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Mt Irvine

My belly is content enough
With two cups of tea and two bits of cake
Wehe gave me today as I sat on her doorstep,
But the night comes like a hammer cracking on an anvil (...)

James K. Baxter
from Jerusalem Sonnets
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Mt. Irvine

Early on Sunday March 17th, a group of Sydney poets, armed with barbecue food and poetry, set out for Mt Irvine, a remote mountain peak (formed by an upthrust of volcanic basalt) in the Blue Mountains of NSW, Australia. The destination was the Mt Irvine Community Hall designed by Bill Lucas, architect, teacher, inventor and philosopher who had died six months previously at the age of 76 and whose innovative ideas, which encompassed not only architecture but also communities and the arts, are still sorely missed. It had been Bill's dream that his buildings serve poets and poetry as well as localities and communities. He had often spoken of his enthusiasm for the United Nations. Bill Lucas' Community Hall seemed in every way a perfect location for the Dialogue through Poetry 2002.
After a long drive we settled into the Mt Irvine Community Hall, which turned out to be a well-designed, low-lying building which was obviously the pride of the community it served as it was clean and well-maintained and had a much-used feel to it. The locals had provided the makings of a fire, so we settled in for a day of conversation, poetry reading, eating, drinking, and sharing.Our readings attracted interest from residents of Mt Irvine. We discovered quite a few poetry lovers among them. We promised to return to share our poetry with the whole community.World Poetry Day in the Year of Mountains was a special day for us which we will long remember as one of those days where many random elements fuse to create an extraordinary moment. -- Angelika Fremd

Mt. Irvine

Mount Irvine Community Hall and basalt sculpture commemorating the founders of the community.
Waking early, a bit like on Christmas, the cool tropical morning when the air is actually sweet. We drive out through the suburbs. Perhaps the dialogue has begun, leaving behind our city attitude, the wake of a ship. We drive the old road to Parramatta, then deviate and cross country via Windsor and Richmond. We have planned something of a BBQ, really a very Australian thing and since the bushfire threat is over and we see little evidence of its ferocity, we are resigned to eating steaks and salads and absorbing airs from the mount. Kurrajong Kurmond Bilingahbin Bell Tomah Wilson and across the Weeney Creek. By leaving the big Australian cities you find yourself off the beaten track very quickly, and that is to mean remote. In Mt Irvine the air is actually thicker, slower and more complete than is the thin poisonous coastal breath we are use to. We count 5 cars passing on the small bush track that is a no-through road to a village that exists only in name. In the quiet gardens of the community hall we lie around in the perfect summer heat. Some of us sleep while the others prepare food, and drinking tea and nice cold beers, we discover ideas about Bachmann and the Austrain post war avant-garde, Bernhard, Ruhm and Handke. I guess Australia's unique claim would have to be to have perfected the 3rd phase of modernism. Concrete and brutal. The city avenues are walled with sleek rectilinear towers, but not massive buildings like in New York or hesitant structures as in parts of London and Paris. In the bush (that's what we called the rural areas) the old colonial world is still clearly evident and the towns are planned and the architecture speaks of a genteel moment, an antipodean ideal underpopulated, regional and remote. The community hall we have come to on this mountain was designed by our friend Bill Lucas. A building like a place can have its poetry, subtle light and showing its being by its processes - a place is like a fingerprint. The garden of Mt Irvine is framed by a mountain wilderness backdrop. We read Pablo Naruda and James K. Baxter(the visionary New Zealand poet, from his Jerusalem Sonnets). A reading done, there is the ground energy to soak up. Some slept while others took a stroll around the leafy paths. Knowing that before dark we would return to the metropolis, and feeling the perfectness of the weather and the place, today the Mountain dialogue was essential. Why waste words? Our discussions were natural, strong and passionate. To share our conceptual ideas together as artists of various ages and backgrounds is remarkable, to not judge an idea as more or less appropriate also is remarkable. I guess that is the secret of attaining knowledge and building language. Timing too is all essential, and a day on the mountain on a beautiful Sunday out in the car just happens sometimes without a lot of fuss. -- Ruark Lewis
James Keir Baxter was born in Dunedin. His father, Archibald Baxter, was a Scots farmer, who gave an account of his pacifist convictions and persecution during World War I in We Will Not Cease (1939). Millicent Baxter, James's mother, was the daughter of the eminent Canterbury College professor J. Macmillan Brown. His early years Baxter lived at Kuri Bush, south of Brighton. He was educated in Quaker schools in New Zealand and in England, where he spent nearly two years in the 1930s. As a poet Baxter established his reputation at the age of 18 with Beyond the Palisade (1944). His second book, Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, appeared two years later. In these early collection Baxter demonstrated his sensitive and melancholic moods in front of the rural landscapes of New Zealand. In 1956 he received his B.A. from Victoria University. Baxter worked for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and from 1954 to 1960 he edited the Wellington magazine Numbers. Baxter had suffered years from drinking problems and in the late 1954 he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1958 Baxter became a Roman Catholicism and was re-baptized - a decision reflected in his collection In Fires No Return (1958). He subsequently founded in the late 1960s a religious commune at Jerusalem on the Wanganui River. Howrah Bridge (1961) collected Baxter's earlier pieces, but also charted his reactions from the short period in the late 1950s when he was in India on a UNESCO Fellowship. In 1966 Baxter was awarded the Burns Fellowhsip at the University of Otago. This ended his relatively uneven period. In his later work Baxter examined with austerely ascetic style his religious conviction, in which poetry became his link to practical religious service. In Pig Island Letters (1966) - the title referring to the South Island of New Zealand - Baxter used Christian and classical mythology to examine the human condition and the inner landscape of his native islands. Jerusalem Sonnets (1970) and Jerusalem Daybook (1971) deal with Baxter's experiences in the Maori village of Jerusalem, in which he had founded a refuge for alcoholics, young drug addicts, and society's rejects. These works also witness his own life of hard work and material deprivation. Although Baxter had started to write plays in the late 1950s, it was not until the late 1960s, when he received recognition. Among his plays performed in Dunedin were The Band Rotunda (1967), The Sore-Footed Man (1967), The Devil and Mr Mulcahy (1967), and The Temptation of Oedipus (1970). Baxter died of a coronary thrombosis in Auckland on October 22, 1972. His funeral included both a requiem mass and a Maori tangi.