Jindyworobak Movement

The Jindyworobak Movement was an Australian literary movement of the 1930s and 1940s whose white members, mostly poets, sought to contribute to a uniquely Australian culture through the integration of Indigenous Australian subjects, language and mythology. The movement's stated aim was to "free Australian art from whatever alien influences trammel it" and create works based on an engagement with the Australian landscape and an "understanding of Australia's history and traditions, primeval, colonial and modern".

The movement began in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1937, when Rex Ingamells and other poets founded the Jindyworobak Club. Ingamells outlined the movement's aims in an address entitled On Environmental Values (1937). "Jindyworobak" comes from the Woiwurrung language, formerly spoken around modern-day Melbourne, meaning "to join" or "to annex". It was used by James Devaney in his 1929 book The Vanished Tribes, in which he claims to have sourced it from a 19th-century vocabulary. Ingamells is said to have chosen the word due to its outlandish and symbolic qualities. The name was sometimes shortened to "Jindy", and "Jindys" came to refer to members of the group, which included Nancy Cato, Ian Mudie and Roland Robinson.

The Jindyworobaks found inspiration in the Australian bush ballad tradition, Kangaroo (1928) by D. H. Lawrence and P. R. Stephensen's The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936), and shared a vision similar to that of some of their contemporaries in the arts, such as author Xavier Herbert, artist Margaret Preston and composer John Antill. However, the movement also attracted criticism for being culturally insular and overtly nationalist, and has more recently been described as racist in appropriating Indigenous culture. The Jindyworobak Anthology was published annually from 1938 to 1953, and the Jindyworobak Review (1948) collected the first ten years of this publication. An extensive history of the movement, The Jindyworobaks, was published in 1979.^[1]