I often wonder if a day will come when these men will rise up—when the wealthy man, perhaps renowned inside[1] for his benevolence, shall see pass before him a band of men—all of whom died in his service, and whose unhallowed graves dot his run—the greater portion hollow, shrunken, burning with the pangs of thirst—others covered with the evil slime of the Diamantina, Cooper, and those far western rivers—burnt unrecognisably in bush fires, struck down by sunstroke, ripped up by cattle, dashed against some tree by their horses, killed in a dozen different ways—and what for? A few shillings a week; and these are begrudged them. While their employer travels the Continent, and lives in all the luxury his wealth can command, they are sweating out their lives under a tropic sun on damper and beef.
This is no exaggerated picture, I can assure you. Marcus Clarke has grasped the meaning of Australia's mountains and forests in his eloquent preface to Gordon's poems; but neither he nor Gordon has written about the plains and sandhills of the far west—it remains for some future poet to do that.
I got a volume of Gordon here the other day, and at length had an opportunity of studying his writings in their entirety. I have long been familiar with his most well-known poems. There is no man within the last century who has achieved such lasting fame as he has. His poems appeal not only to one class of cultured minds, as Tennyson or Browning and that lot; but there is not a bushman or drover who does not know a verse or two of ‘How We Beat the Favourite’ or ‘The Sick Stock-rider.’ I call this fame.
Gordon is the favourite—I may say only poet of the back-blocker; and I am sorry to say Emile Zola is his favourite prose writer. His books are published now in very cheap form, and have a tremendous circulation. A strange partnership indeed, for these two men so different in their tone to share popularity! I am afraid after all the bushman is not a
- ↑ I.e., in the coastal district ; as opposed to outside, or out back—in the interior.
