106 Poetry for Students

thoughts are presented with a tone of resignation

rather than fear. It is likely that the wife feels this

resignation after having moved so many times al-

ready. But rather than communicating with her hus-

band, she yields to her own inner thoughts. It is in-

deed alarming that she does not even know where

they are going, and reader is left to wonder if the

husband knows, either. The wife’s train of thought

then trails back into the past:

—she’ll only remember how, when they came

here,

she held out her hands bright with berries,

the first of the season, and said:

’Make a wish, Tom, make a wish.’

Here, the wife’s introspection turns bitter-

sweet. She remembers that, upon arriving at this

home, the future seemed promising. The same

berries that are now shrivelled were once full and

ripe, and she was full of hope. The woman hold-

ing out her hands, full of berries, to her husband

was both giving a gift and issuing a plea. She en-

treated him to “make a wish,” and she may have

made a wish herself. Most likely both of them

wished to stay, prosper, and be happy. The wish is

now unfulfilled with their leaving. As the poem

concludes on this poignant note, the reader is left

hoping that the family will find the prosperity they

desire.

This poem embodies many of the concerns that

have prevailed in Bruce Dawe’s work. An Aus-

tralian poet, cited by Thomas W. Shapcott in Con-

temporary Poetsas “the most central and pivotal

poet in Australia during the decade of the 1960s,”

Dawe is known for portraying the ordinary lives of

those in his country. Within Dawe’s body of work

the migrant family of “Drifters” coexists with res-

idents of the suburbs, soldiers in Vietnam, and a

raped girl, and many others. By shining their lives

in the light, Dawe demonstrates a deep empathy for

these people. In fact, the title of his 1999 volume

A Poet’s Peopleis both an acknowledgment of, and

an ironic spin on, his distinction. He remains one

of Australia’s most popular, and most widely

taught, poets.

Despite the presence of Dawe’s poetry in the

schools, the poems themselves are not literary or

academic. Instead, they are precise and compas-

sionate pictures of outsiders—“battlers,” Dawe has

called them—communicated in plain language.

Dawe merges these pictures with his overarching

conscience. This conscience is comprised of a deep

commitment to political, social, and religious con-

cerns. In 1964, early in the course of his work,

Dawe spoke at a Commonwealth Literary Fund lec-

ture, elaborating his views on this aspect of poetry:

[There is a] a painful lack of social awareness in our

poetry ... So few genuine poems reflect directly or

indirectly an awareness of the social problems of our

country ... those which concern people everywhere

one way or another ... I mean such issues as graft

and corruption in government, business and industry,

spiritual wickedness in high places. I mean the never-

ending tussle of State versus the individual ... There

are the lost people in our midst for whom no one

speaks and who cannot speak for themselves ... We

seem either too smug or too shy to have a good hard

Drifters

What

Do I Read

Next?

• One of the most recent studies of Dawe’s po-
  etry is Peter Kuch’s Bruce Dawe,published in
  1996 by Oxford University Press. Kuch exam-
  ines Dawe’s poetry using post-Structural and
  post-colonial theory.


• Ken L. Goodwin’s 1988 biography Adjacent
  Worlds: A Literary Life of Bruce Daweis con-
  sidered one of the most influential works about
  the poet, although it is difficult to find in Amer-
  ica.


• One of the most famous and influential books
  about migrant farm workers in the United States
  in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of
  Wrath.This influential book, describing life dur-
  ing the Great Depression, fills in ideas about the
  transient life that are hinted at in “Drifters.”


• “Drifters” is included, with many other signifi-
  cant contemporary Australian poems, in one of
  the best anthologies available, The Bloodaxe
  Book of Modern Australian Poetry,edited by
  John Tranter and Philip Mead. Published in
  1991 by Bloodaxe Books, England.


• Judith Wright is the most respected Australian
  poet of the generation before Dawe’s (she was
  born in 1915). Her poetry is sharp and amusing.
  One of her best collections is The Double Tree:
  Selected Poems, 1942-1976,published in the
  United States by Houghton Mifflin.