Australian Poetry

Humans and the natural worldA.D. Hope * Australia Les Murray * The quality of sprawl * Bat's Ultrasound * Inside Ayers Rock * The Dream Of Wearing Shorts ForeverMark O’Connor * Turtles Hatching * A Queenslander Remembers the Twentieth Century * Rainbow Lorikeets * The Beginning * Moon Over Mindil Beach, N.T. Bruce Dawe * Search and Destroy * Advice to an Interplanetary VisitorHenry Kendall * BellbirdsMidnight Oil * Kosciusko * Blue Sky MineJudith Beveridge * The Domesticity of Giraffes * AppaloosaPeter Skyzynecki * Flying Foxes Neil Paech * zoo: bats/the flying foxesKev Carmody * I’ve Been MovedJudith Wright * The Surfer * At Cooloolah * Flying-fox on barbed wireJohn Kinsella * Chainsaw |

A.D. Hope - AustraliaA Nation of trees, drab blue and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: “we live” but “we survive.”
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt,