haiku, entitled ‘Diptych’. Recently he has been elected to the Literature Board of the federal government’s Arts Council. 

Perhaps the poem that is most like his plays is ‘Life Forces’ 

for John McEncroe

sixty years

 

Just look at that sunset, Doctor,

said the old chap, Don,

with shingles, piles, cataracts,

priapism, torticollis, sprue,

cannonball secondaries bombarding

shot kidneys and lungs,

beaming.

It’s enough to get a coot through the night,

all that beauty and brightness,

the sky beserk with galahs,

(the sounds of a stray Pomeranian

being serviced by his St Bernard),

a distant Vivaldi of crickets,

a soft breeze tickling crinkled cheeks.

Yes, it’s enough to entice a bloke

to plonk his gnarled truncated feet

up on a cardboard suitcase

(packed with essentials),

or a gravestone,

crack an Aristotle or two of Carlton,

dream of dead Dulcie’s dugs,

sail through the oil of darkness,

since such a sunset, Doc,

infallibly heralds a miraculous dawn.

 

 

References and Further reading 

Hibberd J (1976) Three Popular Play  Scribe

Hibberd J  (1998) The Genius of Human Imperfection; Black Pepper 

Hibberd J (2004) Madrigals for a Misanthrope  Black Pepper 

Hibberd J (2000) Selected Plays  Currency Press…. Journal of Australian Studies review of… http://www.api-network.com/cgi-bin/reviews/jrbview.cgi?n=0868196320&issue=2