SOURCE: Elliott, Brian, and Adrian Mitchell. Introduction to Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, edited by Brian Elliot and Adrian Mitchell, pp. xv-xxvii. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1970.

[In the following excerpt, Elliott and Mitchell define landscape and politics as the two principal subjects of nineteenth-century Australian poetry.]

Poetry is one of the expressions of the community consciousness; in surveying the poetry of Australia to about 1920 we have kept very much in mind the community which produced it, largely a provincial community. The colonial habit of thought was extraordinarily persistent—traces of it are still evident and not just in our poetry. Not that we wished to analyse the colonial mentality per se. Our focus is on the growth of an indigenous poetry. But our premise is that poetry cannot be divorced from the society or the times out of which it grew. This anthology, then, presents perspectives on nineteenth-century Australia. The interest of some of the poems included is mainly historical, yet this we thought was justification enough. It was hardly to be expected that many poems of outstanding merit would emerge from a poetic tradition still in the process of formation—though if any were to turn up, that was a happy bonus. For the most part, the poems were selected on the basis of what they demonstrated about the formation and evolution of local poetic taste, of local habits of thought and modes of thinking, of the colonies' various preoccupations—political, social and moral—and their capacity to express them; in short, for what they contributed to the foundation of the Australian literary tradition. Previous anthologists have gathered their selections piecemeal, choosing the individual poems that pleased them best. And it must be agreed that they did not miss much. But often the poems they passed over had interest of another kind. They might be aesthetically imperfect, but they testified vigorously to the liveliness and activity of poets in colonial times. What they lacked in refinement they made up in representative colour. In this anthology we have looked for more than merely agreeable poems. We have tried to see the past in action, and to discover why, as well as what, the poets wrote.

A suspicion persists that the growth of the Australian literary tradition is necessarily involved with the bush ballads. In fact, bush ballads are a kind of fringe benefit: they are a parallel manifestation of our national growth in letters. They do not appear in this anthology because they are a special field. They are liberally represented in Stewart and Keesing's Old Bush Songs and Australian Bush Ballads and Russel Ward's Australian Ballads. But they do not have much to do with the mainstream of our literary growth; they are peripheral, sub-literary. The study of our poetic growth in its formative years is more concerned with formal literary expression. There are inevitably problems of discrimination, because the two tend to merge in the literary ballad, or a balladist now and then attempts the poetical. But allowing a little latitude, we have cleared the ballad from our selection.

This does not mean we have lost contact with the popular tradition or with the descriptive realism of the ballads, for it emerges that most of the poetry written in the colony was in an essential sense popular. The people made themselves articulate in more ways than through the ballads, though we have perhaps been intimidated by the folklorists into thinking otherwise. Much early verse appeared in the newspapers; much of it was topical, much ephemeral. It was a poetry prompted by the experience of living in the colonies. There are so many laments and nostalgic pieces that a hypothesis is suggested: the overriding Australian theme is memory. FitzGerald's ‘Essay on Memory’ is one of a long succession of poems prompted in the first place by the sense of exile and alienation (nostalgia) and then supported by the puzzled feeling of some fundamental lack in the Australian experience of life (the lack of any past heritage). There are also plenty of satires and a continuing spate of political verse, knockabout pieces testifying to social tensions and a lively social conscience: not always polished verses, but they make up in native vigour what they lack in elegance. There are, too, many examples of occasional or commemorative verses, full of rhetoric and platitudes and exhibiting all the most predictable features of imperialistic sycophancy. Their effusiveness about distant figures and events seems, in perspective, ridiculous; yet it testifies to the colonial yearning for identification with England's pomp and circumstance, to the need to share (if vicariously) in the sense of self-importance so evidently lacking here. And there are, in the mid-century, a number of ardently republican verses, often showing an American influence, and passionately advocating political independence—thus seeking to establish locally the conviction of self-importance. The attitudes reflected in all this newspaper verse are as diverse as the issues are many; in short the restlessness, the turbulence, the conceit and the uncertainty of colonial life are captured with a fullness that the poets can hardly have intended. This is truly contemporary poetry.

None of this writing could be called professional; it was amateur in the best sense, but ad hoc, utilitarian, occasional in its design and intention. There was also poetry of a more ambitious literary kind. In the absence of poets greater, the more ambitious amateurs felt called to fill the vast literary vacuum of the colonial community. With boundless energy and enthusiasm, and little talent, they set about the task, poetic tyros for the most part yet self-appointed arbiters of taste. (Consequently, more especially in the early years but actually all through the colonial period to a diminishing degree, there is frequently a striking gap between poetic ambition and performance. This is to be expected; literary sophistication, the mastery of taste and technique, is not achieved overnight.) These poets tended to conform to a set pattern: they were sent out from England as administrators of institutions still basically eighteenth-century in concept and function, they were educated gentlemen (or gave that impression), they maintained a certain social tone. They had no particular ties with the colony and no intention of staying. They were not gifted with much originality of mind; they were appreciative rather than perceptive. Their literary tastes ran to Pope, Goldsmith, Thomson and Gray, and though they may have been acquainted with the literary figures of the moment, they did not understand the romantic impulse. Barron Field, friend and correspondent of Charles Lamb, is an example. He found the new physical environment uncongenial and inhospitable (despite the whimsical humour of ‘Kangaroo’), and he was unable to come to terms with it. Nature in Australia lacked any subject fit for poetry—it was prosaic, it contained no ‘antiquities’. That was what Field felt most keenly, his separation from cultural continuity, the absence of tradition:

We've nothing left us but anticipation,
Better (I grant) than utter selfishness,
Yet too o'erweening—too American;
Where's no past tense; the ign'rant present's all …

It was unthinkable that poetry could sustain a vision without a firm basis in tradition, or that it could be written outside the established social matrix. The sustaining values of Field and his contemporaries are social, not individual, and this is a crucial factor in understanding early Australian attitudes to poetry and nature. The alternative theme for poetry, a preoccupation with the poet's own self, is entirely alien to Field's temperament (‘utter selfishness’). Inspiration escapes him when every circumstance is new, and relates only to the ‘ign'rant present’. In his poem on the Bowles controversy both imagination and rhetoric fail him, since in Australia there is no reassuring poetic association with the English tradition that he can seize upon—only the English ships in the harbour, which are therefore doubly, i.e. both literally and metaphorically, a means of salvation (‘A ship's the only poetry we see’). His final wish is to escape these oppressive, because uncivilised, shores and to return to the established and enlightened society of England.

The terms of Field's escape are significant. His is the early or rudimentary colonial dilemma: it is not just a matter of going home, but of returning to a social and intellectual structure representing order and good taste. The man of letters at this time operated from within society; the profession of letters was only one aspect of a much wider social activity, and the poet consciously spoke with a social voice. He was not, like the romantics, society's enemy. He held a social responsibility in forming and arbitrating taste or affirming the moral value of sentiment; and his most prominent mission was to engage in the search for the familiar, for that which confirmed and upheld the institutional. In the colonies, though, there was no familiar social order, no sense of pattern or continuity within which the poet could function. Under these conditions, the colonial man of letters was understandably distressed by his imaginative and emotional isolation; he attempted to recreate the English literary tradition in what he could never cease to feel was exile, or something very like it.

The process of social and cultural reconstruction was bound to suffer many setbacks. A tradition cannot really be transplanted; it is the indigenous growth that eventually must prevail. But in any case Australia constituted an ambient from every consideration so contrary to the European experience that imitation very quickly emerged as shallow. Nevertheless, the traditionalists—administrators and public servants, lawyers and politicians—set about scrutinising the environment for anything which might prompt poetic associations and uphold cultural continuity. Richard Howitt, a visitor to Victoria, triumphantly discovered a daisy; later, James Brunton Stephens was dismayed to find that a pretty stream capable of inspiring the right sentiments was prosaically called Quart Pot Creek. The landscape continued to disappoint expectations based on standards and concepts of taste that had been adopted but not yet adapted to local conditions. And while the initial assumptions were uncritically accepted, the disappointments continued. Some of the poets, finding that their immediate surroundings were likely to overwhelm the muse, permitted themselves to wallow in nostalgia (often for suffering Ireland, as well as for beautiful England); they wrote of remembered experience, and the impulse to this was so strong that in the eyes of colonials like Kendall, who had never been to England, it became identified with the idea of poetry itself. His bell-birds sing Maytime songs, even though they sing them in September.

Yet through the disappointments something of value was emerging. The immigrant poets were discovering something about the country, just as the colonials were discovering the country for themselves. They were not yet prepared to acknowledge a spiritual identity with the country or its society or its landscape; but there was a perceptive recognition of the factual details of it, imaginatively conceived. Usually the nostalgic emotion felt for the homeland was retained, but often with a twist: it was transferred to the Australian scene, as a kind of positive and interesting gloom, filling the sense of emptiness previously entertained. Marcus Clarke described the new sensation as ‘weird melancholy’, Wentworth much earlier had called it ‘mournful genius’. Field's kangaroo, the spirit or type of Australia, displays a bizarre harmony as ‘discord well resolv'd’. The terms change with the times, but the intuition remains—G. G. McCrae's ‘Silence of the Bush’ is not well expressed, but it acknowledges an important quality of the landscape and the same experience is still present, elaborated more effectively by D. H. Lawrence in Kangaroo. Bernard O'Dowd noticed that ‘warring rocks harmonious landscapes build’; Vance Palmer tried to express the local paradox—‘strange flowers bloom there like lilies in the mud’. A more modern statement, James McAuley's ‘Envoi’ likewise discerns that beauty in Australia exists in strict disorder and as a wild precision:

Beauty is order and good chance in the artesian heart
And does not wholly fail, though we impede;
Though the reluctant and uneasy land resent
The gush of waters, the lean plough, the fretful seed.

The point is that what has for so long been considered the immigrant's malaise—his shock at being transported to a distant and inverted world, where the seasons were out of phase, the trees shed their bark instead of their leaves, the largest animals bounced, the largest birds ran, and the stars were upside down in the sky—was not just a temporary discomfiture while the new settler adjusted to antipodean circumstances. It anticipated a deeper intuition about the landscape and the peculiar fascination it exerted, and more than that pointed to a perception of a different standard of beauty. The standards they upheld were constructed on inadequate principles, and yet for all that they did have their own kind of truth. Australian poetry in the nineteenth century has as its central thesis the conflict between perception and memory, between what the poets saw and what they thought they saw, or wanted to see.

The complaint that this new land lacked a heritage features prominently throughout the century, from Field's antique land without antiquities to Archibald Strong's ‘Not yet her eyes are clear’. ‘Australie’ (Mrs Emilie Heron) wrote a fine landscape poem which ended on the note that everything was too new to foster poetry; John Dunmore Lang reflected that ‘this beauteous world began / To be but yesterday’, and because no poets so far had celebrated its beauty in song, it was a ‘voiceless shore’. Caroline Leakey mused on ‘a still deeper sense / Of emptiness’ and James Hebblethwaite noticed that the land had no legends. Even Bernard O'Dowd thought of Australia as still ‘a prophecy to be fulfilled’. Although they all appear to be deploring the absence of historical and cultural perspectives, something else was missing—an engagement with the land itself. The settlement of Australia was still too recent for an understanding of the environment, or for the poets to form a sympathetic relationship with it. Australia was a hard country to come to terms with.

Wentworth, like Field, early sensed this absence of contact. In ‘Australasia’ he gave his impression of the spirit of the place, or rather his deeper sense of emptiness, in the following terms:

… the mournful genius of the plain
Driv'n from his primal solitary reign,
Has backward fled, and fix'd his drowsy throne
In untrod wilds, to muse and brood alone.

Leaving aside the hint of timelessness in the land, a further extension, really, of the present argument, Wentworth perceived a kind of distancing between the landscape and the observer. The retreat of the ‘genius of the plain’ (whether the aborigine or not) is not accompanied by any corresponding advance by the settlers, other than the initial fact of their settlement; and it is a retreat further into the wilds. Although Wentworth himself had been one of the party that first crossed the Blue Mountains, ‘Australasia’ reflects the attitudes of a community that could conceive of nothing beyond the mountain ranges. Geographically and imaginatively the mountains were a barrier, and the expansive view came only after the frontiers of settlement had been extended. ‘Australasia’, then, reflects the circumscribed or limited perspective: to Wentworth's contemporaries, even to Harpur, the mountains were the boundary of the imagination's panoramic sweep. So with the retreat of the true spirit of the place further into the interior, Wentworth attempts to represent the divorce, the failure of contact between the land and the newcomers. As with Field, no relationship is formed with the environment. Throughout the nineteenth century the poets struggled to bridge that gap, a conflict which often took the form previously outlined, between perception and memory.

The native-born poets, in coming to terms with their environment, were too ardently nationalist to comprehend with much exactness what they were trying to say. They steered a difficult course between the Charybdis of patriotic enthusiasm and the Scylla of literary imitation. Imitation was, in their case, an even more artificial expedient because they had no direct experience of the matter imitated, only of the manner. In the terms of the suggested formula, their ‘memory’ was of experience at a remove, and that an increasingly distant one. It is remarkable how persistently colonial Australian poetry clings to the conventional literary formulae (one thinks particularly of the pastoral mode, with its nymphs and satyrs, Pans and centaurs). Early colonial poetry is of course late eighteenth-century in disposition and in its general assumptions. The Romantic movement made little real impact until after it had already become somewhat outdated in England: for Harpur, writing in the mid-century, it was a veneer to lay over classicism rather than a major impulse. The English Victorian poets were not without their impact, but that impact was considerably diminished by physical and mental isolation. Attitudes and habits of thought established at the colonial outset were modified only slowly and with difficulty. It is a principle of colonial cultural development that there is inevitably an element of stasis in it. A living tradition is suddenly checked: growth is temporarily halted, the transplanted tree stands stagnant for a time until it recovers its balance—then it grows on new roots. For example, it was automatically assumed at first that outside the familiar (European) landscape all birds and flowers were inferior. That is to say, they were in a literary sense unsanctified; they had not been named and blessed by the poets. This accounts quite largely for Field's quizzical view of the Botany Bay flowers and for the views of others who held mixed feelings about nature in Australia. We have plenty of examples in which poets draw attention to the voices and brilliant colours of Australian birds, and the beauty of local flowers, even quite early; but still in 1854 we recognise as typical Caroline Leakey's ‘English Wild Flowers’ (from her volume called Lyra Australis or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land). Even more surprising, as late as 1870 Gordon could allude to ‘lands where bright blossoms are scentless, / And songless bright birds’ (p. 81). At this time, the apparently slighting reference stung the local pride of many poetical enthusiasts who refuted it with indignation—but some, curiously, seemed anxious to justify the formula on a romantic premise that the admitted inferiority somehow (however obscurely) guaranteed our particular uniqueness. (Echoes of the argument can be detected, for example, in Peterson's ‘Song of the Future,’ and Dorothea Mackellar's ‘My Country.’) It does not really matter whether any one poet is right or wrong about a contention of this sort. What happened was simply that a conventional attitude was set up and, despite the living evidence, continued to be maintained as poetically valid. Clichés and fixed ideas prevailed over evidence. They constituted not so much a species of falsehood, but an attitude which was clogged with prejudice and preconceptions. New and more viable traditions were forced to make their way upstream and against strong currents. To some degree therefore the isolation of Australia from England contributed positively to the developing originality of poetic expression here. Poetry had necessarily to generate its own local energies, and meanwhile the habit of reading and writing was kept alive through imitation of what was approved and familiar in English writing.

The wild and challenging landscape encouraged the poets to write descriptive verse in which, in addition to naming and numbering the beauties of the scene, they diligently laboured to articulate the sublime. Sublimity is a Miltonic or at latest a gothic consummation; but it still held the ideal for the colonial poets, for whom the sublime implied the contemplation of nature leading to thoughts of God. In practice, it amounted to a preoccupation with the picturesque, ‘the strong infection of the age’. It was difficult to achieve sublimity as an aspect of theology in the dust and searing heat. In the forests one was too enclosed to achieve the necessary expansiveness and loftiness of tone; only on the mountains, traditional seat of the muse, could the poet generate anything like the requisite exaltation, inspiration and reverence—preferably with thunder as a side effect. (Sublime poetry generally conscripts exaggerated effects.) Harpur and Kendall wrote much in this mode, though the present selection of their poems does not greatly emphasise it, except perhaps in a few lines from ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’. In all versions of this poem the narrative stresses that the settler and his men are encircled or closed in by the bush; the mountain ranges, in contrast, lead to a larger vista, to a sense—habitual with Harpur, and expressed much more forcibly in the later revisions of the poem—of the wide heavens and thence of the Universal. The moon sails on serenely indifferent to the ferocity of human activity below:

And this should teach us that the empyreal Things
Of God, in their creation, were designed
To witness, sympathisingly, alone
The offices of Unity and Love.

It is to be noticed how Harpur opposes nature (the local scene, savages and whites, etc.) to the universal. The contrast does not quite come off here; Harpur evidently detected the weakness and paid more attention to the larger effects when he made his revisions. The first version has its compensating strengths: the narrative is terser, the action more concentrated. It is, as the poem insists first and last, a tale. But comparison with the version usually printed (a version to be treated circumspectly, since it was vigorously edited and emended after Harpur's death) shows how Harpur's literary aspirations carried him on towards the sublime. Examined critically, the poem displays the kind of accretion of detail that was felt to be indispensable for sublimity. The mistake of many minor poets of the time, not just in Australia, was to assume that piling up grand and massive effects was the only means of achieving a truly elevated style. Mrs Heron provides a case in point: her poem ‘The Weatherboard Falls’ grapples with the problem of finding adequate expression for a subject which, because it seems to be in a category of natural sublimity, demands a corresponding elevation in the style. ‘From the Clyde to Braidwood’, on the other hand (the selection by which she is represented in this volume), in its conclusion curiously turns down the opportunity to indulge in poetical elevation. Expectation is defeated rather than disappointed, when the view of Braidwood comes as an anticlimax to her expedition through the wild beauty of the bush.

Political verse is just as much a part of the mid-century statement as landscape poetry and the sublime. As Judith Wright has carefully demonstrated in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, there always has been a vigorous radical wing in our poetry, from the ‘pipes’ to Lang and Harpur, to O'Dowd, and continuing right up to the present day. But in the mid-century political issues were especially controversial and therefore exciting; self-government, the constitution, transportation and land reform provided plenty of material for argument in verse, and for a wide range of opinion. The republican mood was strong at this time, and the agitation for self-government led to a fair amount of attention to the American political structure. Lang visited the United States twice and his ideas on immigration and republicanism drew strongly on their practice. The colonial press printed numerous articles on events in the United States, and followed the course of the Civil War closely. It took a line independent of Britain in this, too: the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, was critical of the London Times for its Southern sympathies (29 December 1862). The poems of Heney and Farrell remind us that America provided considerable direct influence on literature in Australia. Charles Harpur, who read his Milton and Wordsworth and objected to Tennyson, also read James Russell Lowell and Emerson (and he named his eldest son Washington). By the end of the century, Bret Harte was a considerable influence on the short story writers, Henry George and Mark Twain had visited Australia and Bernard O'Dowd was corresponding with Walt Whitman. It would be unwise to overestimate the strength and size of the American influence, but it would be foolish to ignore it. Australian poetry derived a good deal of stimulus from the new world as well as from the old.

At the time of Federation, nationalism was vitally in the air. Simultaneously or very shortly afterwards there was a reaction against it, expressed in those poets who were discontented with local themes and local scenes and who for new horizons turned deliberately to classical mythology or to fashionable literary developments overseas; or who, like O'Dowd and Brennan and Baylebridge, attempted each in his own way to deal with philosophical abstractions. In every case they were ambitious to write larger than locally. But despite themselves they were writing Australian poetry. For example, they are all obsessed still by the sense of becoming, dominated by a symbolic dawn image. Theirs was a poetry peculiarly committed to the future, as was that of the earlier part of the nineteenth century, but this was also modified by a sense of the present—becoming is gradually replaced by being.

Their idealism was a direct issue from the eager idealism of the later colonial romantics—or more exactly, from what that generation called ‘ideality’. Kendall and his contemporaries were faced with the problem of reconciling their growing preoccupation with landscape, the observed landscape, with the current literary impetus towards a more rarefied, less materialistic vision. These were the terms in which they needed to resolve the old duality of perception and memory. Kendall managed the problem fairly well: he described his favourite mountain haunts with reasonable precision and accuracy, but persistently combined this with allusions to some ideal realm remotely higher up in the mountains, the inaccessible region of the spirit where the creeks come from, and the echoes originate. This is really what his habitual nostalgic mood refers to: he looked for something more uplifting than mere topography. He wanted to get at the soul, the indwelling spirit of the land. Alternatively, since his attitudes are more often poetical than poetic, it can be argued that this nostalgia is of a literary kind. The actual landscape, like all experience grasped by the romantic mind, did not meet expectations; necessarily so, because before the poet's observation comes into play, standards of ‘ideality’ interpose. But by devising his symbolism of the region beyond the known—expressed most lucidly in ‘Orara’—Kendall managed to avoid the dilemma. Unfortunately, by the time he had discovered this solution (and he had really been working towards it for a long time, apparently without fully understanding the drift of his inclinations) he had begun to lose something of his touch. In his obsessive concern with the ideal, though, Kendall was a spokesman for his generation. It took no specific form: the ideal remained vague and insubstantial, and therefore transcendental. Part of the fascination of the ideal was that it had, by its very nature, to remain mysterious, at a remove from the world of men and events.

In the next generation this idealism took a very precise and immediate turn; it was a political idealism. The optimists took it for granted that Federation would usher in the millenium; their attention was concentrated on the various social and cultural achievements that seemed to reinforce this view. Less sanguine temperaments kept a watchful eye on events too; but in either case it was a time for summing up, for auditing the books as it were, and making some appraisal of the cultural achievement as well as decisions on what the future program should be. This is the era that first seriously explored what it meant to be an Australian, beginning perhaps with Francis Adams' preliminary essay (there had of course been discussion of ‘the coming Australian’ for a good many years before this), and initiating a self-conscious preoccupation with the national character and national image that has, alas, even yet to be exorcised.

Perhaps this national self-analysis prompted an interest in our Irish heritage; probably the concurrent nationalist revival in Ireland was responsible—but whatever the cause, Australia had at the turn of the century its own version of the Celtic Twilight. A good many of the poets were of Irish extraction; the number is remarkable, especially from about 1890 to 1914. Daley is the principal representative, David McKee Wright another with the richness, the sentiment, the quaintness and lyrical sweetness that characterise the poetry of the Twilight. Roderic Quinn too had some effect in turning contemporary interest away from an insistently Australian viewpoint. Christopher Brennan, who had affinities with this group, consciously resisted involvement with local material, though his imagination, as Irish as theirs, was broad and demanding where theirs was thinly exquisite. O'Dowd is different again—he is not sentimental, though he is mystical, and his political idealism and Irish truculence are of a different stamp. A case can also be made for the inclusion in this group of Mary Gilmore, Hugh McCrae and Shaw Neilson, all of whom share a Celtic freshness of expression with tender sympathies and a sense of magic.

O'Dowd and Brennan are distinguished from the Twilight poets by their awareness of current intellectual movements and ideas, in Europe especially. One thinks particularly of Freud and Nietzsche. The extent of Nietzsche's influence on Australian writers was considerable, and has yet to be examined critically. O'Dowd incorporated him into his poetry confidently, Brennan wrote philosophical papers about him. Norman Lindsay, not himself a poet but a kind of tutelary satyr to a following generation of poets (the Vision school), assimilated something from him and advanced what he understood in a spate of torrid theoretical essays. Hugh McCrae absorbed little of the theory though he matched Lindsay's challenging sensualism—but his was a gentler spirit, and he was never more than a tentative Dionysian. The whole Vision school quoted bits of Nietzsche to give the appearance of intellectual progressivism, and Baylebridge was another who took him up. This is not the place to analyse what elements of Nietzscheanism were most attractive to Australian writers, nor to indicate in what form those ideas were expressed. It is sufficient to say that it was the aesthetic Nietzsche they followed, not the philosophical; and it is more than likely that most of them knew him only at second hand. But the evidence of his influence demonstrates that the writers were beginning to think about thinking.

The intellectual avant-garde who flaunted their acquaintance with the new, fashionable ideas from Europe were guilty of a certain pretentiousness, and the poetry of the time shows an increasing tendency to artificiality, whether it is exhibited in the diction or the subject matter. Classical legend, paintings and books provided the material source but not inspiration. Then came the war, and the poets were confronted with a particularly harsh reality. It at once checked the drift to artificiality and preciosity. There was some patriotic verse, of course, which perpetrated the chauvinism of another country at another time; but it had already begun to sound hollow. The best of the war poetry was strongly personal, as with Manning and Gellert, and this was to be the direction that poetry took afterwards. There were some poets who, never themselves in the arena of war, argued that a baptism of fire must in the long run be good, was even necessary, for the nation. Not that they condoned war—Frank Wilmot protested against it, Zora Cross deplored it—but Strong's view was not without some truth, that Australia had been selfishly indulgent, living in the midst of her fantasies, until brought at last to a real awareness of world events by the Great War:

Not yet her eyes are clear: throughout her brain
          Still swarm the antic creatures of her dream,
                    The idiot jests, the sports that kill the soul,
Yet shall not night lay hold on her again,
          For through the rack she spies the morning gleam
                    Clear on the sword that lights her to her goal.

He was hopeful for Australia's future (the fact that he expected Australia to do her duty by the Empire is a different matter); and in terms of the poetic tradition he prophesied accurately, for there was no reversion to the old colonial attitudes. A new realism was born: not the realism that is attributed to the ballads, but once again an alert responsiveness to the environment, increasingly an urban environment.