The Manawatu Daily Times Adam Lindsay Gordon

Manawatu Times, Volume LIX, Issue 7472, 24 May 1934, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times Adam Lindsay Gordon

Ten clays ago an impressive ceremony linked Westminster Abbey with Australia in a much more intimate fashion than hitherto. The occasion was the unveiling of a memorial to Adam Lindsay Gordon, the first of Australian singers in more senses than one. Sixty-four years have passed since the tragic death of the poet at Port Philip. Now the ceremony in London and Gordon’s admission to the Poet’s Corner in the Abbey marks the universal recognition of his peculiar merits, known for two generations to ali Australians.

Gordon was born at Fayal \ the Azores in 1533, the son of an officer who, on retiring from the Army, became Professor of Hindustani at Cheltenham. There Gordon received his education, and afterward proceeded to Merton College, Oxford, where, because of some youthful indiscretions, his career was a brief one. Handicapped by that bad start, he landed at Adelaide in 1853. His family had male arrangements that lie should there begin a life in accordance with the conventions of his rank, but Gordon preferred to take his own way, and joined the Mounted Police, in which lie was able to gratify his passionate love for horses. Later he left the police force and became a horsebreaker and a famous steeplechase rider. He was, indeed, said to be the best non-professional steeplechase rider in the colony. In 1862 he married a Miss Park, and two years later inherited a sum of £7OOO from his father’s esLate. In 1865 he became a member of Parliament, but retained his scat for only a year. He preferred steeplechasing to legislating, and he was much engaged in poetry, producing the stirring racing vcise that to this day thrills the lover of horses. In 1867 lie moved to Victoria and opened a livery stable at Ballarat. The Turf had by this time become so much of an obsession with him that he determined to break from it and give himself more to literary work. With that object he went to Melbourne in 1869. Even in those early years Melbourne had her literary circle, and to it Gordon was welcomed by such well-known men as Marcus Clarke, Henry Kendall, and George Higinbotham. Two years earlier lie had published his first volume of poems, “Sea-Spray and Smoke Drift,” and it made him known to Australians, even if it did not profit him greatly in a financial sense. Ihe futme seemed bright with promise until he failed to secure the reversion of the estate of Ecclemont, in Aberdeenshire, a year or so later. The disappointment played havoc with him, accentuated by the facts that he was suffering from a fall from a horse, that he had become involved in debt in liis fight for the estate, and that he was despondent over the prospects of another volume of poems published in 1870. The volume, as a matter of fact, was a success, and greatly enhanced his reputation and popularity. But before that had become apparent he was dead, shot by his own hand on Brighton Beach on June 24, 1870.

No other poet has sung himself into the heart of Australia like Gordon. He has had many disciples, but they all acknowledge him as master. Marcus Clarke in an introduction to Gordon’s poems, has written that the reader will find in them “something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.” That is true. Gordon, indeed, established a convention in Australian poetry which still strongly persists. In a sense he may be said to be as much the poet of Australia as Burns is of Scotland. To this day Australians of all ranks quote his verse. One critic has written of him: “The lasting charm and value of his best verse are due to his manly love of the open air, of sport, of ‘playing the game’; at his melancholiest he is always alive, alert, virile; and the curt, crisp phiases of his earlier lyrics will long be household words in Australian homes.” Gordon has come into his own, illustrating the pregnant remark of Fletcher of Saltoun, “I know a very wise man (who) believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of ft nation.”