The Jindyworobak Movement was a nationalistic Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote Indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. They were active from the 1930s to around the 1950s. The movement intended to combat the influx of “alien” culture, which was threatening local art.
The Jindyworobak movement was begun in Adelaide during 1937 by the poet Rex Ingamells and the other members of the Jindyworobak club. The name was taken from a Woiwurrung word meaning “to join” or “to annex”, which had been used by the poet and novelist James Devaney in his 1929 book The Vanished Tribes. “Jindyworobak” is supposedly from the phrase jindi woroback of the Woiwurrung language, formerly spoken around Melbourne. This is said to have been sourced by Devaney from a 19th-century vocabulary. Ingamells is said to have chosen the word to produce an ‘aboriginal’ word both ‘outlandish’ (arresting) and symbolic. Sometimes this name was shortened to “Jindy” or “Jindys” to describe members of the group…
Starting off as a literary club in Adelaide, South Australia in 1938, the Jindyworobak movement was supported by many Australian artists, poets, and writers. Many were fascinated by Indigenous Australian culture and the Outback, and desired to improve the white Australian’s understanding and appreciation of them. Other features came into play, among them white Australia’s increasing alienation from its European origins; the Depression of the 1930s which recalled the economic troubles of the end of the 19th century; an increasingly urban or suburban Australian population alienated from the wild Australia of the Outback etc.; the First World War and the coming of World War II and also the coming of early mass market media in the form of the radio, recordings, newspapers and magazines. Sense of place was particularly important to the Jindyworobak movement.
Ingamells produced Colonial Culture as a prose manifesto of the movement, “in response to L. F. Giblin’s urging that poets in Australia should portray Australian nature and people as they are in Australia, not with the ‘European’ gaze.” and shortly after the first Jindyworobak Anthology came out.
In 1941, the poet and critic A. D. Hope ridiculed the Jindyworobaks as “the Boy Scout school of poetry”, a comment for which he apologised in Native Companions in 1975 saying “some amends are due, I think, to these Jindyworobaks”.[2] Others such as R. H. Morrison derided “Jindyworobackwardness”. Hal Porter wrote of meeting Rex Ingamells whom he said “buys me a porter gaff and tries to persuade me to be a Jindyworobak – that is, a poet who thinks that words from the minute vocabulary of the earth’s most primitive race must be used to express Australia”.[3]
