An Anthology of Australian Poetry to 1920
Edited by John Kinsella
TABLE of CONTENTS
Nedlands, W.A. The University of Western Australia Library 2007
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the English Department at Kenyon College, the Office of the Provost at Kenyon College, and the Kenyon College Library (Consort, OhioLink, Interlibrary Loan); to the Landscape and Language Centre at Edith Cowan University; to Toby Burrows at the Scholars' Centre, Reid Library, University of Western Australia; to the Battye Library, Western Australia; to the Flinder's Library, Sydney; special thanks to the SETIS website at Sydney University Library; to Nicholas Pounder, Sydney; to Serendipity Books, Perth; to Greg at Imprints Bookshop, Adelaide; to Mainly Books, Perth; and special thanks to Andy Grace, my hardworking, hard-typing research assistant and good friend at Kenyon College. I would also like to acknowledge the indigenous people of Australia as the custodial keepers of the land-mass known as “Australia”, and to indicate my respect for their cultures and traditions.
This Anthology is published in electronic form by the University of Western Australia Library.
Copyright in the selection and arrangement: John Kinsella.
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Table of Contents
Part One
Erasmus Darwin
Visit of Hope to Sydney-Cove, near Botany-Bay
George Carter
True Patriots All
Henry Carter
Prologue. By a Gentleman of Leicester
John Grant
Verses Written to Lewin, the Entomologist, 1805
Anonymous (either George Howe or Reverend Samuel Marsden)
A Gardening Poem of 1809
Michael Massey Robinson
Ode (For His Majesty’s Birth Day.)
An Ode
Ode (For The Queen’s Birthday, 1816.)
Song (To Celebrate the Anniversary of the Establishment of the Colony)
Barron Field
Botany-Bay Flowers
On Reading the Controversy Between Lord Byron and Mr. Bowles
Sonnet on Affixing a Tablet to the Memory of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks Against the Rock of Their First Landing in Botany Bay
Sonnet on Visiting the Spot Where Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks First Landed in Botany Bay
The Kangaroo
3 Richard Whately
There is a Place in Distant Seas
William Charles Wentworth
Australasia
Impromptu
Anonymous
To the Editor, Sydney Gazette
“T.K.”
Australia; or the Exile
Mary Leman Grimstone
On Visiting the Cemetery at Hobart Town
John Dunmore Lang
Colonial Nomenclature
D’Entrecasteaux’ Channel,Van Dieman’s Land
Sadoean Ballad No. 3
Sonnet
Anonymous
Botany Bay Flowers
“Rusticus”
Of All the Flowers That Sweetly Blow
Charles Tompson
An Elegy on Winter in Argyleshire
Ode V. to Sylvia
Retrospect; Or, A Review of my Scholastic Days
4 “L.”
To The Swan
Anonymous
A New Song
“Q.”
A Hot Day in Sydney
The Tothersider and the Perthite
Anonymous
Genuine Botany Bay Eclogues No. 1 Australian Courtship
Anonymous
Botany Bay, A New Song
Anonymous
Van Diemen’s Land
Eliza Hamilton Dunlop
The Aboriginal Mother
The Aboriginal Father
James Knox
Transplanted Trees
Charles M’Donald
An Address
Miss Sarah Collins
Lament
Francis MacNamara
(‘Frank the Poet’)
A Convict’s Tour to Hell
5 A petition from the chain gang at Newcastle to Captain Furlong the superintendent praying him to dismiss a scourger named Duffy from the cookhouse and appoint a man in his room.
Farewell to Tasmania
Labouring With the Hoe
The Seizure of Cyprus Brig in Recherche Bay, Aug., 1829
Epigram of Introduction
Anonymous
Paddy Malone In Australia
Robert Gray
The Regatta
Anonymous
Jack Donahue and His Gang
Anonymous
Moreton Bay
George J. Macdonald
On a Movement of Beethoven’s
Lines to a Steamboat
Fidelia Hill
Adelaide
Recollections
Anonymous
Testimony to Gawler
Henry Parkes
Solitude
A Beauteous Terrorist
6 PART TWO
Charles Harpur
A Basket of Summer Fruit
A Flight of Wild Ducks
A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest
A Storm in the Mountains
VIII. Collins
VII. Gray
CXXIX Poetry and Prose
The Creek of the Four Graves
The Drunkard
Richard Howitt
To The Daisy
Tullamarine
Anonymous
Scraps from a Bushman’s Note Book
G.F. Pickering
The Bushman’s Grave
‘Auster’
The Tasmanian Aborigine’s Lament and Remonstrance When in Sight of His Native Land from Flinders Island
Daniel Henry Deniehy
To His Wife
Amans Amare
Caroline Leakey
English Wild Flowers
7 The Prisoners’ Hospital, Van Diemen’s Land
Charles R. Thatcher
Dick Briggs from Australia
The New-Chum Swell
The Queer Ways of Australia
Anonymous
Me and My Dog
Anonymous
The Stringybark Cockatoo
Andrew Wotherspoon
Lines
Anonymous
Untitled
Anonymous
Brave Ben Hall
Anonymous
The Wild Colonial Boy
Anonymous
The Old Keg Of Rum
Anonymous
They’ve All Got a Mate but Me
Caroline Carleton
Fragmentary Lines Written in the Cemetery
Lines
On the Suicide of a Young Lady
8 Wild Flowers of Australia
James Lionel Michael
Memory
Anonymous
The Free Selector
Henry Kendall
A Death in the Bush
Aboriginal Death-Song
Bell Birds
Charles Harpur
Lilith
On a Street
The Last of His Tribe
The Hut by the Black Swamp
The Warrigal
Adam Lindsay Gordon
No Name
The Sick Stockrider
Valedictory Poem
John Le Gay Brereton
Kretschmann
Open Speech
Unborn
Menie Parkes
Our Darling’s Lover
9 Edgar George Williams
Canberra in 1867
Bertha Boyd
Daniel in the Lion’s Den
Elizabeth Deborah Brockman
On Receiving From England A Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers
The Cedars
To England Ministering
Ralph Delaney
Old Scotland
J. Swain
Carol of the Reapers
John Boyle O’Reilly
The Dukite Snake
M.C. (Catherine Edith Macaulay Martin)
My Love Gave Me
“Silent Jim”
“Whitefellow”
On the Death of the Aboriginal Cricketer John Taylor
PART THREE
Elizabeth Julia McKeahnie
In Memory of Mr. Kenneth Cameron
J. Brenchley
Odorous Melbourne
10 Henry E. Clay
Blackboy Hill
“Sylvanus” (William Forster)
The Devil and the Governor
Arthur Patchett Martin
A Bush Study, A La Watteau
A Romance in the Rough
My Cousin from Pall Mall
‘Australie’ (Emily Manning)
From the Clyde to Braidwood
Anonymous
The Old Bullock Dray
Charles Frederic Chubb
An Ode to Sir George Ferguson Bowen, Knight
Alexander Russell
An Australian Drought
On the Port Elliot Rocks, S.A.
Douglas B.W. Sladen
To The Australian Eleven
Under the Wattle
Keighley Goodchild
The Mechanic’s Song
Francis Adams
Post-Mortem
11 “Rolf Boldrewood” (T.A. Browne)
The Bushman’s Lullaby
Marcus Clarke
An Australian Paean—1876
In a Lady’s Album
Anonymous
How Long, O Lord!
Anonymous
Lousy Harry
Mrs. J. A. Bode
Lubra
Mary Hannay Foott
Where the Pelican Builds
In the Land of Dreams
Happy Days
In Time of Drought
New Country
John Hood
The Death of the Native Chief
Robert Lowe
The Price of Freedom
Song of the Squatters I
Song of the Squatters II
Anonymous
Botany Bay
12 John Farrell
Australia
Ada Cambridge
Contentment
The Future Verdict
Vows
An Old Doll
Craven-Heart
Desire
Drunk
Fashion
Individuality
Influence
Outcast
The Mob
Wasted
Ethel Castilla
An Australian Girl
Alpha Crucis
Trucanini’s Dirge
Margaret Thomas
Adam Lindsay Gordon
Frank Penn-Smith
A Deserted Clearing
13 Anonymous
Who Cares for Nothing
George Essex Evans
The Women of the West
From Loraine
Toowoomba
Sydney Jephcott
In the Morning
“Frederick”
North Brisbane Advance
Inez K. Hyland
Disloyalty
F.C.B. Vosper
The New Woman
Edward Dyson
Struck It at Last
Arthur Bayldon
Crabs
Night-Silence
Barcroft Boake
Where the Dead Men Lie
Christopher Brennan
[The point of noon is past, outside: light is asleep; . .]
[There is a far-off thrill that troubles me: . .]
[Was it the sun that broke my dream . .]
14 [She is the night: all horror is of her . .]
[This is of Lilith, by her Hebrew name . .]
[Thus in her hour of wrath, o'er Adam's head . .]
1908
[Come out, come out, ye souls that serve, why will ye die? . .]
[Dawns of the world, how I have known you all, . .]
[Each day I see the long ships coming into port . .]
[How old is my heart, how old is my heart, . .]
[I am driven everywhere from a clinging home, . .]
[I cry to you as I pass your windows in the dusk; . .]
[I sorrow for youth — ah, not for its wildness (would that were dead!) . .]
[O desolate eves along the way, how oft, . .]
[O tame heart, and why are you weary and cannot rest? . .]
[Once I could sit by the fire hourlong when the dripping eaves . .]
[The land I came thro' last was dumb with night, . .]
[What is there with you and me, that I may not forget . .]
[When window-lamps had dwindled, then I rose . .]
[You, at whose table I have sat, some distant eve . .]
[The yellow gas is fired from street to street . .]
[The winter eve is clear and chill:]
[Sweet silence after bells! . .]
‘Viator’ (Charles W. Andree Hayward)
Along the Road to Cue
15 Victor J. Daley
Dreams
In a Wine Cellar
St. Francis II
Tamerlane
The Woman at the Washtub
Villanelle
Anonymous
The Twentieth Century Girl
PART FOUR
Henry Ffrench Gillman
On Jezebel
R. Holt
Lachlan Jack
W.T. Goodge
The Great Australian Adjective
“The Boulder Bard” (“Willy-Willy”)
Ode to West Australia
Anonymous
One of the Has-beens
Henry Lawson
My Literary Friend
The Captain Of The Push
The Old Jimmy Woodser
16 “Thistle” M.C. Anderson (Mrs. Herbert Fisher)
The War and Other Things
A.B. Paterson
Song of the Artesian Water
Song Of The Wheat
The Angel's Kiss
Waltzing Matilda
Alfred George Stephens
The Hanging Judge
Brunton Stephens
On a Fork of Byron's
Furnley Maurice (Frank Wilmot)
Town Folk
The Agricultural Show, Flemington, Victoria
Bernard O’Dowd
Australia
Envy
The Asetic Call
Martin Benson
Threshing
Anonymous
Bringing Home The Cows
Anonymous
Dwell Not With Me
17 Anonymous
Sunny New South Wales
Anonymous
Two Aboriginal Songs
Ernest Favenc
Daybreak in the Desert
In the Desert
Louisa Lawson
A Child's Question
A Mother's Answer
Lines
The City Bird
George Gordon McCrae
The Silence of the Bush
Life’s a Cigar
Edwin Greenslade Murphy (“Dryblower”)
The Smiths
The Lodes That Under-lie
The Rhymes That Our Hearts Can Read
Frederic Manning
Grotesque
Leaves
The Trenches
William Baylebridge (William Blocksidge)
“II” from Life’s Testament
18 “XXXII” from Love Redeemed
Mary Fullerton (“E”)
Crows
Cubes
Emus
Flesh
Lichen
Lovers
Modern Poets
Process
The Selector’s Wife
Dorothea Mackellar
A Smoke Song
My Country
Frederick William Ophel
A Mining Analogy
His Epitaph
Charles Souter
Harvest Time
Anonymous
McQuade’s Curse
Francis Kenna
In the Bush
Zora Berenice May Cross
Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy
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Girl-Gladness
Love Sonnets
X.
XV.
XVII.
XXI.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXXV.
XLII.
XLIV.
XLIX.
LIV.
LVIII.
LX.
Sonnets of Motherhood
VI.
VIII.
X.
XXIV.
XXVII.
XXIX.
XXXI.
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XL.
XLV.
Joseph Furphy
Elegy on Lincoln
John Shaw Neilson
In the Dim Counties
Love's Coming
May
Schoolgirls Hastening
Song Be Delicate
The Crane is My Neighbour
The Loving Tree
The Orange Tree
The Poor Can Feed the Birds
To a Blue Flower
Leon Gellert
‘If You Were Here’
A Night Attack
In the Trench
The Attack at Dawn
The Diggers
These Men
Blind!
The Brothers
Bluebeard’s First Wife
21 The Jester in the Trench
The Wrecked Aeroplane
Mary Corringham
On Observing a Bison at the Zoo
James Picot
To the Rosella in the Poinsettia Tree
C. J. Dennis
Wheat
Lesbia Harford
XXIV A Bad Snap
XLIV An Improver
XXXVII Buddha in the Workroom
LXXIV
LXVI Periodicity
LXVII Pruning Flowering Gums
XLVII Revolution
XIII
XVI Learning Geography
XVII
XXX The Nuns and the Lilies
A. Bertha Crowther
Our Home
22 Appendices
Appendix 1 : Robert Southey, Botany-Bay Eclogues
Appendix 2 : L.E. Threlkeld, The Muses—Poetry
Appendix 3 : Philip Cohen, Description of the “Gaboora”
Appendix 4 : Thomas Brune and others
Appendix 5 : Henry E. Clay, Two and Two
Appendix 6 : Ludwig Becker, Ein Australisch’ Lied
Works Cited
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