Hidden Journey from Australia to the Second World

Abstract

This article concentrates a query as to the facility of current transnationalism in coming to grips with Cold War culture as a world phenomenon bound by both time and space. On the one hand we confront its forceful synchronicities, inspiring but also requiring aesthetic congruities across substantial, sometimes hitherto unrelated portions of the world, and, on the other, its calculated silencings and censorship, enforcing asynchrony and differentiated cultural production, readerships and aesthetic formations on polarised political ground. Exploring little-traced, transverse literary connections between postcolonial Australia and the metropolitan Second World, this paper foregrounds the dissident practices of mid-century poetry, centring the work of settler Australian communist poet Dorothy Hewett. Can such transverse valency help us displace the moribund bipolar model of the cultural Cold War, in favour of a more worldly poetics of disruption, able to speak to the as-yet unrealised utopic horizons that propelled the conflict?