Hansard as Literary Reception: the Uses of Poetry in Australian Political Debate, 1901-1950

Hansard—Australia’s record of parliamentary debate—might seem an unlikely site for literary analysis. It is, however, a publisher of original poetry and its criticism a forum for the performance and citation of poetry, and a complex archive of literary reception in Australia since Federation. In this paper, we discuss our findings in relation to the uses of poetry in the Australian Hansard from 1901 to 1950, focusing on how the work of two settler Australian poet-parliamentarians, J. K. McDougall and John Cash Neild, is put to use in parliamentary speeches as recorded in Hansard. Together, these examples indicate that poetry is not only deployed for a range of heightened rhetorical effects on the floor of parliament; it is also part of the fabric of routine political debate, put to a range of adversarial and racist purposes, and part of the wider history of literary publication and reception.