AUSTRALIA'S GORDON.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 243, 14 October 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIA'S GORDON.

A NATIONAL POET. THE BUSHRANGING BALLAD.

(By D. H. MONRO.)

The centenary of Adam Lindsay Gordon, which occurred on October 19, is being commemorated by a tablet placed in 1 Westminster Abbey. The honour has probably been done to the poet's country rather than to the man himself. Australia has accepted Gordon for better or for worse, as her most important poet, and the authorities were no doubt pre- . pared to take her word for it without inquiring too closely into the merits of the choice. the choice in itself is not really hard to understand. There has always been a tendency to regard Australia as a land of daredevil adventurers, directly descended from the unwilling settlers of the penal days. Even the respectable citizens who work in offices in Sydney and Melbourne, and who would certainly write to the papers if they encountered a bushranger (in a city tramcar, say), like to preserve this tradition: and an Australian poet is conceived (even by his own countrymen, and particularly by those of them who write reviews for the Press) as a bronzed vagabond dashing off careless trifles as ho reclines under the shade of a blue-gum tree and watches the kangaroo bounding over the otherwise boundless desert. A Wild Boyhood. Of all Australian poets, Gordon most nearly contrived to live up to this romantic picture. His work is careless and racy enough to have been produced under just these conditions; and his life was sufficiently adventurous to satisfy the wilder daydreams of the most lawabiding Australian. The son of a professor of Hindustani, he began his career promisingly by getting expelled from Cheltenham College, remaining only long enough to make the acquaintance of Jem Edwards, a famous pugilist of the day, who lived in the neighbourhood. After this, he seems to have been something of a problem to his parents. They made unsuccessful attempts to get him started in the army, and even (out of desperation, one imagines) in the Church, and finally packed him off, at the age of 20, to Australia. Yet Gordon's boyhood, if somewhat wild, had hardly been wasted. He had gained an excellent knowledge of horseracing, for one thing, and this was obviously an indispensable asset to one who was afterwards to become the idol of the Australian public. Secondly, he had somehow picked up a knowledge of, and fondness for, poetry. This even ex-

tended to the classics. He could recite long passages of Ovid and Virgil from memory, and he was accompanied in some of his wildest exploits in the Australian bush by a pocket Horace.

Arriving in Australia, he entered the service of the mounted police force, which was perhaps the next best thing to becoming a bushranger. A skilful rider and a fearless figliter, lie distinguished

himself in the service, in which he remained for two years. But at the end of that time he was ordered by a sergeant to clean his boots for him. Even in the democratic atmosphere of Australia, Gordon never quite lost his sense of caste; his biographer says indeed that he was something of a snob. One can imagine, then, his resentment at this request, and he ended his career as a policeman by hurling the boots in question at the head of their owner.

The poet soon found congenial employment as a horse breaker and a steeplechaser. But in 1804, having inherited a comfortable fortune from his mother's estate, he decided to enter politics, and eventually gained a seat in the Parliament of South Australia. He apparen; ly enjoyed the excitement of the election, but the actual life of a member he found dull. He seldom made a speech, and spent most of his time in the House drawing indifferent caricatures of his fellow members, or writing rhymed squibs about them.

Politics and other dissipations soon caused his money to disappear, and, after an unsuccessful attempt at running a livery stable, he found himself dependent on the income from his writings. This was inconsiderable, for his full fame did not come till after his death. Poverty was too much for Gordon, who was not altogether the - reckless, devil-may-care adventurer ho must have appeared on the surface. He became subject to fits of melancholia, and, no doubt, during one of these, he rode quietly into the bush and shot himself. He wa3 then only 37. Founding a Tradition. Gordon's reputation has not been altogether due to his adventurous career and his attractive personality. He had the gift of fluency, and his poems, if rather diffuse, are generally readable. Moreover, the Australian public naturally responded to a poet who published much of his work in a sporting paper, and to poems which bore such titles as " How We Beat the Favourite," or described such incidents as the following:— We led the hunt throughout, Ned, on the chestnut and the grey, And the troopers were three hundred yards behind, While we emptied our six-shooters on the bushrangers at bay, In the creek with stunted box-tree for a blind.

As a result Gordon helped to found the tradition of tlie Australian bush ballad. It is not a bad tradition in its way, even if the works it produces are hardly in the front rank of poetry. But they are, after all, vigorous and spirited,

they generally show some narrative power, and they do catch something of the spirit of the pioneering days. At the very least, the rendering of them in an appropriately spirited fashion must have done a good deal to brighten drawing room entertainments of the 'eighties and 'nineties. Yet Gordon's work is by no means all of this type. Nor was it all written, as Marcus Clarke suggests, "at odd times and leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous life." Some of it. must have entailed a good deal of study, for many of his verses are imitative in the extreme. A young man writing in the 'sixties, Gordon naturally fell under the influence of Swinburne; and, with his fluency, his diffuseness, and his easy control of metre, he was well qualified to follow his master. "Bellona," for example, catches the Swinburne note fairly accurately: Thou art still, not with stillness of languor. And calm, not with calm boding rest; For thine Is all wrath and all anger, That throbs far and near in the breast Of man, by thy presence possessed. Tho curious mixture of exuberance and world-weariness (both real and feigned) that can be observed in Swinburne is also marked in Gordon. The two strains recur all through his poems. At one moment he is the celebrated steeplechaser, the man who rode Babbler for the Melbourne Cup in 1868, telling in his own racy way "how we beat the favourite." And the next moment he is announcing: I am weary, lay me low, Lay me low, my work is done. Or remarking that he is about to go: . . . Where the last year's lost leaves go, At the falling of the year. Writing from Experience. These two notes are the only ones he could strike with a sure hand, for they both sprang out of his own experience. He could be melancholy, and he could be reckless. But he could do little else. His work has no originality of thought; his moralising, for example, is trite in the extreme. Nobody (except possibly scribblers in autograph albums) is likely to think very highly of the well-known quatrain about life being mostly froth and bubble. And his reputation will hardly be enhanced even by those homelier words of wisdom, which occur iu the same poem: Keep your powder dry, and shut one eye, Not both, when you touch the trigger; Don't stop with your head too frequently (This advice ain't meant for a nigger). If Gordon had remained in England, it is unlikely that he would have become known except as a very unimportant hanger-on of Swinburne and the preRapliaelites. As it was, he went to Australia and helped to found a tradition. Perhaps it was not altogether a bad thing; even if the tradition is hardly worthy of Westminster Abbey,