Anatomies of Australian Realism:
Nat Seeligson’s Symphony for Peace

A lecture by A.J. Carruthers

The two great internationalisms in Australian literary history are the avant-gardes and the realists. The avant-gardes by and large took their cues from European waves from the late 1890s to the 1960s, with aftershocks even into the twenty-first century. The realists, who often found themselves opposed to the avant-gardes, had a remarkably long period of sustained productivity from the 1940s to the early 1970s through the Realist Writers Groups, with publishers like Current Book Distributors and the Australasian Book Society. While there has been interest in some of this from an historical perspective, my interest is literary-historical, and therefore, twofold – what kinds of writing the realists produced, and the role of internationalism in the way they wrote and produced. I’ll focus on a poem by the little-known Nat Seeligson called Symphony for Peace (1953), which showcases the best of what realists could do – a mixture of formal mastery and proletarian internationalism.

AJ Carruthers received the 2024 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and is the author of Languages of Invention: Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes, Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, Axis Book 1: ‘Areal,’ Axis Book 2, and Axis Z Book Languages of Invention, published by Edinburgh University Press, was shortlisted for the Walter McRae Russell Award in 2025. He is an Honorary Visiting Fellow with SLLL at the Australian National University.