Rivista La Biennale di Venezia

Writing of rains, rivers and oceans

Conversation with John Kinsella

Davide Brullo

He has the body of Chiron, the centaur who taught Achilles, combining wisdom with anger, a beast of fierce intelligence. In photographs he stands between rocks and an almost impossibly blue sky. Sometimes he wears a wide-brimmed hat. He has a bull-like body: he could break the reins of the cosmos with a sickle, gather up the stars in a sack and milk them. As a boy, John Kinsella looked like a Hollywood actor, with an implacable, scowling beauty. He would take the compliment as an insult. He lives in Ballardong together with his lifetime partner, Tracy Ryan, also a poet, in south-west Australia, ‘in a land sacred to the Noongar, where my colonial-settler family lived in wounded bushland that we have been treating for years’.

Born in Perth in 1963, Kinsella is the most eminent Australian poet today, and one of the great contemporary English-language poets. He has published around fifty books. One of these, Jam Tree Gully (2011), is about his home at the foot of the forest. He shows me some photos. Intertangled polypoid trees forming arcane calligrams, plant tarots. Petroglyphs, rock codes. Radical colours: green, brown, blue. I am reminded of Bruce Chatwin’s finest book, The Songlines. Writing, perhaps, is an enchanting formula, a dream sower. I think of Peter Weir’s film, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), about a group of schoolgirls – it is set in the early twentieth century – who get lost among aboriginal rocks. Rough life, without polished conventions, a basic, authentic life demands their corolla skirts.