Australia

A.D. Hope 1938

Until Les Murray’s work (like Noonday Axeman) began appearing in the 1980s, A.D. Hope was indisputedly Australia’s premier poet, with a singular reputation internationally. Unable to publish his debut collection, The Wandering Islands (1955), until his late 40s because some sexually explicit poems fell foul of censorship laws, Hope is now often overlooked in Australian literary circles, deemed a conservative poet whose formality, ‘sexism’, and high tone belong to another age.

“I am basically conservative in most matters,” Hope told journalist David Leser in 1988, while also stating he’d agree with many other labels put on him: “worshiper at the altar of rhyme and formal verse”, a “classicist”, but also a “romantic rationalist”.

While Hope poems such as The Death of the Bird  and  The Double Looking Glass are rated amongst the best 20^th century poems, it’s Australia for which he is most renowned. First published in 1943, Hope said he wrote it “in a disgruntled mood” when he returned home from some time in England. “[The poem] follows me around like a bad smell.”

It certainly gives off the stench of a disgruntled persona. Critic Peter Craven views it as a rejoinder to Dorothy Mackellar’s love song for Australia, My Country (1908), replacing Mackellar’s “sapphire-misted mountains” and “flooding rains” with trees “drab green and desolate grey” and a “river of her [Australia’s] immense stupidity” flooding “her monotonous tribes”. Hope didn’t mean Aboriginal tribes, either, but rather those from Europe that had rolled in since 1788, men he viewed as built only for survival.

Australia’s publication pre-dated A.A. Phillips’ 1950 Meanjin essay introducing the notion of the ‘cultural cringe’, the idea that Australians inexorably compare their culture to international efforts and find it wanting. Hope’s poem could be seen as a poster child for cultural cringe, a work that cringes at not just Australian culture, or the lack thereof, but the nation’s landscape, people (particularly their intelligence and outlook), and cities:

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.

Here we have Hope’s formal verse, his only mode, along with his prodigious intelligence and the diction that Clive James described as “unashamedly grandiloquent – born on the border where the grandiose couples with the eloquent – but the narrative drive” makes it “compulsory to keep reading”. And those who did keep reading discovered a poem that would charm Australians today who want to howl down anything of our nation that strikes them as jingoistic.

But Australia reads more as a lament than a critique, a wish that things might be otherwise. When it came to Australian literature of the time, reactionary movements such as the Angry Penguins and the Jindyworobaks attempted in their own ways to mark our literature as independent and not beholden to the cringe. But Hope, already strongly embraced overseas, ridiculed their efforts. Rather, he established the study of Australian literature at Canberra University College/Australian National University, an idea that caught on – until the forces of decolonisation have in recent years diminished it in Australia’s universities. As Scott Hargreaves wrote:

Once upon a time the great battle was to include more Australian works in the Canon of works students should be made to read in our schools and universities. We can now look with envious eyes at the surge of interest in our literary heritage by intellectuals and academics in the middle of the 20th century, which then petered out in the late 20th century. [Read here]

He also quotes this summation by Geordie Williamson in The Burning Library (Text, 2012):

For a long time there was no such thing as Australian literature. Then for a while, say the half-century from the publication in 1938 of Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, there was. After which it once again faded from view.

Hope often said Australia was, effectively, a poem of its time and that Australian culture in subsequent decades wouldn’t have roused him to write such a work. “People always assume that everything you write applies to your views on the whole of life,” he told Leser. So, if even the author recognises it as of its time – and despite its historic recognition as a great Australian poem – why read it today?

As Susan Lever writes in Hope’s Australian Dictionary of Biography entry, the poet was influenced at Sydney University by his philosophy professor John Anderson’s “fiercely critical approach to received religious, social, and political wisdoms.” She wrote that Hope “resisted religious and political commitment for the rest of his life.”

Notwithstanding its technical proficiency, we should still read Australia because, no matter who might claim it, it’s a poem that, even today, defies easy categorisation. It’s the poem of a free-thinker, willing to risk outrage in his damning assessment of a nation self-satisfied in what he viewed as its philistinism; beholden to unhelpful character myths about both its urban and bush people, and destroying its environment via an over-emphasis on shore-hugging cities. We could only hope that Australian poets today might have the same courage to attack our prevailing political myths, though even then homes for publication of such  would be are scant when the criticisms are of leftist agendas.

Hope told Leser that he was always annoyed that people didn’t appear to read to the end of Australia where he writes that, even in 1943 and with all his caustic words against it, Australia is a place he’d like to live. It’s important to note, however, why he writes it’s somewhere he’d like to live:

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

A.D. Hope’s Australia functions like a scroll from an Old Testament biblical prophet, calling his nation to repent of its ignorance and self-satisfaction, and grow up as a nation. It’s a call as relevant today, perhaps more so, as in 1943.

The full poem can be read here.

This appreciation of ‘Australia’ was authored by Melbourne writer and academic Heath Remington, in 2025, specifically for The Genius of Australia.

Image credit: Milky Way at Nambung Desert, Western Australia, by Trevor Dobson. Flickr, Creative Commons license.