Recently in 100 Australian Poems Category

With this poem, the tenth in the collection, we come to the first by a woman, and the first by a poet I had never heard of before.  I'm not overly surprised by the first part of that sentence, but am a bit emabrrassed about the second.  If you look at the publishing history below you'll see that this poem has been reprinted on a quite regular basis since it was first published in 1881.  To not recognise it indicates a certain lack of attention on my part.

Mary Hannay Foott is described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as "a minor poet", though I suspect this is manily due to the relaively small number of poems she published during her lifetime: Austlit lists only 76.  Most of these works appeared in various Queensland newspapers with the odd one or two in The Bulletin.  So it was probably more a matter of her lack of exposure rather than anything else. She only published two collections of poems during here lifetime, Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems in 1885 and Morna Lee and Other Poems in 1890, and wrote very little after the mid-1890s.

I quite like this poem.  It is short but gives a good sense of the interplay between nature and men's fortunes - straddling the gap between Charles Harpur and Mary Gilmore perhaps, as there appear to be echoes of both in this work.  Where the pelican builds its nest is considered the best country, fertile and well-watered.  They prefer large expanses of open water without too much aquatic vegetation which provides perfect breeding conditions for fish, their main source of food.   More pelicans implies more fish, which implies more clean water and a better natural environment.

Mary Hannay Foott wrote this poem while she was living in south-west Queensland, an area of the country prone to the classic "droughts and flooding rains".  When the pelican arrived in the area everyone would have been acutely aware that good times had returned, and you are left in no doubt that this is what is indicated in this work.

Text: "Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography

Publishing history: First published in The Bulletin (12 March 1881), and subsequently reprinted in An Anthology of Australian Verse (1907), The Golden Treasury of Australian Verse (1909), Australian Bush Songs and Ballads (1944), Silence Into Song (1968), A Treasury of Australian Poetry (1982), The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (1990), The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads (1993),  The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse (1995), Classic Australian Verse (2001) and Our Country: Classic Australian Poetry:  From Colonial Ballads to Paterson & Lawson (2004).

Next five poems in the book:

"Catching the Coach" by Alfred T. Chander ("Spinifex")

"Narcissus and Some Tadpoles" by Victor Daley
"Nine Miles from Gundagai" by Jack Moses
"The Duke of Buccleuch" by JA Philp
"How We Drove the Trotter" by W. T. Goodge

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

I had never really considered Marcus Clarke to be much of a poet until I come across this poem - and, by that, I mean from a point of view of quantity rather than quality, having never encountered any poetry by him previously. The Australian literature resource Austlit lists 129 works by the author but only 9 poems.  Granted not all possible publication sources have been indexed, but the major magazines and newspapers show that Clarke was more a novelist, journalist and playwright than poet.

So we come to Clarke's poem of a day in the life of a restaurant waiter, the first truly urban poem in the collection so far.   

The eponymous waiter is given a hard time by all sections of the tavern's clientele. He is yelled at, abused, and cursed by all as he tells the story of his day.  It comes across as one mad rush oorm one dish to another, from one glass or porter to a "soda and a dash".  He is given little rest.

An interesting aspect of the poem is the glimpse it gives of the eating habits of the people of Melbourne in the 1870s: we see mutton chops and steak along with coffee, toast, flathead (fish), ham and beef for breakfast; and there's oxtail soup, curry, cold boiled beef, irsh stew and pickled cabbage for lunch. The poet doesn't actually detail any dinner-time fare but you get the impression that steak and oinions, pork and greens, and spirit-reared cow-heel might just be on the menu.

By the end of the day the waiter has about had it, contemplating the "hideous Babel" that he encounters in the tavern as his "soul is slowly melting" and his "brain is softening fast".  Does man live only to eat, he wonders.  From his perspective that's all there is: eating, shouting, drinking - like something from a Gordon Ramsay kitchen without the swearing.  Or, at least, without the swearing appearing here.  If he was writing today I doubt whether Clarke, or his editor, would have been so restrained.

Clarke was believed to drink heavily - which may have contributed to his early demise at the age of 35 - so we can be fairly certain that the poem is told from his experiences watching put-upon slave labour going about their work.  It's a form of drudgery, I suspect, still very much in evidence today.

Text: "The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography 

Publishing history: First published in The Bulletin on 29 September 1900, and subsequently reprinted in Freedom on the Wallaby: Poems of the Australian People (1953), The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986 and 1996), and The Oxford Book of Australian Light Verse (1991).

Next five poems in the book:

"Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

"Catching the Coach" by Alfred T. Chandler ("Spinifex")

"Narcissus and Some Tadpoles" by Victor Daley

"Nine Miles from Gundagai" by Jack Moses

"The Duke of Buccleuch" by JA Philp

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

With Thomas Spencer's poem, "How McDougal Topped the Score", we move back to comedy; a genre that we only encountered previously with James Brunton Stephens's "My Other Chinee Cook."  And although this poem is not the greatest, or funniest Australian poem, it does come as a bit of light relief.

Comic Australian poems are generally situational in nature, where one person, by dint of luck, good management or just plain rat cunning, gets the better of someone else.   Sometimes it is told from the point of view of the victim - Stephens again - and sometimes from the point of view of the victor.  Spencer's piece is an example of the latter.

The setting is a country cricket match between the two small townships of Piper's Flat and Molongo; the stakes a lunch paid for by the loser. The sub-text being bragging rights between the two towns. Piper's Flat finds themselves a man short and decide to draft in McDougal, an old farmer who has never played the game before.

Needless to say, as you can tell from the title, it is McDougal who saves the day, scoring the 50 runs required for victory with only one wicket to spare; and off one ball as well.  In this case it is rat cunning which wins the day.

When I was reading this poem I was reminded of "The Batting Wizard from the City", a short story by Dal Stivens which also features a cricket match between two small country towns, one of whom is short one player - drafting in a visitor whom no-one seems to know - while the other team has a Demon Bowler given to breaking stumps and bones with equal abandon. As with the poem here, the draftee saves the day at the last minute with a display of batting rarely seen, even in the first-class arena. Here class rather than cunning wins out.  Reading the two together strikes me as being a worthwhile exercise.

I find it peculiar to think that, given the nation's love of sport, such little poetry has been written about it.  This is one of the better ones.

Text: "How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography 

Publishing history:  First published in The Bulletin in March 1898, and subsequently reprinted in such anthologies as Favourite Australian Poems (1963), Complete Book of Australian Folklore (1976), The Penguin Book of Australian Humorous Verse (1984), The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse (1996), and the 1906 collection shown in its 1972 edition below.

Next five poems in the book:

"The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

"Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

"Catching the Coach" by Alfred T. Chandler ("Spinifex")

"Narcissus and Some Tadpoles" by Victor Daley

"Nine Miles from Gundagai" by Jack Moses

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

The subject matter of "Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy is probably about as slight as you can get.  The poem relates the encounter between a swagman and a squatter, and centres around a conversation in which the swaggie tries to figure out if the squatter is the right person to speak to regarding a place to sleep for the night.

It's not one that I could relate to at all until I looked up the meaning of the word "cove" in The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1984).  The word is defined there as "1. a man; 2. a boss, especially the manager of a sheep station", the second definition of which I had never come across before.  So the swagman is attempting to ascertain if the squatter is the station manager; presumably he might then be able to ask permission to "doss" for the night.  If you wanted to stretch the point you could argue that the poem details the strained and suspicious relationship between squatters and men of the road, but it still comes across as a bit thin to me.

Joseph Furphy is a strange choice for a collection of this sort.  He is mainly known as the author of Such is Life under the pseudonym of "Tom Collins".  His poetry career was rather short and Austlit only lists some 28 poems under his name, which leads me to thhink this might be a favourite of the editor's.

Text: "Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography 

There are also a number of posts on this weblog regarding Furphy, his poetry and his life, which can be found here.

Publishing history:  First published in The Poems of Joseph Furphy (1916) which was edited by Kate Baker and included a foreword by Bernard O'Dowd.  The volume, containing only 26 works in 56 pp, appeared four years after the writer's death in 1912.  If it was published during Furphy's lifetime I can find no record of it.

Next five poems in the book:

"How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

"The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

"Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

"Catching the Coach" by Alfred T. Chandler ("Spinifex")

"Narcissus and Some Tadpoles" by Victor Daley

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

[It's been a while since I last posted in this series. Put it down to real life intruding, and once I fall off the treadmill it can be hard to get back on it again.]

By any criteria Henry Kendall's "Bell-Birds" must rank as one of the most popular poems written in Australia's literary history.  Austlit, "The Australian Literature Resource", lists 32 entries in its publication history; possibly ranking only with Dorothea's Mackellar's "My Country", Paterson's "Waltzing Matilda" and one or two others in its universality.  And yet it is not a poem I remember from my childhood - the Paterson and the Mackellar certainly, but not this one.

There is a lovely lilting feel to this work.  The rhymes generally read as occurring naturally (though a query may be made against "sedges/ledges" in the first verse), and the flow and rhythm are reminiscent of a warm, lazy spring day. 

If, as seems reasonable, Kendall wrote this a year or so before its publication in his collection, Leaves from Australian Forests, in 1869, then he was probably living in New South Wales at his happiest.  This was prior to his disastrous sojourn in Melbourne, the death of his young daughter and his descent into bankruptcy and mental illness.  There appears to be no despair or despondency in this work, only the wonder of nature and joy of life.

According to Wikipedia, Bellbirds are so-called "because they feed almost exclusively on the dome-like coverings of certain psyllid bugs, referred to as 'bell lerps', that feed on eucalyptus sap from the leaves", and not because of their distinctive tinkling, bell-like sound.  And yet Kendall refers to "The notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing."  Ringing, yes, but certainly not running.  But this is a minor quibble about a poem that deserves its place in any collection of classic Australian poetry. 

Text: "Bell-Birds" by Henry Kendall

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography 

There are also a number of posts on this weblog regarding Kendall, his poetry and his life, which can be found here.

Publishing history: This poem was first published (so far as we can tell) in Kendall's verse collection, Leaves from Australian Forests, in 1869.  Subsequently it appeared in The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse in 1918 (and its later editions), and in Selections from Australian Poets compiled by Bertram Stevens in 1925. After that it was reprinted in just about every major retrospective Australian poetry anthology. 

Next five poems in the book:

"Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

"How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

"The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

"Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

"Catching the Coach" by Alfred T. Chandler ("Spinifex")

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

James Brunton Stephens's poem "My Other Chinee Cook" is a strange little thing.  Its basic aim is to present an amusing anecdote where the butt of the joke is the subject of the poem and his wife, a quintessential form of Australian self-deprecating humour. Yet, to modern eyes, it can come across as rather racist, and somewhat off-putting.

The poem here is a sequel to "My Chinee Cook" which was published in the same 8 March 1873 issue of "The Australasian", the weekend companion to the Melbourne daily "The Argus".  That first poem tells the story of a man and wife who hire one Chinese cook after another, until they chance upon one who is just perfect - cooking, cleaning, and carrying out all manner of household duties for only room and board.  It's a situation that's just too good to be true. All good stories have to end badly and this first Chinese cook is found to be a jewel thief when he attempts to sell the wife pieces of jewellery from a Sydney robbery.

"My Other Chinee Cook" also concerns a brilliant cook but with a bit of a difference.  Here the cook has a "secret" recipe for "rabbit pie" which some might find rather disturbing.  This is a funny poem: the set-up is good, the final put-down delightful.  The high and mighty are brought to their knees, vomiting up the delicacy they had so enjoyed just moments before, and the pathetic scene at the end is delivered with just the right amount of pathos.  The problem I have with it is that it is just not very well put together: too often the rhythm is broken by just one too many syllables ("When my lad should bring our usual regale of cindered joint," and "And I never saw him more, nor tasted more of rabbit pie").   Given a choice I suspect I would have chosen the first "Chinee Cook" poem, though I can certainly understand the editor's decision here.

The concept of a Chinese cook is quite a common one in Australian folklore, with the most recent occurrence being in Baz Luhrmann's recent film Australia.  We see it now as a cliche, but, in 1873, it was probably quite a normal situation.  It's not the simple fact that the cook is Chinese that gives the poem its racist flavour, it's the overall tone of the piece: "He was lazy, he was cheeky, he was dirty, he was sly," being merely the introduction.  Even so, I'm of the view that we have to apply different criteria to written works of the past, acknowledging the state of the country and society of the time.  I'm not ignoring it, just attempting to allow it to sit within its historical context.

For a period after the death of Henry Kendall in 1882 Stephens was considered one of the leading lights of Australian literature: he wrote three novels and a play, but was probably best known for his five collections of verse. And now he is mostly forgotten, not even being included in Harry Heseltine's 1972 volume The Penguin Book of Australian Verse.  It seems like everyone you've ever heard of is there, except Stephens.

Text: "My Other Chinee Cook" by James Brunton Stephens

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography 

Publishing history: First published in "The Australasian", 8 March 1873; and subsequently in Stephens's popular verse collection My Chinee Cook and Other Humorous Verses, 1902.

Next five poems in the book:

"Bell-Birds" by Henry Kendall

"Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

"How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

"The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

"Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

I don't have much to write about this poem as I covered it in a couple of posts last year as a part of my "Classic Year" reading.  The fact that it fits into both these collections says a lot about its ability to impress even at this distance. 

Text: "The Sick Stockrider" by Adam Lindsay Gordon

Author bio:  Australian Dictionary of Biography

Publishing history: Originally published in the "Colonial Monthly" in January 1870.  Subsequent appearances are too many to mention. 

 Next five poems in the book:

"My Other Chinee Cook" by James Brunton Stephens

"Bell-Birds" by Henry Kendall

"Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

"How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

"The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

Charles Thatcher's poem, "Taking the Census", contains a number of elements that most of us would see as being indicative of the character of early Australian settlers from Europe: humour, resilience and a healthy disrespect for government.

The narrator of the poem has bribed the local census-taker for a look at the "papers" of his fellow townspeople;  he doesn't say why, but we can just assume he likes to snoop on his neighbours.  As he originally suspects, the local ladies are lying about their ages:

Miss Fluffen says she's thirty-two,
   But to tell such a story is naughty,
She's a regular frumpish old maid,
   And if she's a year old she's forty.

Which leaves me feeling positively ancient. 

But it's not just their ages that people lie about: a washerwoman puts down her occupation as a "clear starcher", the chemist's assistant becomes an M.D., and no less than three hairdressers transform themselves into "professors".  None of them are too happy with the government collecting this data and, mischievously, attempt to circumvent the process at each turn.  A trait that is still evident today, as the census-recorded religion of "Jed Knight" attests.

But it's the last couple who provide the humour of the piece. The census-taker visits "two girls,/Who are noted for cutting rum capers" and who live in "an elegant crib".  They've left their occupations blank on their forms and find it vastly amusing that they would be asked to supply one: "..young man, shove me down as a milliner."  Well, yes. The modern reader will have little doubt about these young women, nor, I suspect, did the poem's original readers.
 

Text: "Taking the Census" by Charles R. Thatcher

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB)

Publishing history: another poem that's difficult to track.  ADB states that Thatcher was born in Bristol, England, in 1831 and arrived in Australia in 1852.  He left Australia in 1869 and died in Shanghai, China, in in 1878. The first publication of this poem is listed as being in The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse edited by Les Murray in 1986.  Thatcher appears to have self-published two or three collections of his verse in the late 1850s and 1860s, so it might be that this poem appeared in one of those.  Failing that, it would have appeared in a newspaper or magazine of the time, but I can find no record of it. 

 Next five poems in the book:

"The Sick Stockrider" by Adam Lindsay Gordon

"My Other Chinee Cook" by James Brunton Stephens

"Bell-Birds" by Henry Kendall

"Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

"How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

Charles Harpur's poem "A Beautiful Squatter" is a strange little affair and rather out of character for the poet.  I've always been of the view that Harpur wrote very much in the European style - or, at least, what I suspect that style to be - rather than in a quintessential Australian bush ballad style.  This impression is partly due to his writing period, from 1833-1868, which precedes the work of Lawson (1887-1922) and Paterson (1885-1941), and partly due to the way he handled his subject matter.

He looked at the Australian bush with an eye that would not have been out of place in the Old World.  If you read "Dawn and Sunrise in the Snowy Mountains", for example, you don't get much of a sense that the poet is describing an Australian scene, in fact it could quite as easily have been written about Switzerland or the Rockies.  ("..And now, even long before/The Sun himself is seen, off tow'rds the west/A range of mighty summits, more and more/Blaze, each like a huge cresset, in the keen/Clear atmosphere.") This may well have been due to the fact that Harpur was inventing his poetry as he went with few other major contemporaries to follow, imitate or lead.  It's not the bush I think of when I remember Harpur, it's love sonnets, and mood pieces rather than balladic tales and poems to be recited round a campfire.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising Harpur for this, just trying to put him in context.  He did write "The Creek of the Four Graves" in 1845 which describes the death and burial of four men in the bush, killed in a skirmish with local aboriginals.  But this is a long contemplative piece: a novel rather than a short story. 

Which is why "The Beautiful Squatter" is so different from his other work.  The squatter of the title, riding through the bush, comes across two young Aboriginal women sitting under a tree by a creek. He seduces them with tales of "dampers and blankets quite new", and, while this is not stated explicitly, gets rather intimate with at least one of them.  The women return to their camp where the story of their encounter comes out, the local mob get a group of men together and the squatter is "waddied to death in the bloom of his charms."

The story is reasonable enough and the humour of the poem is directed towards the squatter rather than the indigenous natives, which might have been the expected course.  Yet even they are sketched in caricature, which is very different from the dignified, elusive natives of "Creek".  The poet doesn't judge or take sides here, however, and maybe he meant this poem as a sort of warning to the whites not to treat the Aborigines as play-things and chattels.  If so he was remarkably ahead of his time.

In a 1980 essay titled "The Aboriginal in Early Australian Literature", Elizabeth Webby states that Harpur had written other pieces about Aboriginal suffering ("A Wail from the Bush" and "Ned Connor. A Tale of the Bush" as two examples) which showed understanding of the problems of Aboriginal-White conflict.  As she says in her essay: "It seems appropriate that it should be the Irish, with their own history of invasion and usurpation, who were in the van of opposition to white oppression of Aboriginals" (Southerly, March 1980, p58).

"The Beautiful Squatter" may not be a prime example of the bulk of Harpur's work but it does deal with some issues he covered in other poems and is still an amusing piece.  The poet definitely had to be included in this collection.

Text: "The Beautiful Squatter" by Charles Harpur.

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography

Publishing history: the poem was originally published in "The Weekly Register" on 15 March 1845 under the title "Squatter Songs, No. 1".  It was then included in The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur in 1984, and subsequently in such anthologies as Old Ballads from the Bush (1987), The Sting in the Wattle (1993), The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads (1993), and Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology (1998).

Next five poems in the book:

"Taking the Census" by Charles R. Thatcher

"The Sick Stockrider" by Adam Lindsay Gordon

"My Other Chinee Cook" by James Brunton Stephens

"Bell-Birds" by Henry Kendall

"Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

Although originally written in 1839, this poem by "Frank the Poet" (Francis Macnamara) was first published in 1900 and then in an anthology of Australian poetry in the 1980s. It appears that the poem survived via an oral tradition and may have been finally published in a very different version from that first written - it's impossible to tell. The fact that it has lasted for around 170 years attests to its power to convey the convict experience, or, at least, the hopes of the Australian convicts.

The poem tells the story of Frank the Poet (the alter ego of the poet himself) who dies and finds himself on the banks of the River Styx across from the gates of Hell. Needless to say, Frank considers that he's suffered enough during his mortal life and thinks he's somehow come to the wrong place. As Hell's gatekeeper, Pope Pius 7th, tells him: "This place was made for Priests and Popes/'Tis a world of our own invention", and as Satan himself points out: "...I detest and hate the poor/And none shall in my kingdom stand/Except the grandees of the land." A roll-call of those who have injured and persecuted him is then presented to Frank, who seems quite pleased that they are all to suffer eternal punishment. Even Captain James Cook is tied to a fiery stake, sentenced for no more than discovering New South Wales. Frank finally ends up in heaven and is feted by Jesus, Peter, Abraham and Abel, only to wake at the end of the poem and to find it was all a dream.

It's hard to get a grip on the worth of a poem such as this from a distance of 170 years. The whole story is rather trite from our perspective: a wish-fulfilment dream, in which the dreamer is the innocent victim. The one thing that comes across loud and clear is the hatred that Macnamara felt for the convict settlement and army authorities: sulphurous lakes, fiery stakes and chairs, and rivers of boiling lead.

And all those fiery seats and chairs
Are fitted up for Dukes and Mayors
And nobles of Judicial orders
Barristers, Lawyers and Recorders
Here I beheld legions of traitors
Hangmen gaolers and flagellators
Commandants,Constables and Spies
Informers and Overseers likewise
In flames of brimstone they were toiling
And lakes of sulphur round them boiling
Hell did resound with their fierce yelling
Alas how dismal was their dwelling

It's all classic fire and brimstone stuff.

Macnamara probably felt he had due cause to wish such punishments on his gaolers. Born in 1811 in Ireland he was transported to New South Wales in 1832 after being convicted of theft, though there is a suspicion that he was a political agitator. If that last is true, he would have been targeted by the authorities from the start. He did abscond
several times and received numerous floggings and other punishments. Little else is known about him other than he was shifted from NSW to Port Arthur in 1842. He appears to have changed his ways there - probably under the threat of further depravations, and believe me, Port Arthur is a pretty scarey place - and was given his freedom in 1847. After that he disappears from the record, although Marcus Clarke does write about a balladeer in a dosshouse in Melbourne in 1868 who might have been Macnamara. Less than 20 poems have been attributed to him.

Text: "A Convict's Tour to Hell" by Francis Macnamara. [I dropped the original link to this as it had a missing line, and several punctuation variations.]

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography

Publishing history: the first known publication of the poem was in the Cumberland Times, December 27, 1900. It subsequently appeared in The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse edited by Philip Neilsen (1986), The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse edited by Les Murray (1986 and 1996), The Sting in the Wattle : Australian Satirical Verse edited by Philip Neilsen (1993), The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads edited by Elizabeth Webby and Philip Butterss (1993), and Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology edited by John Leonard (1998).

Notes: This work is also known under the alternative titles: "A Tour to Hell", "Come all you prisoners of New South Wales", and "Ye prisoners of New South Wales".

Next five poems in the book:
"The Beautiful Squatter" by Charles Harpur
"Taking the Census" by Charles R Thatcher
"The Sick Stockrider" by Adam Lindsay Gordon
"My Other Chinee Cook" by James Brunton Stephens
"Bell-Birds" by Henry Kendall

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant. You can read the other posts in this series here.

100 Australian Poems You Need to Know Edited by Jamie Grant Hardie Grant Books 2008

I recently picked up a copy of this book and, I must say, I'm mightily impressed by just about everything to do with it. It's a good-looking thing from the outset: brightly coloured boards, an inlaid illustration on the front, slightly cream-coloured pages with lots of white space and a good font size, and a number of pencil illustrations throughout the book by Bridget Farmer. Hardie Grant Books has produced a good one here, one that makes you want to pick it up and read.

I say "just about" because there are a few things that irk me a little. I won't detail them now but will aim to cover them as I gradually work my way through the list of poems presented here. They are mostly minor, and probably rather nit-picky, but it's the right of the reader to complain as well as praise. The book is divided into nine sections ("Convict and Stockrider", "The Red Page", "Gundagai to Ironbark", "Bastard and Bushranger", "Drought, Dusk and War", "Country Story", "Melbourne and Sydney", "Beyond Sprawl", and "The Generation of XYZ") most of which will be pretty obvious to most Australian readers. The exception might be "The Red Page", which refers to the literary section of The Bulletin magazine which was printed on the inside pages of the red wrap-around cover the magazine sported for much of its early life, from 1880.

The contents of this volume cover the full range of poems from the earliest distinctly Australian literature to a poem from 2002. So you can fairly state that the contents cover the date range of Australian poetry - in the European style at any rate. But the major question outstanding is "Do you really need to know these poems?", or, for that matter, "any poems?" It depends on your ambitions. If it's to have a general understanding of the development of Australian literature over the past 200 years or so then at least some acquaintance with poetry is a requirement - I'm not one for assuming that verse will be learnt by rote, so a recognition and appreciation level of knowledge should suffice.

So poetry is a requirement, but these ones in particular? Well, that's where the arguments come in. Grant comments on the selection process by stating:

There will inevitably be some other readers' favourites missing, particularly as I have restricted my choice to one poem for each author. If I had attempted to literally present the first one hundred in a list of this country's most popular poems, there might not be many more than a dozen poets included in the collecton, from Henry Lawson to Les Murray. The broader range which results from my self-imposed restriction should enable other readers to make some pleasurable discoveries.

So you can understand what Grant is getting at. Even though it does fly in the face of the title to some extent this is a publishing decision which makes about as much sense as any other. It keeps the volume down to a manageable size, and for that we can be grateful. Just taking Banjo Paterson as an example, if you took all his most-loved poems you'd have to include "Waltzing Matilda", "The Man from Snowy River", "Clancy of the Overflow", "Mulga Bill's Bicycle" and "The Man from Ironbark". Too unwieldy. Better to chose one and leave it at that. Anyway, it allows for arguments amongst readers. And arguing about these poems is just what I am going to do on this weblog. I'm aiming to write about one poem here each week: looking at the poem, the author, the context and publishing history. A self-imposed study course on Australian poetry if you like.

"Ah", but I hear you say, "whatever happened to the 'Classic Year' reading program from 2008. That only got through 17 of the 50 odd titles." Which is a good point. I dropped that reading program last year for a number of reasons, and now have every intention of picking it up again in the next week or so. Just have to keep plugging away and doing the best I can. Where possible I'll provide links to web-based editions of the poems in the book, though, for copyright reasons, you'll understand that this will begin to peter out by the time we get to about halfway.

First five poems in the book:
"A Convict's Tour to Hell" by Francis Macnamara
"The Beautiful Squatter" by Charles Harpur
"Taking the Census" by Charles R Thatcher
"The Sick Stockrider" by Adam Lindsay Gordon
"My Other Chinee Cook" by James Brunton Stephens