What initially drew me to this poem was its title. Wake in Fright is arguably the greatest ever Australian film. It is definitely the most disturbing. Set in the fictional outback town of Yabba, the film centers on a refined, if slightly pretentious, English school teacher, John Grant, who is passing through Yabba on his way to Sydney. The town is striking in its peculiarities: It is mono-sexual (there is not a woman in sight); the streets are entirely empty and the bars are completely full; everyone seems to know each other and no one pays for anything. Yabba imprisons Grant with its hospitality. In what is meant to be his first and only night there, Grant meets the town’s chief of police who forces him, by way of Australian custom, to get drunk. The teacher begins to lower his grandiosity and his guard, and joins in the local curiosities—all of which include drinking beer. Grant goes on to get paralytic drunk and gambles away all his money. Waking up the next morning in his dusty hotel room with a devastating hangover and empty pockets, he suddenly realizes he has no way of getting home. The townspeople offer to take care of him, but will not let him leave: for the next week he is shipped around from house to house, always offered a bed to sleep in and a cold can of beer to drink. Nothing else. Grant’s world turns into one long bender, and the harder he resists drinking, the more drunk he ends up getting. His ethics and his cultural refinements gradually begin to slide off him, lubricated by the beer and the good cheer of his hosts, he begins to lose his ability to discern himself from the locals (people he only days before considered to be brutes, thugs, savages) and the thin veneer of civilization is washed away.
The film captures the menace lurking behind Australia’s jocular national character: the tyranny of its good cheer and the threat hidden in its hospitality. In a distressing scene to watch, Grant is taken on a late night kangaroo hunt, on which he violently clubs a kangaroo cub to death (the kangaroo, of course, being Australia’s symbol). The next morning he is served his first meal: kangaroo stew. This seems to be the moment Caitlan Maling’s poem takes for its starting point. The clever opening rhyme and metre gives the the poem a false sense of innocence, which both masks and heightens its true maliciousness, reminiscent of a Frederick Seidel poem. "Wake in Fright" then turns away from its namesake film and shifts to a more personal register that reflects on the nature of a hunt: "This is something / I should learn / the full process." Maling is a Western Australian poet who is a previous recipient of the John Marsden Poetry Prize. In 2014 Maling was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and won the Harri Jones Memorial Prize.
Wake in Fright
The roo, stewed,
is outcome of shotgun,
the messy tear of skin.
The goat will break teeth
if not carefully cut
and held in the slow cooker
longer, so the metal falls
deeper into the pot. Two shot
between here and Jurien,
one almost kid-sized—
oven-roastable.
Coming home, the slab
of red in glad-wrap
on the bench is just flesh,
indistinguishable.
This is something
I should learn,
the full process.
Filling the chamber, the shot,
how to angle the body
so the blood spills neatly.
All the old farm boys
know, teach their sons.
I could be one
with a gun. Just
cock the handle
and be ready to take
the recoil, the bruise
on the collarbone,
the misfire, the graze
from dropping knees to ground.
The corpse, too heavy
to lift, winched against sky.
Wake in Fright is closely based on a great novel with the same title. Worth checking out both of them.
Posted by: Bruce Kawin | June 04, 2022 at 09:22 AM