Local Moderns: The Jindyworobak Movement and Australian Modernism

Abstract

'This article locates the Jindyworobak movement in relation to late global modernism and reads the Jindyworobaks as what I term "provincial modernists". While the Jindyworobak group has often been understood as disconnected from, even antithetical to, modernism, I argue that the Jindyworobak movement provides a new formulation of the relationship between the local and the modern that makes a commitment to local and parochial cultures the basis of a response to modernity. The article does not focus on the poetry produced by the movement but rather on statements written to define and theorise Jindyworobak as a movement, and on the movement's material and institutional practices.'