Adam Lindsay Gordon's Bush Poem

 Everyone to me there are few ways I can describe what it is about Australia I feel makes me Australia. All of it is captured in this poem. It's not the landscape though, it's relationship this poet has with it. It's a complex love. It's something so unexpected. It's the attitude of all of us I'd like to think. Read this poem and see if you understand what I mean. It's behind glass in Canberra the seat of the Australian Commonwealth Government. I wonder why?

Adam Lindsay Gordon, poet, 1876
 
In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque,
the weird the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write
Some see no beauty in our trees without shade,

Our flowers without perfume,
Our birds who cannot fly
And our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours.

But the dweller in the wilderness
Acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land
of monstrosities.
He becomes familiar with the beauty of the wilderness
He learns the language of the barren and the uncouth

and Can read the hieroglyphs of the haggard gum trees
blow into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds
Or cramped with cold nights when the Southern Cross
Freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue.

The phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland
Termed the Bush interprets itself
And the poet of our desolation begins to
Comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand
better than the bountiful richness of Egypt.