Background
Reginald Charles Ingamells was born on January 19, 1913 in Orroroo, a small town in South Australia, eldest of four children of native-born parents Eric Marfleet Ingamells, Methodist minister, and his wife Mabel Gwendolen, née Fraser.
Rex Ingamells later graduated from Adelaide University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1934.
Rex Ingamells attended Prince Albert College during 1927 - 1930.
(Platypus and Kookaburra are dissatisfied with life. One w...)
Platypus and Kookaburra are dissatisfied with life. One would like to wallow in the mud and the other to fly. The bunyip grants their wish and, flopping in the mud and water of the riverside was the Kookaplatyburrapus.
https://www.amazon.com/Platypus-Kookaburra-Rex-Ingamells/dp/0207170363/?tag=2022091-20
1990
Reginald Charles Ingamells was born on January 19, 1913 in Orroroo, a small town in South Australia, eldest of four children of native-born parents Eric Marfleet Ingamells, Methodist minister, and his wife Mabel Gwendolen, née Fraser.
His early love of poetry was fostered at the Port Lincoln High School. Rex Ingamells later attended Prince Albert College during 1927 - 1930 and graduated from Adelaide University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1934. His Master of Arts thesis was rejected on the grounds that his topic, 'Australian History as a background to Australian Literature', had not been approved.
While a student, Ingamells began writing poetry and became interested in Aboriginal culture. He was strongly influenced by W. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen’s “The Arunta”, a 1927 anthropological work that examines the Alchera (the “Dreamtime” or “Dreaming”), the creation myth that is the basis for every aspect of Aboriginal culture. The subjects and themes Ingamells explored during this period remained central to his work throughout his life.
Following his graduation from Adelaide University, he held a series of jobs, working as a freelance journalist, teacher, and publisher’s representative, and traveled extensively throughout South Australia and Victoria. His first book of poetry, “Gumtops”, was published in 1935. This work, like many that followed, featured memorable descriptions of the Australian landscape.
He was hoping to secure an academic position following his graduation but struggled to tie something down, moving between various educational establishments during the next ten years. He also worked in publishing and was a commercial traveler for a time. His passion, though, was for the principles of the Jindyworobak movement. He claimed influences from a number of academics such as Percy Stephensen who wrote “The Foundations of Culture” in Australia, published in 1936. This highlighted, for Ingamells, the dangers of foreign, or ‘alien’, influences on Australian culture.
During the late 1930s Ingamells developed the social and artistic ideas that resulted in the formation of the Jindyworobak movement. Outlining the purpose and tenets of the movement in his 1938 essay “Conditional Culture”, Ingamells concluded that a distinctly Australian literature did not exist and could not develop until Australian writers based their works on the Australian environment and Aboriginal culture, rejecting English terminology that was not appropriate to Australian life and incorporating Aboriginal language and symbols, especially the imagery of the Alchera.
Ingamells and other Jindyworobak poets, including Ian Mundie and Roland Robertson, were immediately characterized as misguided and overzealous by critics who argued that English-language literature had nothing to learn from such an “uncivilized" people as the Aborigines. Ingamells was further criticized for his involvement in Australia First, a controversial nationalist group, and his attempts to express political and social opinions through his poetry were deprecated as lacking artistic merit.
In 1945 he moved to Melbourne to take a job with George Jaboor, a publishers' representative. Next year he was employed as a commercial traveler with Georgian House Pty Ltd. By 1955 he had been working for Longmans, Green & Co. and about to join United Service Publicity Pty Ltd.
Ingamells’s Jindyworobak philosophy is reflected in both his prose and his poetry. “Aranda Boy”, a children’s novella published in 1954, describes the experiences of an Aboriginal child, while his 1952 work “Of Us Now Living: A Novel of Australia” is a complex narrative that recounts the history and settlement of a fictional Australian township. Much of Ingamells’s poetry focuses on various aspects of the Australian continent: many of his poems feature description of the landscape, while others, such as the 1951 epic “The Great South Land”, describe the process of European discovery and settlement.
Whereas many contemporary critics derided Ingamells’s frequent use of Aboriginal terms in his poems as superfluous and artificial, others applauded this innovation. Later commentators have noted that, contrary to what some critics asserted at the time, the Jindyworobaks did not strive to imitate Aboriginal poetry, but rather incorporated Aboriginal elements into traditional European poetic forms. Commentators generally maintain that Ingamells’s shorter poems best exhibit his skillful description and evocative imagery.
By contrast, “The Great South Land”, which has been praised as containing some of Ingamells’s best writing, has for the most part been described as overly long and Pretentious. In his “A History of Australian Literature”, H. M. Green concluded that Ingamells’s poetic talent was “genuine and not without individuality, but not great.” Ingamells was most important in Australian literature for encouraging the development and expression of an Australian consciousness.
As a lyrical poet, he had a modest talent. As a pamphleteer, although he overstated his case, his arguments on the appropriate language and subject matter for Australian poets deserved attention and got it, as did his views on Aboriginal culture. As an editor and publisher, through his Jindyworobak movement, he was responsible for at least forty-four volumes of poetry and literary comment (apart from periodicals) between 1938 and 1953. His output was achieved through considerable personal and financial sacrifice.
(Platypus and Kookaburra are dissatisfied with life. One w...)
1990Quotations: “Ours is a country of endless contrasts, of beauty and terror, of fertile lands and empty deserts. It is a country of moods, of ever- changing, incalculable moods. But always the land’s individuality, the spirit of the place... is there, speaking through the medium of the mood, for those who have the eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Rather short and slimly built, with fairish hair and a small, military-style moustache, he was friendly and persuasive in manner, but could become intense and dogged in literary argument.
On July 9, 1938 at the Methodist Church, Port Broughton, he married Eileen Eva Spensley.