Bust of A. D. Hope in “Poet’s Corner”, Garema Place, Canberra (one of a group of three, with two other poets) photographed by Doug Butler, Wikipedia “A.D. Hope” – licensed https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(14) A.D. HOPE (1907-2000)

“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.”

If you were to ask the average Australian to name one poem about Australia, I suspect you’d mostly get the answer “My Country” – as in “I love a sunburnt country” – by Dorothea Mackellar.

Well, that is, if you got any answer at all, or one that wasn’t “Waltzing Matilda”, the country’s unofficial national anthem (aptly enough about a criminal swagman who prefers death to arrest and whose ghost haunts a billabong thereafter) by Banjo Paterson – the latter also probably the answer you’d get if you asked the average Australian to name one Australian poet and not without reason as Australia’s bush balladeer bard and poet laureate.

Or perhaps the official national anthem, “Advance Australian Fair”, for which everyone forgets there’s more than one verse – and only remembers the first because of its use of the word girt, because who puts girt in a national anthem?

And then there’s that other unofficial Australian anthem and greatest lyrical genius of Australia or by any Australian ever – “Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi oi oi!”. There’s actually more lines of this but you get the point.

If I were to name one poem about Australia, however, I’d name the poem I quoted at the outset, aptly and simply titled “Australia”, by Alec Derwent Hope- who would also be the one Australian poet I would name.

Also aptly enough for a poem about Australia by an Australian, it’s taking the p!ss out of patriotic poetic platitudes, presenting Australia as a nation clinging timidly to its coasts while draining its desert continent like a “vast parasite robber-state”.

Mind you, it’s not that much more complimentary to the European civilization of which Australia is a second-hand offshoot – “the learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes which is called civilization over there”.

That pretty much sums up the “savagely satirical” style of A.D. Hope. I was delighted to learn that his highly er0tic verse and “frequent allusions to s€xuality” caused him to be dubbed “Phallic Alec” (in a letter to Norman Lindsay, an Australian also known for his er0ticism).

His style also harked back to eighteenth century poetry, leading an American journal to quip about him as “the greatest eighteenth century poet in the twentieth century”.

“When once asked what poets could do for Australia, Hope replied “oh not much, merely justify its existence”.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)