Finding Home: The Poetry of Margaret Scott

Abstract

Trying to situate Margaret Scott in contemporary Australian poetry, I am struck by the way she stands out, among her contemporaries of British descent, as the poet who speaks with an immigrant voice. While writers of other ethnic backgrounds are voicing this experience in Australian writing, 1 Scott presents, to the best of my knowledge, the most coherent set of reflections on a British/Australian immigrant identity. To read through her poems, stories and novels is to be drawn into a life of dialogue between two places: the Bristol of her childhood (with brief glances in the stories at Cambridge and the environs of London) and the specific areas of her Tasmanian life: Hobart and the Tasman Peninsula. The poetry in particular hones this dialogue.