Rex Ingamells

Reginald Charles "Rex" Ingamells (19 January 1913 – 30 December 1955) was an Australian poet, generally credited with being the leading light of the Jindyworobak Movement.

Rex Ingamells in 1936

Quotes

• This piece of hardwood, cunningly shaped,
  Was curved so evenly while piccaninnies gaped
  At a warrior who chipped at it with pieces of flint,
  And formed it by meticulous dint upon dint.
  Outside his wurly he sat beside a tree
  And chipped at it patiently for hours—not for me,
  But to kill the wallaby in the rocky pass,
  To kill the fat wild-turkey hiding in the grass.
  • "Boomerang", in The Jindyworobaks, ed. Brian Elliott (University of Queensland Press, 1979), p. 4

• Into moorawathimeering,
  where atninga dare not tread,
  leaving wurly for a wilban,
  tallabilla, you have fled.
  • "Moorawathimeering", st. 1, in The Jindyworobaks (1979), p. 11, with Elliott's paraphrase: "Into sanctuary in the land of the lost (a place of the dead, whose sacrosanct borders the tribesmen may not safely cross) you have fled, O outcast (victim of a punishment party sent to revenge a murder). But there you shall have no hut to take shelter in, only some comfortless cave."

• Australia is a land that has no people,
  for those that were hers we have torn away,
  we who are not hers nor can be till love
  shall make us so and fill our hearts with her.
  • "The Gangrened People", in At a Boundary (Adelaide: F. W. Preece Ltd., 1941), p. 11

External links

• Alan Marshall, "Here Was a Man of Strong Words", The Argus (7 January 1956), p. 14

• Robert Sellick, "Rex Ingamells", in Australian Writers, 1915–1950, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 260 (Gale, 2002), p. 162