“Australia” by Bernard O’Dowd.
LAST sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?
The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,
Mix omens with the auguries that dare
To plant the Cross upon your forehead sky,
A virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees.
“Australia” by Bernard O’Dowd written at the dawn of Federation in 1900 refers to a national destiny of a newly federated country. O’Dowd expresses his predictions for Australia’s future in relation to England posing the question “what is Australia to become, are we doomed to repeate our Europeane past?” It is clear in the poem’s last two lines of the first stanza and the second stanza, that O’Dowd is questioning whether Australia will become a replication of England or will Australia have its own identity breaking away from the ‘Motherland’?
It is evident when O’Dowd writes, “A new demesne for Mammon to infest?” that he is questioning the reader to think whether Australia is a new place for England to infest. He calls England a Mammon meaning an evil spirit or deity obsessed with riches. It seems that O’Dowd is predicting that England, obsessed with riches and growth, will use the countries resources for industrial, material and economic purposes inorder to reproduce wealth, class and privilage. The use of rhetorical questions allows the reader to ingest the ideas being presented and question whether Englands influences and O’Dowd’s predictions written over a hundred years ago have come true.
In the second stanza O’Dowd identifies cenotaphs which in my interpretation reffers to the Indigenous Australian inhabitants during that time. I believe it to mean that when O’Dowd states that “in your limits…” he is saying that England has control and will allow only what it wants to. Australia will be “a virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees,” an advantageous country that will support and add to the British Empire.
In a way O’Dowd’s predictions were right and wrong. Australia has shaped its own identity. After federation when Australia established central governance decades passed and it is now considered a free-standing country known for it’s multiculturalism and uniqueness. There are still influences of European culture and Australia still has ties with the British Empire and the monarchy, however, we have become an independent country part of the commonwealth realms.
Australian Literature 