Poets From Australia

"Men change their dispositions as they change their climate."

"Convictism having been safely got under hatches, and put to bed in its Government allowance of sixteen inches of space per man, cut a little short by exigencies of shipboard, the cuddy was wont to pass some not unpleasant evenings."

"I have examined you long enough. I have read your heart, and written out your secrets! You are but a shell—the shell that holds a corrupted and sinful heart. He shall live; you shall die!"

"To describe a tempest of the elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is impossible."

"It's us two when it's morning, And us two when it's night; And us two when it's troubled, And us two when it's bright;And us two don't want nothing To make life good and true, And lovin'-sweet, and happy, While us two's got us two."

"I have grown past hate and bitterness, I see the world as one; But though I can no longer hate, My son is still my son.All men at God's round table sit, And all men must be fed; But this loaf in my hand, This loaf is my son's bread."

"We are the sons of Australia, Of the men who fashioned the land, We are the sons of the women Who walked with them, hand in hand; And we swear by the dead who bore us, By the heroes who blazed the trail, No foe shall gather our harvest, Or sit on our stockyard rail."

"Never admit the pain, Bury it deep; Only the weak complain. Complaint is cheap."

"I span and Eve span, A thread to bind the heart of man!"

"I have no thunder in my words, Thunder is much too high; But I can see as far as birds, And feel the wind go by.And I can follow through the grass The darling-breasted quail; For, though things great in splendour mass, I choose the lesser grail."

"Better we were cold and still, with our famous Jim and Bill, Beneath the interdicted wattle-bough, For the angels made our date five-and-twenty years too late, And there is no for us now."

"Every country can claim for itself a of home manufacture. He of Australia is William Buckley."

"Out on the wastes of the Never Never — That's where the dead men lie! There where the heat-waves dance forever — That's where the dead men lie!"

"The pick of the mountain mob, bays, greys, or roans, He proved in his death that the pace ’tis that kills; And a sun-shrunken hide o’er a few whitened bones Marks the last resting-place of the Lord of the Hills."

"All my soul is slowly melting, all my brain is softening fast, And I know that I'll be taken to the Yarr bend at last. For at night from fitful slumbers I awaken with a start, Murmuring of steak and onions, babbling of apple-tart. While to me the Poet's cloudland a gigantic kitchen seems, And those mislaid table-napkins haunt me even in my dreams Is this right? — Ye sages tell me! — Does a man live but to eat? Is there nothing worth enjoying but one's miserable meat? Is the mightiest task of genius but to swallow buttered beans, And has man but been created to demolish pork and greens? Is there no unfed Hereafter, where the round of chewing stops? Is the atmosphere of heaven clammy with perpetual chops?"

"I used to be a dreadful fellow — nearly as bad as the drunkards in the storybook. I have been drunk for a year and a-half at a stretch. It was natural for me to drink. When I was about three days and a-half old, I saw my nurse hide a brandy bottle away in a cupboard that she couldn't get at afterwards. I never said anything about it then, but as soon as I could walk, I got the keys and drank that brandy."

"Now, I have a theory that women do not love their husbands ... I hold that married life is a long-drawn ordeal, which no man short of a Chevalier Bayard has any business to face ..."

"His one positive quality was mendacity. ... He could lie. His style was ornate, yet reposeful; microscopically exact, yet large and sublime. You could sit down and rest in the cool shade of one of his fabrications."

"... the married man must wear his rue (rue is good) with a difference. ... he will, in a general way, become sordid, and thrifty, and domesticated; he will learn to glory more in buying articles cheap at sales than in carrying off trophies from his compeers; he will become particular over his tucker, and cautious about getting his feet wet; he will become prudent, and circumspect, and churchwardenlike, and befittingly frightened in the presence of anything lawless, from a crash of thunder to a scrub-bred steer. And, gentle lady, there goes your ideal. Confess it, ye devil! Let us all ring Fancy's knell."

"Why is Hamlet never a favourite with the woman-student? Merely because she sees him morally vivisected, and illustrated (so to speak) with coloured plates. loved him as the glass of fashion, and so forth; but when he groaned he was no longer a god; when he raised his arabesqued wings, he disclosed the segmented and woolly body common to the '—and all was over."

"Pritchard senior died of some unpronounceable scientific term signifying internal haemorrhage of irascibility and malevolence."

"Ah me! the husband once found out has no remedy that I can think of."

"We find it so much easier, you will observe, to forgive our own shortcomings than the imperfections of our ladye-loves. This 'tis to be married; this 'tis to have linen and buck-baskets. Ay de mi!"

"Ten thousand women revered and idolized John Wesley; but there was one woman to whom he was small spuds, and few in a hill; one woman who used to put out her tongue at him when he was preaching, and who, in the seclusion of domestic life, cursed and cuffed him, and set him utterly at naught. That was the dear lady Disdain who had studied the demi-god's close-cropped, wigless cranium; who had watched him shaving, and had marked him snore o' nights; who was familiar with all his jokes, and who knew exactly how much truth there was in his yarns; who had heard the demi-god's voice saying: "D——n the boots! and the (adj.) snob that made them!"—or words to that effect."

"I used to drink so that the publicans, when they went out of business, used to sell me among the valuable fixtures."

"... I noticed both women's eyes fixed on my face, with a disconcerting interest in the casual gossip. It is humiliating when you feel yourself expected to say something good, and a swift reconnaissance of the subject shows you no opening for anything beyond what a nobleman might drivel. Moreover, I was fresh from the pastoral regions, where etiquette demands frank, unsolicited, and copious comment on the merits or demerits of some absent person ..."

"I am not a teetotaller — at least, not now. I used to be, but my constitution is not strong, and I could not stand the dissipation."

"Comedy is tragedy, plucked unripe."

"... each man, be he king or beggar, is a little world of his own. If he be swayed by a female, as kings and beggars frequently are, he is an extremely little world."

"The successful pioneer is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss. The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm."

"I compare tracking to reading a letter written in a good business hand. You must'nt look at what's under your eye; you must see a lot at once, and keep a general grasp of what's on ahead, besides spotting each track you pass."

"I have just finished writing a full-sized novel; title, Such is Life; scenery, and northern Vic.; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian."

"Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity."

"His arrogance was not without grounds. He more than once unbent himself to confide to my own dad that he (the deponent, not my good old plebeian dad, for heaven's sake!) was the illegitimate son of an illegitimate son of ."

"The gods will give us some faults to make us men; therefore no man is up to the husband-ideal of a loving woman. The bachelor may reach this standard-for why shouldn't he be magnanimous, and mettlesome, and debonair; prepared to do all that may become a man, and sometimes even things that don't? And if he should fall a trifle short of the real Mackay-a contingency that you may safely count upon-he is in no way compelled to flaunt his own worthlessness before the feminine eye."

"Farce is the grimmest of all tragedy; it is the blind jollity of an Irish wake, with the silent guest none the less present because unassertive."

"Unemployed at last!"

"Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!"

"The two greatest supra-physical pleasures of life are antithetical in operation. One is to have something to do, and to know that you are doing it deftly and honestly. The other is to have nothing to do, and to know that you are carrying out your blank programme like a good and faithful menial."

"Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place, Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest? A new demesne for Mammon to infest? Or lurks millennial ’neath your face?"

"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."

"All that we love in olden lands and lore Was signal of her coming long ago! Bacon foresaw her, Campanella, More, And Plato’s eyes were with her star aglow!"

"Into moorawathimeering, where atninga dare not tread, leaving wurly for a wilban, tallabilla, you have fled."

"This is a rune I ravelled in the still, Arrogant stare of an Australian cow."

"When, comrades, we thrill to the message of speaker in highway or hall, The voice of the poet is reaching the silenter poet in all: And again, as of old, when the flames are to leap up the turrets of Wrong, Shall the torch of the New Revolution be lit from the words of a Song!"

"‘Be true, be brave, be merciful, be free!’"

"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."

"And our reward? In this wan land, In clientage of Greed, Despised, polluted, maimed and banned, To wander and—to breed."

"They teach and live the Golden Rule Of Young Democracy:—‘That culture, joy and goodliness Be th’ equal right of all: That Greed no more shall those oppress Who by the wayside fall:‘That each shall share what all men sow: That colour, caste’s a lie: That man is God, however low— Is man, however high.’"

"We've seen the Red, like a thirsty king, Bend over the silent stream; We've seen the Mallee its tassels fling, To steal of the sunset's gleam; The Blue's young shoots, with his leaves gray pearled, A cloud that has gone awry; The Ironbark, with his limbs up-hurled As though he would win the sky. * * * He stands apart from the Old World trees, Unbound by the laws of form; He bows his head to the zephyr breeze, But laughs at the drought and storm. We stand alone, like our own great tree, Afar from the nations' hum. Come, brothers! Keep we our homeland free As limbs of our Austral gum."