MEETINGS WITH ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

I remember an unseasonal cold in the air, an almost wintry sky, and mutterings around me from people I thought must have known the truth about the place. I knew little myself; and my father beside me was anxious, as usual, to be away.

I remember looking briefly through more than one window, but what was on the other side of the glass I do not remember. Yet I recall my childish sadness that day for things lost or detained far from their rightful surroundings. I imagined that the house itself had been shipped many years before from Britain. Hearing that a man had composed poetry behind the locked doors, I thought of the poet as a sort of prisoner there, writing to pass the months or years of his sentence or exile. And a strange chain of confusions made me think that the poet was Robert Burns, whose verses I had already chanced on – and found, of course, unreadable.

I saw Adam Lindsay Gordon’s house in Ballarat only that once, on an afternoon in 1946 while I waited with my parents for the bus that would take us across the Western Plains on the second leg of our holiday journey from Bendigo to the coast. Twenty years later I looked at a photograph of the house and saw not a poet’s cell or a trans-planted bit of the Old World but the house where I had spent the Bendigo years of my childhood. Distracted on that grey summer day by mutterings about the poet and his unhappiness, I had not recognised the two front windows, the central front door, and the hooded iron verandah roof – the same pattern that was repeated over and over among the gravel footpaths and picket fences and pepper trees of Bendigo and every other goldfields town.

I had failed to notice that the glass I peered through for signs of my first poet was part of the same symmetry that always appeared to me in the streets of Bendigo as a pair of eyes and a nose under a frowning forehead. Those were the eyes of all the people detained where nothing could ever be a subject for poetry or fiction. I would have seen myself as one of those blankly staring people except that my father talked often of taking us for good where we went every Christmas – south-west to his native district on the coast. Indoors on hot afternoons I never peeped around the drawn blinds of my own twin windows because I was thinking of our journey through the hills to Ballarat and then out over the plains.

I could never handle any of the Victorian Readers, published by the Education Department, without imagining a single personage as their compiler. It was a male, the son of a Methodist minister, with two grandparents from Birmingham, one from Aberdeen, and one from Belfast. In his youth he had worked briefly as a jackaroo. Later he had been wounded at Gallipoli. In his mature years, apart from compiling the readers, he was a bushwalker, a lay preacher, and a student of British and Imperial History and Greek and Roman mythology.

In 1949, at a two-roomed school in a forested district a little east of Warrnambool, my teacher actually looked and talked like the Compiler of Readers. And on a certain February afternoon, with his back to a window where deciduous shrubbery framed a sky hazy with bushfire smoke, he took us (his words) for poetry.

Hark! the bells on distant cattle

Waft across the range,

Through the golden-tufted wattle,

Music low and strange;

Like the marriage peal of fairies

Comes the tinkling sound,

Or like chimes of sweet St. Mary’s

On far English ground.

These and forty other lines from ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’ were printed in our Reader (with a new title and their stanzas altered to make them seem like a message of simple optimism). Girls who could be relied on to put feeling into their voices read aloud a stanza each. Then the composite overseer of my childhood explained that although the poet’s love of beauty was apparent, still Gordon was not quite a poet to be proud of. He had not quite become an Australian. Just when the cattle-bells and the wattle should have made him appreciate the true beauty of Australia, Gordon had felt homesick for England.

I did not think it odd that Gordon should be blamed for Englishness by the same authority who taught loyalty to Empire. There were appropriate times for an Australian to think of England: during (Protestant) church services; on Shakespeare’s birthday; at the funeral of a civic or military leader. In general an Australian thought English thoughts indoors and when solemnity was called for. Out of doors one could be Australian, and more light-hearted. Yet I felt a certain sympathy for Gordon. I suspected in those days that a secret meaning was hidden in the landscapes of Australia; and I thought Gordon with his simple home-sickness might have been closer to that meaning than the Compiler of Readers with his breadth of outlook.

The page headed ‘January’ on the calendar always made me think of a yellowish plain of the Western District awash with heat haze. At the beginning of every January I foresaw myself reaching the heart of an actual plain and learning the secret that would keep me for ever afterwards contented in Australia. In January of a year when I seemed more than halfway from childhood to manhood, I found the empty paddock I had been expecting and stood there waiting to think and feel as an Australian. I was aware of nothing I could call an original thought. But if such a thought had come to me, I was sure it would have announced itself in metrical verse. I could almost hear the predictable pattern of stresses, although it had no words with it. Then, when I tried to think of myself as a poet of the Australian landscape, I had to imagine as the place where my words came to me the library of a large homestead with windows overhung by English trees. As my readers I imagined a people who strode in from the white, scorched paddocks and read leather-bound volumes in the half-light of indoors.

In a summer when I was trying not to think of poetry, because I believed I had read too much and lived too little, one of my drinking mates told me about ‘Dingley Dell’. This man seemed to think of Gordon as a poet of the bush, the horseman who had once, for sheer daring, urged his mount over a fence on the edge of the steepest cliff above the lakes at Mount Gambier. And yet this active bushman, so I was told, had shut himself away for two years at ‘Dingley Dell’: a lonely house on a lonely coast where convivial fellows such as ourselves would have gone mad. My drinking mate offered to take me from Melbourne to see the poet’s shrine.

But we detoured too widely on the way; and somewhere near the South Australian border we were too tired and too ill to go any farther. Gordon had not been much of a drinker, but in our crazed banter we chose to confuse him with his Sick Stockrider and with a figure from Australian folk memories: the lonely, misplaced new-chum, already in the horrors from drink and maddened further by the harsh, foreign sunshine and cries of unrecognised birds.

My father, whose forebears arrived in Victoria in the 1830s, scorned all more recent migrants. But he liked to recite by heart from ‘How We Beat the Favourite’. My father could forgive a good horseman much. Remembering the rhythms of racing ballads, and the internal rhymes falling like whip-blows, I looked at Gordon’s poems in the first week of November this year.

Before I turned to the racing verses I looked for evidence that Gordon had looked at the Australian landscape, or felt about it, in some way peculiarly his own. I found that the poet sees his surroundings mostly as a place where he is called on to think in what he assumes to be a poet’s idiom. This stanza is from the dedication to Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.

In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles

’Twixt shadow and shine,

When each dew-laden air draught resembles

A long draught of wine;

When the skyline’s blue burnish’d resistance

Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,

Some song in all hearts hath existence, –

Such songs have been mine.

Substitute an appropriate botanical term for ‘wattle gold’ and the poet might be in the pampas of Argentina, preparing to sing to us.

It is hardly worth raising the trite accusation that Gordon did not see Australia clearly. No doubt he saw it clearly enough for his own purposes, which did not include the writing of poems about the landscape itself. Wattles, distant mountains and horizons were boundaries of the place where poems of reflection occurred to Gordon. He was a poet in the landscape and not a poet of the landscape.

But a racecourse is a landscape – and a landscape that is no mere backdrop but an arena where many doubtful issues can be resolved. The English bookmaker and world-traveller, J. Snowy, writing not long after Gordon’s death, called Melbourne the greatest horse-racing city in the world, where the entire population seemed to exist on racing. Australian writers on popular culture have made many shallow pronouncements on horse-racing. Novels and films set around racecourses seem the work of simpletons. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s racing verses may be not much more than thumping doggerel, but I find it peculiarly appropriate that an early Australian poet should have put on racing silks and ridden at Flemington and Coleraine.

The racecourse must have seemed sometimes to Gordon his landscape of last resort. A man who had been born in Ballarat in the 1890s once told me that he had heard from a former jockey who rode with Gordon. At the barrier before a steeplechase one day at Dowling Forest, Gordon announced that this would be his last race. When he urged his horse like a madman at the first jump, the other riders knew what he had meant. That was the last they saw of him – in racing parlance. He won that day by a great space.

(Age Monthly Review, December 1984)