Jindyworobak Movement - Influence and Aftermath

Influence and Aftermath

Arguably, the movement failed to make a lasting impression, and its erosion signalled the arrival of modernist painting in Australia, as well as jazz. No native Australians were members of the movement, but it did indirectly spur the contemporary burgeoning of indigenous Australian art in the commercial market.

Judith Wright wrote in Because I was Invited in 1975 that the movement had succeeded in bringing poetry into the public arena:

"One thing the movement did achieve was to make verse a subject of debate and argument. Opposition movements sprang up, and brought into the quarrel most practising poets of any stature. The Jindyworobak's tenets were discussed, and their more extravagant aspects such as recourse to 'Aboriginality' was ridiculed, even in the daily newspapers (which at that time were scarcely arenas for literary debate)."

Also, many of Australian literature's elder statespeople, some still living today, got their breaks through the Jindyworobak movement.

Brian Matthews wrote during the 1980s that:

"When Ingamells looked over the poetry scene from the standpoint of, say, 1937 – which he delivered his address On Environmental Values to the English Association in Adelaide – he saw very little poetry which satisfied the requirement of Australian inspiration, Australian content and imagery, and when Max Harris surveyed the same scene at the start of the new decade, he saw the burgeoning Jindyworobaks and not much else – nothing that seemed to have much connection with or awareness of the cultural world beyond the antipodes. And by and large, they were both right." (excerpt from Literature and Conflict)

Ackland argues in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature that the movement "reactualised debate on Indigenous culture, and promoted local talent in its annual anthologies".