104 Poetry for Students
Because of the similarities of experience,
Americans can generally pick up Australian writ-
ings without much background, aside from the de-
finitions of a few words that are exclusively theirs.
Much Australian poetry, if it is not concerned with
specific natural conditions, reflects life and sensi-
bilities that could be our own. This has been espe-
cially true since World War II, when the bonds be-
tween Australia and the United States became
closer as we fought a common enemy.
Bruce Dawe’s poem “Drifters,” which comes
from his 1962 collection No Fixed Address,is ac-
cessible to American readers. On the other hand,
this is a particularly Australian poem, and if we
look at where it came from we can see that, though
it fits our circumstances, it fits its own land even
better.
Geography tells the tale most eloquently. Aus-
tralia is a huge island that, like America, is thou-
sands of miles away from Europe. Much has been
written about the country’s roots as a prison colony,
a dumping ground for England’s criminals for
nearly a hundred years. Such a history is undeni-
ably important, and will show a residual trace in
nearly all things Australian, such as the deep-
seated, almost maniacal struggle for freedom hinted
at in “Drifters.” Even more important, though, is
the topography of the continent.
In America the wilderness is lush and fertile,
and going into the wilderness in our literature may
be dangerous, but more often than not it means be-
ginning a new and better life. American expansion
moved in one direction, from east to west, with
some of the most fertile soil in the world found in
the Great Plains of the center. Australia’s center,
on the other hand, is a desert, barely inhabitable
and certainly not a garden of prosperity. The penalcolonies were so successful because they offered
nowhere to escape. Prisoners left on the western
edge of the continent stayed there. Over the gen-
erations, the descendants of former convicts and
their jailers developed a civilization, but they cer-
tainly did not plunge into it with the optimism that
drove America’s settlers.
It is not pessimism, exactly, that hangs over
the lives of the people in “Drifters,” but they do
see life as a cycle of hope followed by hope’s aban-
donment. America has its share of idealists, always
pulling up stakes to look for something better, and
its share of desperados who are always on the run,
but “Drifters” comes from a more subtle frame of
mind than that. The people it shows are not going
anywhere; the reader knows that as well as the wife
in the poem does. The phrase “make a wish” at the
end of the poem means different things to Aus-
tralians than to Americans. An American speaker
could, even in the circumstances given, imbue this
phrase with a greater belief that prosperity actually
is just over the next ridge, but Australia, settled
around the edges of a harsh island, offers the
drifters only three possibilities: somewhere like
where they are, or the ocean or the desert. Of course
this is a generalization that ignores all of the beauty
of the land, but it applies to the poem in a general
sense.
“Drifters” offers a picture of hopelessness and
ineffectuality that taps one strain of the Australian
personality without capturing the nation’s good hu-
mor. Dawe captures a feeling of what life is like
for his characters by using the language that he
uses. This poem is specifically, pointedly, as “un-
poetic” as the unhappy lives it presents, relying on
the strength of its well-placed images to keep read-
ers’ attention. Dawe does not let his technical skill
draw attention to itself, but it is all over the piece,
such as the alliteration of “how,” “happy,” and
“home” and assonance of “tears,” “she,” and “here”
in line 5. He makes it read like the kind of poem
that might have been written by the kind of people
that it talks about.
Dawe was considered a master of rendering
common lives in their own terms, of seeing poetry
in the ordinary. In the early 1960’s, when his work
first started to appear, Dawe was considered a pi-
oneer who ignored Australia’s cultural ties to Eng-
land and America and developed an Australian
voice to present Australian people and their con-
cerns. His direct relation to the people of his land
was ground-breaking, but it was also long overdue.
A reader does not need to know anything about
the society or circumstances a poem like “Drifters”Drifters“Drifters” offers a
picture of hopelessness and
ineffectuality that taps one
strain of the Australian
personality without
capturing the nation’s good
humor.”