Alan Wearne’s poetic vehicle of choice is the dramatic monologue. He is a master of the form. Like those mid-Victorian poets Clough, Meredith and Browning, whose prowess in narrative verse Wearne cites as more or less challenging him to try his hand at the form (“We can do it… go on… can you?”), Wearne takes full advantage of the scope offered by the dramatic monologue: from compelling narrative plots (often topical) to psychological portraiture (always entangled) and everything in between.
Take The Nightmarkets, Wearne’s epic verse novel that follows a year in the life of six characters and includes ten separate monologues totalling over 10,000 lines. Set in 1980s Melbourne and the city’s surrounding suburbs, the poem involves the romantic relationship between Sue Dobson, a leftist-activist-journalist in her late 20s from the inner-city, and the noticeably older, inescapably patrician, politician Jack McTaggart. McTaggart is running for federal office and looking to start his own political party. To complicate things further, Dobson has been commissioned to write McTaggart’s biography. The poem not only surveys the political and social landscape of early 1980s Australia, which was still suffering from the hangover of “The Dismissal” (the removal of the progressive Labor Prime Minister Gough Whiltlam by the Attorney General in 1975), but also the conflicted personal lives of those who strive to shape this landscape.
In Wearne’s monologues we witness his characters’ attempts to validate their contradictions, justify their compromises, explain themselves to themselves—that is, we witness how we navigate in our own minds the sharp collisions between our supposed convictions and how we ultimately choose (or sometimes are compelled) to act. Wearne achieves this effect through the energy of his language, in particular the tightness of its rhythm, which allows for a simultaneous propulsion of the narrative and for the rapidly oscillating nature of human introspection to be mirrored: the slightest change in cadence is significant enough to discernibly mark a change in mood or thought.
The following passage is taken from Sue Dobson’s monologue “Climbing Up the Ladder of Love,” which is featured in full in Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021. I think it is exemplary of Wearne’s energy and ear for the Australian vernacular—also for his comic effect. Chatting with dock worker Kev at a bar, Dobson imagines the morning to come if she takes the guy home, a morning filled with embarrassment, in main part created by the space between the ideals of her post-grad-educated socialism (what we would call in Australia “Champaign socialism” or “chardonnay socialism”) and the realities of Kev’s working class life. Having recently reread “The Masque of Anarchy,” it was hard not to compare the idealism of Shelley’s famous ending couplet with the irony of the final couplet of the passage below—Wearne’s holds up pretty well.
(Note: an “ocker” is similar to “white trash” or “hillbilly”; pronouncing the letter “h” with a hard h “haitch” was viewed in Australia as a signifier of poor education).
From ‘Climbing Up the Ladder of Love’ (from The Nightmarkets)
Drovers, miners, abalone-divers hit town, go on a bender
and, if so much creeps up grey, ill defined, to confuse
like then like now, I also head to pub company. Tends either to amuse
or bore, and when these overlap keeps reminding
me how Lou once said: ‘Maybe it is this mind thing,
but Melbourne! On occasions I’ve heard and agreed, or thought and said myself
Fuck fuck fuck. In this place do they think of nothing else?‘
So chatting-up one Friday at The Standard,
after a joint has hyped me ultra-candid:
‘Like getting smashed, Kev? I do. Wine, lager, bitter,
draught, even stout? Nah. Spirits only tonight.’
The hues of winter
filled the public bar: blacks, blues and browns;
with friends to share my ups and ride my downs
I’d arrived back. And this Kev deserved I make a start
in ‘getting along’. But the taste was tart and I shuddered,
saw myself staring in
a barrel of bullshit, all that’s (so called) egalitarian.
A Women’s Studies postgrad meets a wharfie/
painter-and-docker/ that ilk, say, invites him back for coffee,
a number, a rave. And what’s to follow
the next day? ‘Bonjour Kev.’
‘Huh?’
‘That’s hello
in French.’
And the final hour is spent
trying to save him/you more embarrassment.
Oh a touch of the worker and consciousness unfurls
to separate the women from the girls,
they think. Poor deluded molls, why slave
after ockers? Haven’t you heard they’ve
almost another language? Why bumming it
round public bars for even further slumming it?
Sure there’s a whole class struggle to instil ’em
with, but you just wince with every ‘haitch’ and ‘fillum’.
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Author: Thomas Moody
