Tracing aviatrix archives with Dr Jo Langdon

Luke Hickey: You may. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Luke Hickey. I'm the Assistant Director General of the Engagement Branch here at the Library, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations people, the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we are meeting today. And I give my respect to their elders, past and present. I'd also like to extend that respect to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are here with us today and also extend that respect to the many collections that we hold and are privileged to hold here in the Library's collection.  

Thank you for attending this event, coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, and we're also streaming this online. And special hello to Jo's family, either now or later perhaps. This afternoon's presentation "Found Poetry in Flight: Tracing Aviatrix Archives" is by Dr Jo Langdon, a 2024 National Library of Australia Creative Arts fellow. Our distinguished fellowships program supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of three months. National Library of Australia fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support and Dr Jo Langdon's fellowship has been made possible and supported by the Ray Matthew and Eva Colesman Trust. We're very grateful for that support.  

Dr Jo Langdon is an Australian author and poet. She has published two poetry collections: "Snowline" 2012, which was the co-winner of the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, and "Glass Life" in 2018. Her recent poetry, fiction, and essays also appear in literary journals, such as "Antipodes”, “Australian Book Review, "Chord Oak Poetry Review," "Mangen Overland," and "The Griffith Review." And in addition to that, in her spare time, in anthologies, such as "Best Australian Poems" and "Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry." In her presentation today, Jo will discuss her research into the lives and records of Australian women pilots that will be re-presented in new works of poetry, exploring hidden aspects of women's experiences through poetic forms. Please join me in welcoming Dr Jo Langdon. 

Jo Langdon: Thank you, Luke, for such a kind and generous introduction. I also wish to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people as the true owners and custodians of this land and to acknowledge as well the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin nation, the unceded land on which I usually live in Geelong and where most of my reading and writing practise takes place. I pay my respects to elders, past and present, and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across this continent as well as any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people in the audience today or watching online into the future.  

Thank you all very much for coming today and thank you to the Library staff and to the many people I've had the opportunity to connect with over these past weeks, including other research fellows whose own projects I've so enjoyed learning about and who have in many cases shared with me unexpected encounters with poetry within their own archival interactions and discoveries. Thank you especially to the fellowships team, particularly Sharyn O'Brien and Simone Lark, for their considerable care, support, encouragement, and kindness. And I'm also deeply grateful to the Ray Matthew and Eva Colesman Trust for the tangible support and the opportunities of this fellowship. Receiving this kind of support to research, focus, explore on, sorry, focus on, explore, and create new poetry is something I'll never take lightly.  

In this presentation, I'd also like to recognise and hopefully to honour the work of the poet Jordie Albiston, who was a fellow here at the Library in 2021 and whose book "Frank," a work of documentary poetry on the Australian adventurer and photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Morson and Ernest Shackleton was published by the National Library's imprint in 2023. You can, of course, request "Frank" from the main reading room here at the Library or purchase a copy at the Library's bookshop. You can see a beautiful stack of Frank spines here on my slide. These are all in the bookshop upstairs and I'd warmly encourage you to do either or to otherwise engage with Jordie's writing if you're not familiar with it already.  

As many of you may know, Jordie Albiston died in February of 2022 during the production of her book "Frank" at age 60, with "Frank" becoming her 14th and final poetry collection. I know Jordie is much loved and deeply missed by many. I've only had the opportunity to know her through her work rather than personally during her life, but her poetry has informed and inspired my practise significantly, especially my reading practise as an enthusiastic reader of her writing and also notably in my approach to this fellowship project. In her own NLA talk, which is available online and printed in an abridged version at the end of her book "Frank," Jordie describes how for that text and also her earlier collection, "War Lines," which involved redacting into poetry letters written home by Victorian soldiers during the First World War, her poems, quote, "contain none of her own words. What I'm doing," she explains in her own presentation, "is taking fragments and images and collocating them under the pressure of poetic form in order to create something new."  

There are many remarkable practitioners of this form in contemporary Australian poetry and across the world trans nationally. In another striking example, the American poet Tracy K. Smith, who is poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, has authored a 10-poem sequence titled "I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All About It," which captures the lives and stories of African American soldiers and their families during the Civil War. As described on the website africanamericanpoetry.org, yep, africanamericanpoetry.org, the sequence includes, quote, "the voices of a mother pleading with President Lincoln to release her son from the army, a soldier sending love to his children back home, and deposition statements given by African American veterans, their widows, and descendants, hoping to receive their rightful pensions." At a 2019 Oratorio performance of this work, Smith describes engaging with the archival materials and how the archives directed her approach as a poet. She says, "The voices that I found in going through these sources told me that my aim was not to learn and then write something in my own voice that kind of metabolised all of this, but rather to receive and submit to the urgency and the humanity and the sense of justice that these voices were speaking from and to, and to invite other people to listen to them."  

In her essay, "New Australian Poetry: Deranged and Teeming," the poet and scholar Jill Jones describes "how poets are remaking poems/works out of other works made by bodies out of textual artefacts, even textual excess. Put another way," she says, "these are poetries of experimenting with repurposing or recuperating. Metaphorically, they could be described as poetries of weaving, folding, layering, sampling, reticulating, reconfiguring, even embracing." And if I can aspire to anything right now, I think it might be to writing deranged and teeming poetry. I think that's a wonderful title.  

In Albiston's fellowship presentation, she describes finding in her research process "poems arriving in the very act of transcription, which is always magic." Now here I must admit to the waves of doubt and sometimes bursts of panic that arose during certain points of my own research. This is a sort of different way I've been working to how I've worked previously, especially as four weeks started to zip by and some days felt more fruitful or more productive than others, at least in terms of producing or progressing any poetry or sourcing materials I felt would work for the purposes of creating poetic collages. Another fellow preempted my worries in one of our earlier conversations, asking, "What if you don't find the right material for poetry?" Or something to this effect. What if after four weeks at the Library, I didn't or couldn't produce any poems?  

In my own recent work, prior to commencing this fellowship, I had been writing poems that engage with the art and life of a Polish sculptor called Alina, I've practised this so many times, Alina Szapocznikow. Now, unfortunately, I've had to take Alina's image out of my slide set for copyright reasons, but the artist herself, and of course, and more to the point, her artworks are incredibly striking should you like to do your own image searches. Some of these poems in response to Szapocznikow's work are in my own language, so to speak, while others are comprised of textile fragments from Alina's letters to the art historian Ryszard Stanislawski to whom she was married between 1951 and 1958. Szapocznikow's language is lively, vivid and surprising, or that's how I find and experience it. The published book of their letters and most of the surviving letters are those by Alina with Stanislawski apparently the more careful or sentimental record keeper holding onto her letters while she apparently kind of lost them or did whatever she did with them. The book is actually titled "Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt." And here is my own rather tattered and grubby copy of the book. I mean, I did buy it secondhand, but I think it's survived a lot of use since then.  

Often, with this source, I did indeed experience the magic Albiston describes, but it wasn't something I preempted or took for granted. And I should also note that per the citation here, the letters are translated by Jennifer Croft from Polish and I believe sometimes French into English, so there are many layers of transformation or change at work.  

I am also perhaps less committed to forming faithful records of the past with the fragments or clusters of text I've worked with in this kind of poetry often juxtaposed rather than contextually placed. And for this reason, I'm not sure I can truly claim the title of documentary poet or poetic biographer or even nonfiction poet. At this stage of my project, I have as indicated also focused far more on research than any writing, so the poems or project outcomes remain hypothetical and open, not committed to a particular form or mode of expression. Though, as I've suggested, I'm interested in the constraints of using and transforming existent texts. With this in mind, the poet Emily Dickinson's line "I dwell in possibility" has surfaced in my head these past weeks and in a comforting kind of way as I've tried to focus on the process and experience rather than fixed or clear outcome, at least for now.  

I've been thinking in terms of atmosphere literally per the definition of the air in any particular place, which on frosty Canberra mornings walking to the Library is tangible and distinct in an everyday and immediate sense and also in terms of poetry. In her introduction to Emma Lou's book, "Crow College, New and Selected Poems," the poet Bella Lee suggests that atmosphere beyond the province of science is an amorphous concept, difficult to define, impossible to convey with any precision. Lee asks, "What does it mean to speak of atmosphere in poetry? It is to recognise the significance of the sensed over the scene, to be aware that a poetic use of language is constituted by the play between presence and absence, between what is revealed and what is withheld."  

The longer title of my fellowship project includes a quote from the Irish poet Evan Boland's poem "Anonymous," which I will share here in full. "Anonymous." Swapped over too soon.  

"She was a closed book, a new relative, almost the same age as the century. I once heard she carried messages, communications, worn out documents. Ferrying revolt to the far corners of Haddington Road and O'Connell Street. On cold nights when mist rolls in from the ocean somewhere near Clontarf, I think I see her strolling, holding on to a folded message, a dispatch order. Then I ask myself, what is it I know? The evening mist unfolds. It is empty. That is history. This is only poetry."  

The poem's, final lines, "that is history, this is only poetry," formed a kind of epigraph to my project and initial proposal, perhaps with some irony or tongue in cheek given the “only” might seem to diminish poetry as an art form. I am conscious of what the poet and scholar David McCoy has described in an essay on poetry and public speech, which is that contemporary poetry is routinely seen as marginal to public culture. Perhaps this is part of its appeal, personally. In any case, my interest in the allowances and affordances of the poetic form is sincere and underpins my approach to the creative research for this project. Indeed, my application for this fellowship was underpinned by a fierce belief in and commitment to the value and possibilities of poetry. Not always my own poetry, which I'm frequently prone to doubting, but certainly the poetry of other writers and poetry as a mode of writing more broadly.  

The author Jeannette Winterson in her memoir, "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal," writes, and isn't that another terrific title, "When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language, and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers, a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place, it's a finding place." And I was thinking of a lot of things I'd like to say about this extract from Winterson and then thought, I'll let it speak for itself. But I do think that the hiding and the finding places are really resonant in terms of working with archives.  

The Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike late last year along with members of his family, his brother, his sister, and four of her children, is perhaps now best known for his affecting poem "If I Must Die," which has since appeared in various artistic tributes, including street art and murals, kites, protest posters and banners, and in video recordings, including the actor Brian Cox's reading of the poem recorded for the Palestine Festival of Literature and since shared widely on social media. However, in a poetry lecture Alareer gave at the Islamic University of Gaza, a university that no longer exists, only the recording does on YouTube, Alareer proposed that poetry can be a life-changing experience. He says, and I quote, "Poetry is about making us better human beings. Poetry is about improving the way we look at things, the way we deal with others, the way we deal with life with difficulties, the way we deal with ourselves, the way we treat ourselves, the way we think about things."  

In this light, he also cautions against referring to only writing a poem or just writing a poem. Referring to the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, Alareer says, "We always fall into this trap, even us believers of literature, of saying she was arrested for just writing poetry. Why would Israel arrest someone or put someone under house arrest? She only wrote a poem." And I'm still quoting him here. He says, "We contradict ourselves sometimes. We believe in the power of language." Sorry. "We believe in the power of literature changing life as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back. And then at the end of the day, we say, she just wrote a poem. We shouldn't be saying that," is what he says.  

If I'm dwelling on poetry here, it's because I've been thinking a lot about what it means to write and to read it or to make or engage with art of any kind while bearing witness to atrocities in real time. On the website Literary Hub, lithub.com, there is an article published in December, 2023 titled "These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza." It includes Refaat Alareer as pictured here beautifully with a crate of strawberries, among 14 poets and writers killed by Israel since October last year, though I fear the list is no doubt incomplete and these months on out of date. Nonetheless, I encourage you to read it and to read the available work of these poets along with living Palestinian poets, such as Mosab Abu Toha who kindly gave me permission to use the image of his friend, Refaat, and closer to home, Sara M. Saleh whose collection "The Flirtation of Girls" published by the University of Queensland Press is a recent winner of the Anne Elder Poetry Award.  

Suffice to say, I want to keep believing in the power and worth of poetry and to honour poets like Refaat Alareer and his belief that poetry can make us better human beings. And for me right now, this means speaking out against injustice where we can. Each day I've spent in this amazing Library, it hasn't been lost on me that in Palestine, the Israeli military has targeted and destroyed, damaged, or looted countless cultural sites and treasures, including libraries and archives in Gaza, and that becomes ever more sort of significant to me working with archives firsthand as I have been.  

I will shortly turn to the aviatrixes who are probably more so than poetry the draw cards for this event. However, my approach to this project was undoubtedly paved by an interest in ballooning pioneers, namely two American aeronaut sisters, Millie and Essie Viola, who were possibly various women using these names as stage names. Millie and Essie toured the Australasian colonies as balloonists during the 1890s and I was initially introduced to them by the writer Maria Takolander, who I was blessed to have as a PhD supervisor and I'm now lucky to call a friend, through Maria's own exploration of archival materials for research locally in Geelong where we both live. Some years ago now, Maria kindly shared with me a newspaper article from the "Geelong Advertiser," the one pictured, dated May 17th, 1890, which describes Mademoiselle Viola, alighting safely on Pevensey Crescent in Geelong after losing control of her balloon and being very nearly blown into Corio Bay, into the deep water of the bay. In the various articles I've read via Trove, the Violas are often surviving risky displays. Their balloons are incinerated or they are swept into deep water or they meet the ground violently in crash landings. As one article put it memorably, “Miss Millie Viola crashed all over Perth” in 1891.  

In a talk given for the Poetry Foundation in April, 2009, the Irish poet I've mentioned, poet, author, and Professor Yvan Boland, describes how she began to see eventually a huge difference, a huge rift in Ireland between the past and history. And as time went on, she says, "It was plain to me that the past was a place of whispers and shadows and vanishings and that history was a story of heroes. And I was not interested eventually," she says, "in the story of heroes for many reasons, but I was interested in the past. I was interested in what disappears into that past. Nor do I think it's peculiarly Irish. I think that rift exists."  

So in trying to work out my interest in an approach to the aeronaut sisters, Millie and Essie, my approach to them through writing, it was what disappears into that past that compelled me as much as their daring feats and remarkable accomplishments. So as much as, or maybe even more than what was immediate and exciting about them. I was and remain compelled by what is perhaps irretrievable, especially if Millie and Essie were in fact more than just two women, what of them has disappeared into the past and what is the role of the imagination of writing and creativity in entering into that space, that gap?  

Similarly, with the aviatrixes of this fellowship project, I have been interested in what disappears. Though I can see that these women are, per Boland's term, also heroes, so I don't mean to kind of downplay what they've achieved in any way. And many of their stories have been recorded in press articles of the time as well as contemporary published texts. Some of them authored their own books, for example. In some cases, they even have physical sites and places or monuments in their honour, so they have not vanished nor been excluded from the historical record, or not altogether. By example, pictured is Lores Bonney Way. And I had been calling her Lores Bonney, like Dolores, and then only recently read that apparently it was pronounced phonetically like Lori, but if I'm getting that wrong, please forgive me, or I hope she would forgive me. I've also learned that she sometimes like to go or prefer to go by Mrs. Harry Bonney, actually, in recognition of her husband's substantial support, so I might call her by different names variously by those.  

According to the back of the photo, this Lores Bonnie Way is in New Mexico USA and also pictured here is a memorial to the nurse and pilot Robin Miller Dicks at Jandakot Airport in Western Australia. According to her Wikipedia page, Robin Miller Dicks also has a seminar room in the Royal Perth Hospital name for her as well as a road at Perth Airport called Sugarbird Lady Road. Sugarbird Lady was Miller Dicks' nickname and the title of one of her published books also. And it was a name apparently given to her by the Aboriginal children of various communities across WA to whom she dispensed oral vaccines, such as the vaccine for polio on sugar cubes.  

In another example, Freda Thompson featured on a $1.80 Australian postage stamp issued in 1994, and Lores Bonney has also inspired a doll made by the artist and doll maker Gladys Busch, whose work I was excited to discover via the archives as well. She actually has a book featuring all of her many dolls, which you can access here through the Library as well. But this with the red backdrop is Lores Bonney and it's part of her great aviator series, great aviators, plural. And then pictured here is a birthday card from the doll maker to Bonney as well.  

So I remain interested in these women individually and as a group and I remain interested in the less conspicuous aspects of their lives or the social environments of their respective times, "the whispers and shadows and vanishings," to borrow again from Yvan Boland, though I should be careful here not to suggest any kind of binary between history and past, but perhaps more of a trajectory. The archives offer traces. For the poet and scholar Ann Vickery, the trace, quote, "encourages a wavering, a breaking of linear thought." In her introduction to a text titled "Poetry and the Trace," which she co-edited with John Hawke, Vickery writes, "Language itself is trace-like in the sense of fret work, of being a net that can hold some things, but not all." This is how I hope the poems I am yet to write can engage with the archives by attending to traces.  

So over these past weeks, I have focused my attention on particular women whose manuscripts are held here at the Library, some of whom I've named in the talk, this talk already, and I had intended to be a bit more kind of chronological in my approach, but as in my research, it hasn't quite been that way today. They are Millicent Bryant, Freda Thompson, Nancy Ellis, Lores Bonney, Lady Helen Blackburn, Nancy Bird-Walton, and Robin Miller Dicks. These collections vary in size and scope and can include correspondence, such as letters and postcards, notebooks and diaries, scrapbooks and press cuttings, flying log books, and other procedural documents, passports, photographs, unpublished manuscripts, and sometimes published texts. Here are just some of the trolleys the patient and helpful librarians have wheeled out for me in the special collections room. Some collections include uniforms. I've opened boxes to find Freda Thompson's leather cap and goggles and Robin Miller Dicks' beautiful blue boiler suit and red cape as pictured here. And I honestly have to refrain from calling this a costume and just sort of mentally pause for a moment because it's so visually striking and to me looks made for the screen. I did touch it very carefully with sort of gloves and just gently lifting the tissue paper. Here is Robin Miller Dicks herself at work on one of her planes and I love this image and the details, such as her bare feet.  

I won't talk comprehensively today about each of the women partly owing to time and partly because I feel I'm still in the middle of my own learning about them, even as my time here formally as a fellow concludes. Although this project necessarily has parameters, I'd intended to focus on Australian aviatrixes and those with collections here at the Library for obvious reasons of practicality. It has also proved generative and elusive both within the archives and in conversations at and beyond the Library with numerous people sharing anecdotes and points of reference with me from other published texts and recommendations to TV series and even recollections of unexpected pub pickup lines, as in the example of a friend who texted her recollection of someone telling her she looked like an aviatrix at the pub because she was wearing a white scarf at the bar. And this account has made me even more interested, I think, in the many details regarding what the aviatrixes wore on their flights.  

Without knowing of my interest in the Viola Sisters, the balloonists I mentioned earlier, another friend sent a message with a story from the "Townsville Daily Bulletin" in June, 1924, which describes, quote, "plucky balloonist Miss Lydia Vautassel, a brave girl aeronaut who many years ago soared away up into the clouds and landed six miles away”. Now you might not expect to find her going by the "Meatworks" headline, but Lydia is in there. I haven't flicked onto the wrong slide or picture. And I have to thank Bethany Keats for this wonderful lead. Bethany and I were friends in primary school and she now lives in Queensland and I live in Victoria and we were actually at the National Library on the same day, but didn't realise until later that night that we'd sort of crossed paths. But she's passed this on to me. We've sort of crossed paths indirectly in our travels.  

Just a few weeks ago, I attended Dr Bernadette Brennan's own fellowship presentation here in this theatre in which she described this sense of the archives whispering to each other. And I really feel this with my subjects, too, that the voices and stories seem to gather and expand and call out to each other across time and space. And I keep meeting new aviatrixes, too, such as Edith Viratonken-Cooper, whose name I love, and who in her own words, quote, "forsook the sky for the bed chamber" when she married in 1933. And this is as outlined in Margaret Cantley's typed manuscript, "Sometimes the Pilot Wears a Skirt."  

So as well as looking at the manuscripts and collections of particular aviatrixes, particular women, I've also spent time exploring sources, like Cantley's, along with the records of the Australian Women Pilots Association, of which Nancy Bird-Walton was apparently the founder in 1950.  

While it was a thrill to look at these scrapbooks in person, I've been equally excited to discover that thanks to a generous donation by the Dick and Pip Smith Foundation, the National Library has recently digitised the records of the Australian Women Pilots Association. I've come across some fascinating new names and stories spanning different time periods and look forward to the opportunity to work with these digitised records further, beyond this fellowship period. There's another example.  

While some of the women I've focused on flew recreationally and others worked professionally as pilots, many of them knew each other and corresponded. The papers of Lady Helen Blackburn include some of their exchanges, their letters and cards to one another, including this Christmas card to Blackburn from Robin Miller Dicks. Their papers often refer to each other. A favourite example of mine comes from Freda Thompson whose diary entries on loose sheets of paper describe a trip to New Zealand. In it, she writes, Thompson writes, "Jean Batten is no chicken. She's 39. There is hope for me yet."  

Certain names and figures appear repeatedly, including the pioneering English aviatrix Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to, sorry, from London to Australia, as well as the record-breaking New Zealand Aviatrix Jean Batten as mentioned by Freda Thompson and pictured here. And perhaps the most famous name, Amelia Earhart, who I was sure was peripheral to my research, and yet. I remembered that Amelia Earhart had herself been interested in poetry and found online some examples of her own work, which she apparently submitted unsuccessfully to "Poetry Magazine" in 1921. Here is one poem called "From an Aeroplane," which has stayed with me, especially as I've walked through Canberra's tail end of autumn and into winter, even if my vantage point from the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge is not exactly the same as Earhart's from the air.  

"From an Aeroplane." "Even the watchful purple hills that hold the lake could not see so well as I. The stain of evening, creeping from its heart; nor the round yellow eyes of the hamlet growing filmy with mists." In another poem, Earhart describes “crackling icicles that rattle in the small breezes”, and I think of how as readers we arrive at texts with our own contexts and associations. For instance, I wondered if in rereading the articles on the Viola sisters and their ballooning whether I would've been as engaged by the following passage had I been in Canberra during a more temperate season. "When our reporter entered at 11 o'clock on Tuesday morning, the ladies, to use their own words, were 'trying to get warm.' But the weather had not chilled their spirits. 'I don't know how it is,' said Miss Millie, who is the elder, 'but we always strike a town when it's cold.'"  

Although I've introduced a few names already, I will focus for a moment here as I'd actually intended to begin with Millicent Bryant, who was the first woman to gain a pilot's licence in Australia. In an article for the conversations "Hidden Women of History" series, James Vickers, author of "Beyond the Sky: The Passions of Millicent Bryant Aviator" and also Bryant's great grandson suggests that she was unusual. Here was a 49-year-old mother of three taking up the challenge of flying, which in the 1920s, he notes, "was still as dangerous as it was exciting and glamorous." There we go. I'll come back to that slide. Bryant's story, as some of you may know, is a tragic one as she died, not in an aviation accident, but as one of 40 passengers killed in the Sydney Harbour Greycliffe ferry disaster in 1927. And maybe you can see her name here in the list of the dead from this 1927 newspaper article in the "Argus." So she's there among the list of dead as it's put, or the list of victims. I think she's the fourth, the fourth down here.  

Indeed, while some of the women whose collections I've spent time with have lived long lives, pictured here is Mrs Bonney celebrating her 91st birthday, and here she is once more, others lived sadly brief ones that feel at odds with their considerable achievements and legacies. I've mentioned Robin Miller Dicks already, for instance, and she was only 35 when she died of cancer. Here are a couple of further images from her life and it's my sincere hope that in my ongoing work with these collections, I can continue to honour the lives of these women and those whose lives appear as tracers within their various records. For there are many traces of the distance disappeared or vanished past throughout these collections.  

So I've only shared brief fragments of my research today here, I realise. I hope into the future to be able to share more via poetry, needless to say, and perhaps in other contexts or capacities as well. But for now, I'd like to thank you all again for making time in your afternoon to listen to me speak. I'd also, before I finish, like to thank my partner, the poet Cameron Lowe, and our daughter Ada, who have travelled with me to Canberra. And to say a special thank you again to the many Library staff who've welcomed Ada on her visits to the Library and shown her hidden details, such as the shape of the ram and the blue pineapple in one of the tapestries in the foyer and the floor stone from Athens. She's also enjoyed interacting with the friendly mud-lark who frequents the foyer in the Library and setting locker codes to safely store the various treasures she brings here to the Library. And I have to acknowledge Cam especially because he's dedicated his annual leave, I think all of it, to childcare while I've undertaken this project, which is in its early stages, but which I hope to develop in ways that are at this point a bit mysterious to me. But I'm very grateful to have this time and space. Thank you all for listening. Thanks. 

Luke HIckey: Thanks, Jo. Thanks for bringing these collections to life and sharing them with us. And I'm sure just as Jordie's work has inspired you that what you've shared today, looking forward to seeing how your creative fellowship inspires others into the future as well. We now have time for some questions. And as this presentation is being recorded, we've got some microphones on the side. So if you'd like to ask a question, please pop your hand up and we'll bring a microphone so that we can hear it on the live stream and in the room. Questions? Down the front. 

Audience member 1 (Susan):Thanks so much, Jo. That a was fascinating. It took I'm sure most of us into areas we don't normally inhabit. It was very interesting and to see aviation and poetry come together is intriguing. And you may not have any sort of answer to this yet, but I wondered if in looking through the archives and presumably part of your mind is thinking poetically. As you look, were there lines from the material that jumped out and you wrote down and thought that could be useful or, you know, were there particular things that seemed like material for poetry or were you just getting more general sort of information and ideas? 

Jo Langdon: That's a great question. Thank you, Susan, and for your enthusiasm. Yes, absolutely. I've been furiously sort of scribbling down lines carefully in pencil up in the special collections room, and I haven't gone back. I mean, a couple of times, I have. I haven't gone back too much at this point through my notes, so I'm going to be really curious and interested to see whether what I thought was like the magic of, you know, poems arriving in the very act of transcription as Jordie Albiston described it, whether I still feel that I've captured some kind of magic within those lines when I revisit them. I'm not sure whether they're all for poetry necessarily, but even like the Freda Thompson line, "Jean Baton is no chicken, she's 39," I loved everything about that. The delivery, the single comma punctuation, the exclamation mark. And in the context of the diary, it kind of came from nowhere, at least for me. Not from nowhere, but I'd been reading about her time in New Zealand and it was sort of like this travel diary and I was like, oh, this is, you know, describing very beautiful places. Have I gone a little bit off track here? And then, suddenly, this popped out at me. And I'm not sure if that's for a poem per se.  

I think, yeah, definitely I would like to, I don't want to conflate contexts in any way, but what Tracy K. Smith described as not wanting to metabolise and then, you know, reproduce this material in my own voice, but rather somehow honour those voices, that's something that stayed with me. And I think it's what Jordie Albiston did as well in “War lines” with the soldiers' letters and from memory she retained, you know, misspellings and every aspect of the letter was sort of honoured within those poems, but they were transformed by, yeah, under the pressures of poetic form. So yes, without going back into my notebooks, I'm hoping that there are a lot of treasures there. Thanks, Susan. 

Audience member 2: Jo, I was just wondering if in your technique, you'll stick religiously with just drawing on the text that you find or will you be tempted to, I imagine, you know, succumb to the temptation to fill in a bit of the blanks yourself? 

Jo Langdon: That's a really great question. I mean, I love the idea of being really strict and having that constraint of using, you know, none of my own words. At the same time, I'm also not quite sure how many projects this is. So the balloonists, I sort of have been intrigued by for a number of years and I'd love to write about them in a work of fiction. I just haven't figured out, I've said to a couple of people, including Luke, just this morning, you know, is this sort of typical plot of, you know, I don't think I wanna write about them in a straightforward way, but I haven't really figured that out yet. So some, I think, you know, it might be my own language so to speak, but I do hope to be able to kind of showcase the voices that I've come across. And I definitely like to kind of put some constraints on how I'm working. Yeah, some limits as a form of, and pressures as a form of creating something new. 

Luke Hickey: There's no other questions? All right. Thank you, Jo. For those interested, Jo touched on the Australian Women Pilots Association that was founded by Nancy Bird-Walton in 1950. So for those who are interested in it, you can actually find out more information about that on our website. We've put in a link in the chat if you're watching this event now or if you're wanting to go back to it later. Those digitised records are on Trove and made available on Trove, courtesy of a generous donation from the Dick and Pip Smith Foundation is part of that.  

A few more quick plugs before we leave and thanks as well Jo for the plug earlier for Jordie, which you can find upstairs in the bookshop or online as well. We've also got a couple of other poetry books as well published by our publishing arm, NLA Publishing, “Birds” and “This is home” are other good ones to keep an eye out for.  

But I hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, which is ‘Meeting Miriam Hyde’, which will be delivered by 2024 National Library Creative Arts fellow Miss Celia Craig, Celia, you're hiding up the back there somewhere, I thought I saw you earlier, at 5:30 on Thursday the 25th of July. Our website is the place where you'll be able to find recordings of our recent talks and performances from our fellows, and these are also available on our Library YouTube channel. So thanks everyone today for attending. Please join me once again in congratulating Dr Jo Langdon for today's wonderful presentation.