Country Town by Judith Wright
This is no longer the landscape that they knew,
the sad green enemy country of their exile,
those branded men whose songs were of rebellion.
The nights were cold, shepherding; and the dingoes
bawling like banshees in the hills, the mist coming over
from eastward chilled them. Beside the fire in the hut
their pannikin of rum filled them with songs
that were their tears for Devonshire and Ireland
and chains and whips and soldiers. Or by day
a slope of grass with small sheep moving on it,
the sound of the creek talking, a glimpse of mountains,
looked like another country and wrenched the heart.
They are dead, the bearded men who sang of women
In another world (sweet Alice) and another world.
This is a landscape that the town creeps over;
a landscape safe with bitumen and banks.
The hostile hills are netted in with fences
and the roads lead to houses and the pictures.
Thunderbolt was killed by Constable Walker
long ago; the bones are buried, the story printed.
And yet in the night of the sleeping town, the voices:
This is not ours, not ours the flowering tree.
What is it we have lost and left behind?
Where do the roads lead? It is not where we expected.
The gold is mined and safe, and where is the profit?
The church is built, the bishop is ordained,
and this is where we live: where do we live?
And how should we rebel? The chains are stronger.
Remember Thunderbolt, buried under the air-raid trenches.
Remember the bearded men singing of exile.
Remember the shepherds under their strange stars.
Rottnest by Jack Davis
These rocks placed here by man
to form a bridgewater
The sea’s age typified
by algae clinging to the stone
The Indian Ocean limitless
breathing might and power
even on this day of calm
I look across at Rottnest
in the far off haze
where my people
breathed their last sigh
for home the mainland
to them the distant blue
What did they do
but stand within the paths
of cloven hooves
their only crime
to fight for what was rightly theirs
To them the island was a place of souls
departed down through
eons of time
but by a savage twist of fate
No flight of soul for them
But chained they waited
for their lot’s conclusion
to be forever part of
the island of the dead
Australia by A.D. Hope
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: “we live” but “we survive”,
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
Driving Through Sawmill Towns by Les Murray
1
In the high cool country,
having come from the clouds,
down a tilting road
into a distant valley,
you drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest,
swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance
crouches in clearings ...
then you come across them,
the sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards
with perhaps a store,
perhaps a bridge beyond
and a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles.
2
The mills are roofed with iron, have no walls:
you look straight in as you pass, see the lithe men working,
the swerve of a winch,
dim dazzling blades advancing
through a trolley-borne trunk
till it sags apart
in a manifold sprawl of weatherboards and battens.
The men watch you pass:
when you stop your car and ask them for directions,
tall youths look away -
it is the older men who
come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you.
Beside each mill, smoke trickles out of mounds
Of ash and sawdust.
3
You glide on through town,
your mudguards damp with cloud.
The houses there wear verandahs out of shyness,
all day in clandared kitchens, women listen
for cars on the road,
lost children in the bush,
a cry from the mill, a footstep -
nothing happens.
The half-heard radio sings
its song of sidewalks.
Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step,
Or a plain young wife at a tankstand fetching water
In a metal bucket will turn round and gaze
at the mountains in wonderment,
looking for a city.
4
Evenings are very quiet. All around
the forest is there.
As night comes down, the houses watch each other:
a light going out in a window here has meaning.
You speed away through the upland,
glare through towns
and are gone in the forest, glowing on far hills.
On summer nights
ground-crickets sing and pause.
In the dark of winter, tin roofs sough with rain,
downpipes chafe in the wind, agog with water.
Men sit after tea
by the stove while their wives talk, rolling a dead match
between their fingers,
thinking of the future.
The representation of Australia’s landscape has, for a long time, been a major motif in Australian Classic literature. In this comparative analysis I will be looking at four poems written with descriptions of natural and built Australian landscapes by Australian poets, and seeing how their representations of Australia are significant.
The poems I will be analysing are Country Town written by Judith Wright, Rottnest written by Jack Davis, Australia written by A.D Hope, and Driving Through Sawmill Towns written by Les Murray. To summarise, each of the four poems contain a description of Australian landscapes, as well as have their respective narrators expressing their attitudes towards said landscapes. Judith Wright’s Country Town describes Australian land from the perspectives of European settlers, set some time in the 1900s. She creates the image of a country that was once perceived by the Europeans as a hostile environment in which nobody could live comfortably, that had turned into a place built similar to the urban locations of their places of origin. However, in spite of the major impact that the European settlers had on Australia, there will always be a sense that the land that they now live on will never be truly theirs, no matter how much they transform it to be similar to their places of origin. Similarly, A.D. Hope in his poem Australia describes the country’s landscape, both natural and built, and makes a commentary on the effects of colonisation on Australia. He writes from the perspective of a person with European ancestry living on Australian grounds. In Rottnest, Jack Davis writes from the perspective of an Indigenous Australian reminiscing about Rottnest, an island in Western Australia. Rottnest, whose original owners were the Whadjuk Noongar people, was affected heavily by European colonisation and through the narrator, he expresses the now tragic relationship that he and his people have with that area of land. Finally, to summarise Driving Through Sawmill Towns by Les Murray, the poem tells a scenario where the narrator is driving through rural Australia and taking a glimpse of the lifestyle of those that live there. Unlike Judith Wright, Jack Davis and A.D Hope’s poems, there is no explicit commentary on the colonisation of Australia and its impact, and instead creates a setting of everyday life in rural Australia.
In spite of each poem depicting scenarios that are unique to each other, all four poems put emphasis on describing Australia’s natural and built landscape through a number of poetic and literary techniques. One of the techniques that each of the four poems share is their use of tone and word selection to emphasise their respective narrator’s relationship to Australian land, both natural and built. Using tone and emotive language, each narrator depicts their relationship to Australian landscapes with a sense of disconnect, as if the land that they describe is not completely one with them, through introducing the subject of Australian colonisation, or in the case of Driving Through Sawmill Towns being unfamiliar with rural Australia. Australia as described in both Judith Wright’s Country Town and A.D Hope’s Australia is, from narrators who tells from the perspective of European settlers, a place that is strange and unfamiliar, even despite how many decades Australia had been under European control before the publishing of the poems. From Country Town’s first line, describing Australia as being “no longer the landscape that [the European settlers] knew”, there is a feeling of shame and unsurity introduced (Wright, line 1). This tone remains unchanged throughout the entirety of the poem and the narrator is brought into a state of pondering whether or not their home in Australia should really feel like home, particularly from lines 21 - 31 of Country Town.
In Australia however, despite its similarities in themes and concepts to Country Town, A.D Hope creates a more definite tone of remorse towards the effects on Australian land on behalf of European settlers. He states that the colonisation of Australia had negatively impacted the land, which Jack Davis also acknowledges in Rottnest from the point of view of an indigenous Australian. Davis represents Rottnest Island as a place that is spiritual, “a place of souls”, and shows that his narrator has a very personal relationship to the land (Davis, line 19). The narrator expresses sorrow and grief when it is said that the island was a place where “[their] people breathed their last sigh” and a place suffered a “savage twist of fate,” being the European’s process in colonising the island (lines 11, 22). In Hope’s poem the narrator compares Australia’s major cities to “five teeming sores, / each [draining ] [the country]” which represents those said cities as something that is harming the land like parasites (Hope, lines 17-18). Interestingly, Murray describes Australia’s rural locations under a more neutral light compared to the Wright, Hope and Davis’ poems. However, there is still a sense of dreariness and distantness, even when the narrator establishes a tone that is more placid, neutral and even beautiful in tone and mood. This is prevalent in the mention of houses being shown to “wear verandahs out of shyness,” and even in the scene that describes a scene where “women listen / for cars on the road, / lost children in the bush, / a cry from the mill, a footstep - / nothing happens” (Murray, lines 29-34).
Imagery also has its place as a notable literary technique that each poem uses to represent Australian landscapes. This technique is used very prominently in all four of the poems, but for different purposes from one another. Unlike the other poems, the imagery in Driving Through Sawmill Towns is focused mainly on the activity that happens in the physical world more than the focal character’s internal thoughts. Murray illustrates an image of a character, the reader, driving through a quiet rural town from approaching the town in midday to exiting the town by night, which has the purpose of representing rural Australia as it is at a glance. Meanwhile, the imagery in Country Town reflects the attitudes that the Europeans had on Australian landscapes early in their colonisation. Wright described an image of Australia being a “sad green enemy country of [the European’s] exile,” which contained land with “hostile hills” and lacked bitumen roads, causing the settlers to “[net] [the hills] in with fences” (Wright, lines 2, 17). A.D Hope also uses imagery in this way to illustrate how the effects of colonisation had hurt Australian natural landscapes, as well as the country itself. He describes the landscapes to have that similar sense of bleakness, characterising it as “drab green and desolate grey,” stating that it was a land full of “dying earth” that needed inhabiting, providing the same view on how Australia was once perceived (Hope, lines 1, 16). The imagery used in Rottnest appears to be a combination of the two mentioned uses for imagery. The narrator stands in one of the locations in which they describe a built landscape next to a seaside, being “rocks placed [there] by man / to form a bridgewater” (Davis, lines 1-2). The coming line, “Algae clinging to the stone” creates the visualisation of an object submerged in water that has stayed there for a long time, also indicating the amount of time it had been since Europeans began to settle on Australian lands (line 4).
THere are also poetic techniques that are used significantly in each poem that differ from one another. Wright uses repetition of certain elements in her poem to help emphasise the sense of uncertainty and questioning about the impact that European settlers have made on natural Australian landscapes. In referring to the modifications made on the land by Europeans, Wright describes it as “a landscape that the town creeps over; / a landscape safe with bitumen and banks,” implying that Australia’s natural landscape is something best left alone rather than simply an area where things can be built (Wright, lines 15-16). This is also helped by the repetition of rhetorical questions from lines 23 - 28 which augment that theme. In Rottnest, Davis makes subtle uses of rhyme and stresses in syllables to highlight significant words throughout his poem. Rottnest is described as a place where “[his] people / breathed their last sigh / for home the mainland / to them the distant blue” (Davis, lines 10-13). Murray, in Driving Through Sawmill Towns, there is a prominent use of line length variation. The short lines from 8 - 11 describing details of the rural sawmill towns, “bare hamlets built of boards / with perhaps a store, / perhaps a bridge beyond”, create a listing effect, giving the imagery of rural Australian towns significance, giving the reader time to visualise the image. This can also be said about the long lines where the descriptions within those lines are at its most complex compared to the rest of the poem, also enhancing the imagery. Finally, what makes Australia unique compared to the three other poems is that A.D Hope personifies Australia and its landscapes, both natural and built, rather than describing Australia as something that is inanimate. As well as personification, he also makes strong use of metaphor to create strong imagery which he uses to emphasise his message about the tragic elements of Australia’s history. The narrator in his poem uses feminine third-person pronouns to describe the country as a whole and creates the image of a divine yet barren woman-like being who is hurting from the effects of European colonisation.
Throughout this analysis I have found that in the four poems that I have analysed, Judith Wright’s Country Town, Jack Davis’ Rottnest, A.D Hope’s Australia and Les Murray’s Driving Through Sawmill Towns, there are poetic techniques that each of them share. Imagery is a technique that was very effectively used by all poets to represent Australia’s natural and built landscape, and each has shown to use this technique in their own way, whether it be to reflect someone’s attitudes towards the land or an interpretation of how the land is experiencing the impact of humankind. In these poems, tone has also shown to be an important technique, especially in sharing the message that each poem provides.
Hope, AD 2009, ‘Australia’, in J Kinsella (ed.), The Penguin anthology of Australian poetry , Penguin Books, Camberwell, Vic. :, pp. 160–161.
Kinsella, J (ed.) 2009, ‘Poem : Rottnest’, in The Penguin anthology of Australian poetry , Penguin Books, Camberwell, Vic. :, pp. 187–187.
Murray, Les A. 2006, ‘Poem : Driving through sawmill towns’ 2006, in Collected poems , Black Inc, Melbourne :, pp. 10–12.
Rottnest Island Authority, n.d., Aboriginal History, Rottnest Island, <https://rottnestisland.com/the-island/about-the-island/our-history/aboriginal-history>
Wright, J 1994, ‘Poem : Country Town’, in Collected poems : 1942-1985 , Angus & Robertson, Pymble, N.S.W. :, pp. 13–14.
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