The Malpoetical Turn: Deep-Diving Into The Poetry Of 16-Year-Old Malcolm Turnbull

In the Summer of 2013/14, I spent two months at Old Parliament House researching poetry written by Australian parliamentarians. The best, most honest examples of parliamentary poems are windows into the dark and haunted hollows of the political mind. The worst serve only to confirm an obvious truth: that politicians are partisan warriors capable of immense rhetorical contortioning.

I wrote a brief field survey of the politico-literary landscape for the Australian Poetry Journal, and found only three sitting poets in the 44th Parliament: Clive Palmer (who reveled aloud in his awful doggerel at this year’s Queensland Poetry Festival), Greens Senator Penny Wright (since retired), and Liberal MP David Coleman (the appropriately-titled Member for Banks).

But now, I stand corrected: there is another.

Absent from this weird bibliography was the singular poetic work of one M.B. Turnbull, age 16, published in the 1970 issue of The Sydneian, the student annual of Sydney Grammar School. It took a while for this poem to surface because, unlike Canberra Grammar’s The Canberran, where Gough Whitlam’s juvenilia reside, The Sydneian has not been digitised for public consumption – probably a not-unwise decision intended to prevent the re-emergence of a now-prominent alumni’s embarrassing teenage treatises, portrait-day cow-licks, and utterly awful poems.

When SBS News republished Turnbull’s ‘The Return to the Temple’ a few weeks ago, it was uploaded without any context or criticism (but with plenty of errors in transcription), lest the extent of the ex-Communications Minister’s poetic indiscretions be laid bare. I am acutely aware that critiquing any sixteen-year-old’s poetry is neither fair nor a serious pursuit. However, by publishing the potentially damaging poem (young Turnbull is roundly critical of the Catholic church, which he has since joined) without analysis, SBS has already been unfair.

A proper reading is required to put the poem in context. So here we go.

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THE RETURN TO THE TEMPLE

 

Christ, you old fisherman,

Fisher of souls,

Fishing for souls and their pennance.

How would you sanctify

Sanctions for sinners?

And red-black peons of Peter

Peacefully, piously starving a world?

 

God bless you all

    All of you –

Bearers of Christ on a Cross,

A silver Christ on a cross of gold;

Aye – you have lost the cross

Upreared on chilly Calvary;

You have lost the Christ

Who saved the sinful world

You slowly try to starve

For red-black peons of Peter

Peacefully, piously have led back

The lenders of Gold to the Temple.

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First, let’s acknowledge that this is not the type of poetry referred to by the 19th Century Bostonian Maronite Catholic poet Khalil Gibran (Bob Katter Jnr’s Dad’s cousin, coincidentally) when he said: “Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary”.

There is admittedly a deal of pain and wonder in reading Turnbull’s effort, and even a snifter of dictionary, but the only joy comes in the form of a liberal dose of schadenfreude. Surely the alliterative “red-black peons of Peter / peacefully, piously” are so pulpardly pathetic a ploy that they practically push one to purgery [sic]. No Peter Porter Poetry Prize for you, Prime Minister, ye great plaster-saint pretender and putative penny-packer of Goldman’s sacks!

But maybe that’s unfair – Turnbull’s poem doesn’t exactly clamber, despite its religious theme, for the metaphysical heights of the most famous English language poet/parliamentarian, John Donne. Malcolm is no cleric, and his poetic turn – in and of itself – makes no great claim to sublimity. It’s an exercise. A model student’s piece of model schoolwork. From and for the cloistered halls of a Grammar School in the penumbral age of really serious sectarian rivalry in Australia. So when Young Malcolm – a Presbyterian convert to Catholicism – seems to despair that the Catholic church’s fetish for money has corrupted the humble Christian faith (taking Peter and his red-black Cardinals as synechdoche), it’s probably only because he was a complaisant pupil (“a ruthless climber”) to a class of teachers looking to reward the best tow-ers of the party line with the promise of publication (read: publicity).

In other words, it isn’t fair or reasonable to extrapolate any kind of serious religious sentiment from such a socially- and historically-situated, isolated piece of juvenile homework. What we can determine from this reading, however, is exactly how far Young Malcolm was prepared to go – rhetorically, ideologically – to satisfy his masters. Now, as the Churchillian leader of a divided party with a bitter conservative core, it remains to be seen whether Malcolm’s policies will be passionate and original expressions of his own sleeve-worn ideology writ large, or if they will fall limply down the page like yet more lines of stilted, over-vaulting compromise ordered into lines to please the masters.

NB: While I’m correcting the record on parliamentary poets, let me quickly refute Clive Palmer’s outrageous claim that he sold ten thousand copies of Hopes, Dreams and Reflections, his 1981 collection of poems. Ten thousand! Odd, then, that a best-selling chapbook – one that has outsold most contemporary single-author poetry collections in Australia – is on the National Library of Australia’s wish list, but not in their collection. Stranger still that it took me months and many requests to retrieve the only publicly held copy from the stacks of the Southport Branch Library. Or that Palmer’s biographer reckons the book “attracted few sales”. Not to mention the simple fact that Clive’s poems, each and every one of them, is as cranially stupefying as a brain bubble of sniffed glue. On the other hand, Emily Dickinson once wrote: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that [what I have read] is poetry”. So, give or take a few scoops of gray matter, maybe Palmer is the true poet here after all.

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Mitchell Welch is a writer and award-winning poet. His poems and essays have appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Overland, and Rabbit.