Banjo Paterson referenced the Illawarra in his A Bushman’s Song. Photo: National Library of Australia.
Writing poems about Wollongong and the Illawarra is probably about as lucrative a pursuit as talking poetry with the taxman.
But a surprising number of once famous (along with emerging) Australian writers seem to have been willing to do so. And as Fred Dagg (aka John Clarke) should have known when publishing his Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse, many of the famed Oz poets mention The Gong at least once.
Banjo Paterson got in early with his A Bushman’s Song. But in his view The Gong was a bastard of a place where Illawarra’s bunyip aristocracy’s early control of their assigned convict servants had made most of the population obsequious and grovelling.
“I went to Illawarra, where my brother’s got a farm,
He has to ask his landlord’s leave before he lifts his arm;
The landlord owns the countryside – man, woman, dog, and cat,
They haven’t the cheek to dare to speak without they touch their hat.”
The former Corrimal/Fairy Meadow resident, Henry Kendall of “Bellbirds” fame – “softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing / The notes of the bellbirds are running and ringing” – even came up with a too-often neglected poem about the attempted genocide of the Indigenous people of northern Illawarra.
Kendall wrote stacks more about the Illawarra, from Woonona to Jamberoo and you can check it out online for bits of it are today still quite bearable if, sadly, too often overlong.
Henry Kendall’s Woonoona was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 30 September 1864. Image: Supplied.
Both Paterson and Kendall may well have been predated in their Illawarra poeticism by the anonymous author of an ode to what was once the best known edible product emanating from Warilla.
“This fact, e’er since I crossed the seas,
I rarely fail at meals to utter,
That Bathurst stands unmatched for cheese,
And Wollongong for yellow butter.”
Warilla was originally spelt “Waarilla”. And though it might look like a transliteration of some long lost Aboriginal word, in reality, it was only invented by the NSW Housing Commission in the early 1950s as an anagram of Illawarra.
Some bureaucrat obviously thought the double ‘a’ looked weird and so it was dropped. A butter company, however, used another modified spelling with just the double ‘r’ until someone must have later phased it out with decimalisation or something.
Warilla was spelt Warrilla by this butter company. Photo: Supplied.
But perhaps the best ever Illawarra poetic slam was made in 1982 when the disgraced Wollongong Mayor Frank Arkell stepped up to the stage of the Wollongong Town Hall and proudly told the Uzbekistan dancers performing there that they were here in the 150th year of Wollongong’s founding.
The very debonair Uzbeki translator then hilariously informed the audience that he and the Uzbekistan dancers were from Samarkand and, coincidentally, in this very same year its people were currently celebrating that city’s 2500th anniversary.
So much for Arkell’s interminable and less than venerable poetic utterances about “Wonderful Wollongong”.
Fortunately, however, in that same year when white Wollongong supposedly turned 150, it lucked upon a very serious and talented poet in the person of Conal Fitzpatrick and his Wollongong Poems which captured Illawarra circa 1982 with a marvellous lack of sentimentality.
“Wollongong, City Of Sinuses
Where old men lean blowing into street corners
And Emphysema, the city’s cousin
Hides out in the coal yards and the mines dotting the slopes.”
Conal Fitzpatrick’s Wollongong Poems which captured Illawarra circa 1982. Image: Supplied.
The prolific Melbourne poet Alan Wearne who moved to Wollongong and taught at UOW for many years also managed to come up with Seventeen Illawarra Couplets, one of which was dedicated to two of his now well-known former students, Damien Cahill and Van Badham.
“Mon Dieu, fair dinkum and begorah
Hail and Farewell Illawarra
For further details Sir or Madam
Check ‘em out with Cahill and Badham.”
And even though Corrimal Street in Wollongong has today been high-rised almost completely out of charm, way back in 1982 it was a very different place. Conal Fitzpatrick knew this well and made an unerring prophecy of what was then just starting to happen in central Wollongong and would later go on to infect acres of Illawarra elsewhere.
“In the broken down houses around Corrimal Street
The avant-garde are taking their white wine with cheese.”
Now a new poetic voice, that of Luke Johnson, a senior lecturer at UOW (and like Alan Wearne currently short-listed for the 2025 Judith Wright Poetry Prize) has wittily tackled the current essence of 21st Century Illawarra in his collection titled Kangaroo Unbound, published by Puncher and Wattmann.
