CREATIVE: Take any single Australian painting that you saw at the gallery yesterday (it must be one that you saw) and write a description either in poetry or prose. Pay close attention to detail in your description. What you are in fact doing in this exercise is a piece of Ekphrastic Writing. Check up the meaning of this word!
Ekphrastic. Wow, what a wonderful word! Originating from the Greek, it translates to description . Ekphrastic poetry dates all the way back to Homer’s Illiad in his description of Achilles Shield. This is my own humble attempt at such description, to capture the essence behind a visual work and place it in written terms. I was grabbed by Tom Roberts’ Bailed Up in the late colonial era, depicting the holdup of a stage coach. I got a touch of a Robin Hood vibe and doing a little research on the painting I gained some intriguing insights…
Beneath his hat stood proud chiseled features
Hard grey eyes flecked with specks of steel
His hands lovingly caressed his deadly preachers
Terrible blood and thunder they deal
The horses whinnied and snorted
Stamping their feet with eyes ran wild
Around the stage coach they cavorted
As the men atop them smiled
The Driver sighed and surrendered
He was a man well worth his salt
Only too well he remembered
The ways of Captain Thunderbolt
‘Good morning to you Silent Bob’
Came the cheerful calls from below
It was a standard old fashioned job
Disappointing if you hoped for a show
The sun bore brightly down
Upon these noble bush-rangers
In this wide land of brown
As they stood and made polite exchanges
Laconically they worked
Stuffing full their sacks
The tension usurped
For the highwaymen were just another tax
Whilst composing this piece Roberts consulted a man by the name of ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, who was held up by the famous’Captain Thunderbolt’ during the 1860s. For this reason my choice of names was very deliberate for that added contextual detail. Bob gaves to Roberts a detailed description of “the quiet way the whole thing took place”, which we can see translated in the painting. There is no drama in the work according to Humphrey McQueen, the scene lit with bright sunshine, as one of the rangers has a chat with the passenger as he casually leans on the stage coach. “The affray looks like a picnic party delayed by a broken spoke rather than a matter of life or death.”
It exposes a distinctive Australian trait; the carefree, she’ll be right attitude that can be applied to any pressure inducing situation. In a growing national fervor pushing for federation this representation begins to make a lot of sense. I wanted to capture this in the poem with an initial expectation of great drama and tension which can then be shattered by the end of the poem, with the cadence and choice of words.
Andrew Colman: Adventures in Literature 