Adapted for Education by Bruce Toms, retired teacher and Australian Socialist editor from the Dedication prepared by Jefferson Lee, the Special Projects Officer for the Australia-East Timor Association (NSW).
The Australian folk tradition music scene, poetry world and labour movement are all in mourning over the sudden death of the Blue Mountains based poet Denis Kevans at Sydney's Westmead Hospital on the morning of Tuesday August 23rd 2005 following complications from heart surgery.
Kevans, known for the last 30 years as "The Poet Lorikeet of Australia", a pun on the title "poet laureate" often bestowed on other writers by the literary establishment, was always regarded as "the people's poet" because of his close identification with Aborigines, Irish political prisoners, other down-trodden, the workers movement, environmental causes, republicanism and the anti-war movement.
With an Irish Catholic background, where two generations of the male side of the family volunteered and were POW's in both World War One and Two, "war child" Denis Kevans excelled scholastically and in sport. He was in the St Joseph's College First XV Rugby team in High School, then two years later, as a junior public servant in the old External Affairs Department in Canberra, he was chosen by Sir Robert Menzies for the Prime Minister's Eleven Cricket Team against the visiting English in 1958.
He wrote many poems on religion, sport, the futility of war and politics from an early age, with a poem on Gallipoli and Australian history called "Young Words" winning the Mary Gilmore Award for poetry in 1959. An early highpoint was when the legendary anti-war folk singer Gary Shearston recording Den's "The Roar of the Crowd" on his seminal vinyl LP "Broadside" as the tumultuous decade of the 1960s drew to a close. Throughout the 1960s Kevans was prominent in both the 'Ban The Bomb' anti-nuclear campaign, where his satirical poem "Teen Problems" drew the wrath of 'The Bulletin' magazine, and the anti-war movement, where his "Slouch of Vietnam" poem became the battle hymn of the Vietnam Moritorium Movement.
Australia's inevitable subservience to the USA-led war in Vietnam saw Kevans satirize Canberra's folly in the Lawson-Paterson tradition of 'I had written him a letter' found in "Clancy of the Overflow". As each American leader arrived on our shores during the war in Vietnam they were greeted with his latest edict : "Welcome Spiro Agnew" was closely followed by "Henry "Napalm" Kissinger". Both poems were written with all the laconic wit, irony and Australian vernacular of the earlier bards. As was his tribute to the suffering of Australia's Vietnam veterans after the war in poems such as "Agent Orange, Agent Blue".
Denis Kevans, with his younger brother Jacko, who also recently died, were part of the Bush Music and folk song revival period in Australia which began in the mid-1950s with the play "Reedy River" at New Theatre in Sydney. While his brother Jacko stayed with the music tradition his whole life as a performer, Denis excelled at poetry. His involvement with the Realist Writers Group, influenced by Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory and Russell Ward's The Australian Legend, invigorated him to pursue the Henry Lawson tradition for much of his writing career, to the chagrin of the academic and literary establishment who shunned the growing Kevans' output by denying his obvious talent access to review columns, favorable grant decisions or inclusion in prestigious anthologies. Denis responded in verse once when establishment poet Les Murray complained about the Literature Board of the Australia Council not renewing one of Murray's many grants with the short poem about his own lack of funding (They'll give the grant to) "Anyone But Him". Denis had been for many years a member of the Communist Party.
But Denis never worried about the establishment nod. He still had his massive following amongst ordinary Australian workers with endless poems written for and recited on picket lines like "Clowns and other Clowns" (satirising John Leard, the boss of ANI, during the Comeng dispute in 1983), "Cockatoo Island", "The Dogman", "Ten Minutes Washing Time" and "The Green Ban Fusiliers" (celebrating Jack Munday's BLF and Green Bans movement in the 1970s). His teacher career led to poems like "Century of the Child" which he recited to 150,000 people at the anti-nuclear rally in Sydney on Palm Sunday 1984.Denis was an active federationist.
Denis Kevans, a committed environmentalist, was inspired by Jack Mundey and the Green Bans imposed by the Builders Labourers Federation in the 1970s to stop the destruction of both Sydney's architectural heritage and low cost inner-city housing stock. He wrote "Across The Western Suburbs (We Must Wander)", a parody of the traditional "Across The Western Plains", to highlight the plight of the evicted working class tenants of Victoria Street, Kings Cross. Many of the older residents of Victoria Street were on war-time tenancies and were illegally moved with their possessions to the outer Western Suburbs of Sydney in the middle of the night by stand-over men. The song was first performed by seaman, jazz musician and the last 'legal' tenant of the Victoria Street squats, Mick Fowler. At the Blue Mountains Folk Festival in the late 1990s Jack Mundey launched an album of Denis Kevan's poems set to music entitled City of Green - Green Ban Songs and Beyond.
The Denis Kevans legacy to Australian verse and song will be an enduring one. His verse has been recorded by over one hundred local musicians, including Jeannie Lewis, The Fagans, Michael Atherton from Sirocco (who set the poem "Albert Namatjira" to music), and translated into more than half a dozen languages in overseas anthologies from Vietnam and Russia to South America. His self-published anthologies were partially funded by royalties from Midnight Oil. This came about when the band used an unauthorised version of the Kevans' poem "Harrisburg Oh Harrisburg" (on the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979) as the lead in track on their "Red Sails in the Sunset" 1980s release. Kevans collaborated with many musicians. His most recent efforts were in conjunction with his long time friend and singing partner Sonia Bennett on her Wollemi Pine CD of environmental songs and the more recent "Loosely Woven" double CD release. Towards the end of his life his poems were included in many anthologies like The Irish History of Australia in Song and Verse and The Blue Mountains Folk Book.
The Kevans' contribution to the peace movement in Australia and globally was also significant. He was a tireless campaigner and performer at benefit concerts and rallies over many decades. In the last five years he has twice graced the stage of the Sydney Town Hall to recite at East Timor benefit nights and introduce Paddy Kenneally from the 2/2 Commandoes who fought in East Timor - in November 2000 for the 'Anin Murak' Choir tour from East Timor and in April 2004 for the Kirsty Sword-Gusmao - Alola Foundation benefit. On both occasions he performed "Your Friends Will Never Forget You", a poem that refers to the Australian Defence Forces leaflet dropped over East Timor during World War Two and the betrayal of the the Timorese people by successive Australian Governments. He frequently contributed his poems for publication in The Australian Socialist among other left media.. His poems will be sorely missed - as will Denis and his contribution to progressive causes. Among the many fine tributes to him at his Wake at Sydney=s Gaelic Club on August 28, none could surpass the rendition of his poem, Monuments, put to music and sung by the family folk musicians, the Fagans.
(Jefferson Lee in 1987 received an MA Honours degree from Uni of NSW on completion of his thesis entitled The Political Content of the Poetic Works of Denis Kevans.)
MONUMENTS
by Denis Kevans
Some leave a marble monument, or a statue made of brass,
That stands in cold retirement getting tickled by the grass,
Some leave a passive portrait they've commissioned for a fee,
But no-one comes to sculpt or carve or paint a pic of me.
Don't worry, I've been carved up by experts, not a few,
Subbies, foremen, used their knives to carve a pound or two,
I've been sculptured by the cleaver winds that scream up in the struts,
I've been painted by the mud and slush in bogging rickshaw ruts.
I am a kind of portrait if you could read between
The lines that mark my face with time and see just what they mean,
The leagues and loves and lands I've known, the years of wear and tear,
No gypsy woman on the earth could glean the stories there.
From the mullock-heavy rickshaw to the hook that rides with ease,
From the sucking clay-caught shovel to the steelwalk in the breeze,
From the jackpick's gun staccato to the steady chisel chip,
I've worked upon my monument in a life's apprenticeship.
From the convict's pick-marked alphabet in the Hawkesbury river stone
To where the dogman carves his name in the concrete rise alone,
From mud in acres poured and squared to the bright mosaic eye,
I've worked upon my monument and build before I die.
I see your monuments displayed in cavalcades of war,
In lands where you make ashes from the courage of the poor,
In little children hobbling down to drink at sorrow's well
Looking sadly at their faces cut to bits by petrol-gel.
I see your monuments displayed in smog-polluted air,
The wraiths of black-shawled mountains in the wake of I-don't-care,
In oil-choked harbours, upturned fish, and nuclear-sullied seas,
In forests felled, and deserts made from the songbirds' aviaries.
You've had your chance, you've run the world your way, we know it's
Your monuments stick in the craw, the monuments to you,
We leave the cities of the world cemented with our sweat,
The cemeteries of our youthful years,, but we're not beaten yet.
For there's a living monument to all we've lived and learnt,
The green bans we've created and the victories we've earnt,
And one day when these cities are but dust upon the air,
The pollen from our fighting hearts will bloom again somewhere.