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Best Famous Australia Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Australia poems. This is a select list of the best famous Australia poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Australia poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of australia poems.

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Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Song of the Redwood-Tree

 1
A CALIFORNIA song! 
A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air; 
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing; 
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, 
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
Farewell, my brethren, Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters; My time has ended, my term has come.
2 Along the northern coast, Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves, In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country, With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse, With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms, Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense, I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.
The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not; The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not, As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but the future.
3 You untold life of me, And all you venerable and innocent joys, Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, ’mid rain, and many a summer sun, And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds; O the great patient, rugged joys! my soul’s strong joys, unreck’d by man; (For know I bear the soul befitting me—I too have consciousness, identity, And all the rocks and mountains have—and all the earth;) Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Our time, our term has come.
Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers, We who have grandly fill’d our time; With Nature’s calm content, and tacit, huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past, And leave the field for them.
For them predicted long, For a superber Race—they too to grandly fill their time, For them we abdicate—in them ourselves, ye forest kings! In them these skies and airs—these mountain peaks—Shasta—Nevadas, These huge, precipitous cliffs—this amplitude—these valleys grand—Yosemite, To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.
4 Then to a loftier strain, Still prouder, more ecstatic, rose the chant, As if the heirs, the Deities of the West, Joining, with master-tongue, bore part.
Not wan from Asia’s fetishes, Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house, (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds every where,) But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes—peacefully builded thence, These virgin lands—Lands of the Western Shore, To the new Culminating Man—to you, the Empire New, You, promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate.
You occult, deep volitions, You average Spiritual Manhood, purpose of all, pois’d on yourself—giving, not taking law, You Womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love, and aught that comes from life and love, You unseen Moral Essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age, working in Death the same as Life,) You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden National Will, lying in your abysms, conceal’d, but ever alert, You past and present purposes, tenaciously pursued, may-be unconscious of yourselves, Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface; You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures, Here build your homes for good—establish here—These areas entire, Lands of the Western Shore, We pledge, we dedicate to you.
For man of you—your characteristic Race, Here may be hardy, sweet, gigantic grow—here tower, proportionate to Nature, Here climb the vast, pure spaces, unconfined, uncheck’d by wall or roof, Here laugh with storm or sun—here joy—here patiently inure, Here heed himself, unfold himself (not others’ formulas heed)—here fill his time, To duly fall, to aid, unreck’d at last, To disappear, to serve.
Thus, on the northern coast, In the echo of teamsters’ calls, and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers’ axes, The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan, Such words combined from the Redwood-tree—as of wood-spirits’ voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling, The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing, All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving, From the Cascade range to the Wasatch—or Idaho far, or Utah, To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding, The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity—the settlements, features all, In the Mendocino woods I caught.
5 The flashing and golden pageant of California! The sudden and gorgeous drama—the sunny and ample lands; The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south; Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air—valleys and mountain cliffs; The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow—the silent, cyclic chemistry; The slow and steady ages plodding—the unoccupied surface ripening—the rich ores forming beneath; At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where; Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific; Populous cities—the latest inventions—the steamers on the rivers—the railroads—with many a thrifty farm, with machinery, And wool, and wheat, and the grape—and diggings of yellow gold.
6 But more in you than these, Lands of the Western Shore! (These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,) I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr’d, Promis’d, to be fulfill’d, our common kind, the Race.
The New Society at last, proportionate to Nature, In Man of you, more than your mountain peaks, or stalwart trees imperial, In Woman more, far more, than all your gold, or vines, or even vital air.
Fresh come, to a New World indeed, yet long prepared, I see the Genius of the Modern, child of the Real and Ideal, Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, To build a grander future.


Written by Mark Twain | Create an image from this poem

A Sweltering Day In Australia

 The Bombola faints in the hot Bowral tree, 
Where fierce Mullengudgery's smothering fires 
Far from the breezes of Coolgardie 
Burn ghastly and blue as the day expires; 

And Murriwillumba complaineth in song 
For the garlanded bowers of Woolloomooloo, 
And the Ballarat Fly and the lone Wollongong 
They dream of the gardens of Jamberoo; 

The wallabi sighs for the Murrubidgee, 
For the velvety sod of the Munno Parah, 
Where the waters of healing from Muloowurtie 
Flow dim in the gloaming by Yaranyackah; 

The Koppio sorrows for lost Wolloway, 
And sigheth in secret for Murrurundi, 
The Whangeroo wombat lamenteth the day 
That made him an exile from Jerrilderie; 

The Teawamute Tumut from Wirrega's glade, 
The Nangkita swallow, the Wallaroo swan, 
They long for the peace of the Timaru shade 
And thy balmy soft airs, O sweet Mittagong! 

The Kooringa buffalo pants in the sun, 
The Kondoparinga lies gaping for breath, 
The Kongorong Camaum to the shadow has won, 
But the Goomeroo sinks in the slumber of death; 

In the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plain 
The Yatala Wangary withers and dies, 
And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain, 
To the Woolgoolga woodlands despairingly flies; 

Sweet Nangwarry's desolate, Coonamble wails, 
And Tungkillo Kuito in sables is drest, 
For the Whangerei winds fall asleep in the sails 
And the Booleroo life-breeze is dead in the west.
Mypongo, Kapunda, O slumber no more Yankalilla, Parawirra, be warned There's death in the air! Killanoola, wherefore Shall the prayer of Penola be scorned? Cootamundra, and Takee, and Wakatipu, Toowoomba, Kaikoura are lost From Onkaparinga to far Oamaru All burn in this hell's holocaust! Paramatta and Binnum are gone to their rest In the vale of Tapanni Taroom, Kawakawa, Deniliquin - all that was best In the earth are but graves and a tomb! Narrandera mourns, Cameron answers not When the roll of the scathless we cry Tongariro, Goondiwindi, Woolundunga, the spot Is mute and forlorn where ye lie.
Written by Henry Lawson | Create an image from this poem

A Song of Brave Men

 Man, is the Sea your master? Sea, and is man your slave? – 
This is the song of brave men who never know they are brave: 
Ceaselessly watching to save you, stranger from foreign lands, 
Soundly asleep in your state room, full sail for the Goodwin Sands! 
Life is a dream, they tell us, but life seems very real, 
When the lifeboat puts out from Ramsgate, and the buggers put out from Deal! 

A gun from the lightship! – a rocket! – a cry of, "Turn out, me lad!" 
"Ship on the Sands!" they're shouting, and a rush of the oilskin-clad.
The lifeboat leaping and swooping, in the wake of the fighting tug, And the luggers afloat in Hell's water – Oh, "tourist", with cushion and rug! – Think of the freezing fury, without one minute's relief, When they stood all night in the blackness by the wreck of the Indian Chief! Lashed to their seats, and crouching, to the spray that froze as it flew, Twenty-six hours in midwinter! That was the lifeboat's crew.
Twice she was swamped, and she righted, in the rush of the heavy seas, And her tug was mostly buried; but these were common things, these.
And the luggers go out whenever there's a hope to get them afloat, And these things they do for nothing, and those fishermen say, "Oh! it's nowt!" (Enemy, Friend or Stranger! In every sea or land, And across the lives of most men run stretches of Goodwin Sand; And across the life of a nation, as across the track of a ship, Lies the hidden rock, or the iceberg, within the horizon dip.
And wise men know them, and warn us, with lightship, or voice, or pen; But we strike, and the fool survivors sail on to strike again.
) But this is a song of brave men, wherever is aught to save, Christian or Jew or Wowser – and I knew one who was brave; British or French or German, Dane or Latin or Dutch: "Scandies" that ignorant British reckon with "Dagoes and such" – (Where'er, on a wreck titanic, in a scene of wild despair, The officers call for assistance, a Swede or a Norse is there.
) Tale of a wreck titanic, with the last boat over the side, And a brave young husband fighting his clinging, hysterical bride; He strikes her fair on the temple, while the decks are scarce afloat, And he kisses her once on the forehead, and he drops her into the boat.
So he goes to his death to save her; and she lives to remember and lie – Or be true to his love and courage.
But that's how brave men die.
(I hate the slander: "Be British" – and I don't believe it, that's flat: No British sailor and captain would stoop to such cant as that.
What – in the rush of cowards – of the help from before the mast – Of the two big Swedes and the Norse, who stood by the mate to the last? – In every mining disaster, in a New-World mining town, In one of the rescue parties an Olsen or Hans goes down.
) Men who fought for their village, away on their country's edge: The priest with his cross – and a musket, and the blacksmith with his sledge; The butcher with cleaver and pistols, and the notary with his pike.
And the clerk with what he laid hands on; but all were ready to strike.
And – Tennyson notwithstanding – when the hour of danger was come, The shopman has struck full often with his "cheating yard-wand" home! This is a song of brave men, ever, the wide world o'er – Starved and crippled and murdered by the land they are fighting for.
Left to freeze in the trenches, sent to drown by the Cape, Throttled by army contractors, and strangled bv old red-tape.
Fighting for "Home" and "Country", or "Glory", or what you choose – Sacrificed for the Syndicates, and a monarch "in" with the Jews.
Australia! your trial is coming! Down with the party strife: Send Your cackling, lying women back to the old Home Life.
Brush trom your Parliament benches the legal chaff and dust: Make Federation perfect, as sooner or later you must.
Scatter your crowded cities, cut up your States – and so Give your brave sons of the future the ghost of a White Man's show.
Written by John Betjeman | Create an image from this poem

Back From Australia

 Cocooned in Time, at this inhuman height,
The packaged food tastes neutrally of clay,
We never seem to catch the running day
But travel on in everlasting night
With all the chic accoutrements of flight:
Lotions and essences in neat array
And yet another plastic cup and tray.
"Thank you so much.
Oh no, I'm quite all right".
At home in Cornwall hurrying autumn skies Leave Bray Hill barren, Stepper jutting bare, And hold the moon above the sea-wet sand.
The very last of late September dies In frosty silence and the hills declare How vast the sky is, looked at from the land.
Written by Andrew Barton Paterson | Create an image from this poem

The Incantation

 Scene: Federal Political Arena 
A darkened cave.
In the middle, a cauldron, boiling.
Enter the three witches.
1ST WITCH: Thrice hath the Federal Jackass brayed.
2ND WITCH: Once the Bruce-Smith War-horse neighed.
3RD WITCH: So Georgie comes, 'tis time, 'tis time, Around the cauldron to chant our rhyme.
1ST WITCH: In the cauldron boil and bake Fillet of a tariff snake, Home-made flannels -- mostly cotton, Apples full of moths, and rotten, Lamb that perished in the drought, Starving stock from "furthest out", Drops of sweat from cultivators, Sweating to feed legislators.
Grime from a white stoker's nob, Toiling at a ******'s job.
Thus the great Australian Nation, Seeks political salvation.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
2ND WITCH: Heel-taps from the threepenny bars, Ash from Socialist cigars.
Leathern tongue of boozer curst With the great Australian thirst, Two-up gambler keeping dark, Loafer sleeping in the park -- Drop them in to prove the sequel, All men are born free and equal.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
3RD WITCH:Lung of Labour agitator, Gall of Isaacs turning traitor; Spleen that Kingston has revealed, Sawdust stuffing out of Neild; Mix them up, and then combine With duplicity of Lyne, Alfred Deakin's gift of gab, Mix the gruel thick and slab.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble, Heav'n help Australia in her trouble.
HECATE: Oh, well done, I commend your pains, And everyone shall share i' the gains, And now about the cauldron sing, Enchanting all that you put in.
Round about the cauldron go, In the People's rights we'll throw, Cool it with an Employer's blood, Then the charm stands firm and good, And thus with chaos in possession, Ring in the coming Fed'ral Session.


Written by Henry Lawson | Create an image from this poem

To Be Amused

 You ask me to be gay and glad 
While lurid clouds of danger loom, 
And vain and bad and gambling mad, 
Australia races to her doom.
You bid me sing the light and fair, The dance, the glance on pleasure's wings – While you have wives who will not bear, And beer to drown the fear of things.
A war with reason you would wage To be amused for your short span, Until your children's heritage Is claimed for China by Japan.
The football match, the cricket score, The "scraps", the tote, the mad'ning Cup – You drunken fools that evermore "To-morrow morning" sober up! I see again with haggard eyes, The thirsty land, the wasted flood; Unpeopled plains beyond the skies, And precious streams that run to mud; The ruined health, the wasted wealth, In our mad cities by the seas, The black race suicide by stealth, The starved and murdered industries! You bid me make a farce of day, And make a mockery of death; While not five thousand miles away The yellow millions pant for breath! But heed me now, nor ask me this – Lest you too late should wake to find That hopeless patriotism is The strongest passion in mankind! You'd think the seer sees, perhaps, While staring on from days like these, Politeness in the conquering Japs, Or mercy in the banned Chinese! I mind the days when parents stood, And spake no word, while children ran From Christian lanes and deemed it good To stone a helpless Chinaman.
I see the stricken city fall, The fathers murdered at their doors, The sack, the massacre of all Save healthy slaves and paramours – The wounded hero at the stake, The pure girl to the leper's kiss – God, give us faith, for Christ's own sake To kill our womankind ere this.
I see the Bushman from Out Back, From mountain range and rolling downs, And carts race on each rough bush track With food and rifles from the towns; I see my Bushmen fight and die Amongst the torn blood-spattered trees, And hear all night the wounded cry For men! More men and batteries! I see the brown and yellow rule The southern lands and southern waves, White children in the heathen school, And black and white together slaves; I see the colour-line so drawn (I see it plain and speak I must), That our brown masters of the dawn Might, aye, have fair girls for their lusts! With land and life and race at stake – No matter which race wronged, or how – Let all and one Australia make A superhuman effort now.
Clear out the blasting parasites, The paid-for-one-thing manifold, And curb the goggled "social-lights" That "scorch" to nowhere with our gold.
Store guns and ammunition first, Build forts and warlike factories, Sink bores and tanks where drought is worst, Give over time to industries.
The outpost of the white man's race, Where next his flag shall be unfurled, Make clean the place! Make strong the place! Call white men in from all the world!
Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

Tenth Commandment

 The woman said yes she would go to Australia with him
Unless he heard wrong and she said Argentina
Where they could learn the tango and pursue the widows
Of Nazi war criminals unrepentant to the end.
But no, she said Australia.
She'd been born in New Zealand.
The difference between the two places was the difference Between a hamburger and a chocolate malted, she said.
In the candy store across from the elementary school, They planned their tryst.
She said Australia, which meant She was willing to go to bed with him, and this Was before her husband's coronary At a time when a woman didn't take off her underpants If she didn't like you.
She said Australia, And he saw last summer's seashell collection In a plastic bag on a shelf in the mud room With last summer's sand.
The cycle of sexual captivity Beginning in romance and ending in adultery Was now in the late middle phases, the way America Had gone from barbarism to amnesia without A period of high decadence, which meant something, But what? A raft on the rapids? The violinist At the gate? Oh, absolute is the law of biology.
For the *********** seminar, what should she wear?
Written by Henry Lawson | Create an image from this poem

Australias Peril

 We must suffer, husband and father, we must suffer, daughter and son,
For the wrong we have taken part in and the wrong that we have seen done.
Let the bride of frivolous fashion, and of ease, be ashamed and dumb, For I tell you the nations shall rule us who have let their children come! How shall Australia escape it – we in the South and alone Who have taken the sword for no right of England and none of our own? (Can we bring back the husbands and fathers, can we bring the lovers and sons? From the Dead to the homes we have ruined with the fire of our murdering guns?) Who shall aid and protect us when the blood-streaked dawn we meet? Will England, the hated of nations, whose existence depends on her fleet? Who, because of the deer-parks and game-runs where her wheat-fields and pastures should be, Must bring food for her herded thousands and shepherd it over the sea? The beak of the British Octopus, or the Bosses within our reach Who spend the hot days on the Mountains or summer at Manly Beach! The thousands of paltry swindlers who are fathoms beneath our scorn – Or the army of brave sons grown from the children who should have been born! The wealth you have won has been wasted on trips to the English Rome, On costly costumes from Paris, and titles and gewgaws from "home".
Shall a knighthood frighten Asia when she comes with the hate of hell? Will the motor-launch race the torpedo, or the motor-car outspeed the shell? Keep the wealth you have won from the cities, spend the wealth you have won on the land, Save the floods that run into the ocean – save the floods that sink into the sand! Make farms fit to live on, build workshops and technical schools for your sons; Keep the wealth of the land in Australia – make your own cloth, machines, and guns! Clear out the Calico Jimmy, the ******, the Chow, and his pals; Be your foreword for years: Irrigation.
Make a network of lakes and canals! See that your daughters have children, and see that Australia is home, And so be prepared, a strong nation, for the storm that most surely must come.
Written by Robinson Jeffers | Create an image from this poem

The Eye

 The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific--
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs Nor any future world-quarrel of westering And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths-- Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke Into pale sea--look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia, Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleeping Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
Written by Henry Lawson | Create an image from this poem

In the Storm that is to come

 By our place in the midst of the furthest seas we were fated to stand alone -
When the nations fly at each other's throats let Australia look to her own;
Let her spend her gold on the barren west, let her keep her men at home;
For the South must look to the South for strength in the storm that is to come.
Now who shall gallop from cape to cape, and who shall defend our shores - The crowd that stand on the kerb agape and glares at the cricket scores? And who will hold the invader back when the shells tear up the ground - The weeds that yelp by the cycling track while a ****** scorches round? There may be many to man the forts in the big towns beside the sea - But the East will call to the West for scouts in the storm that is to be: The West cries out to the East in drought, but the coastal towns are dumb; And the East must look to the West for food in the war that is to come.
The rain comes down on the Western land and the rivers run to waste, When the city folk rush for the special tram in their childless, senseless haste, And never a pile of a lock we drive - but a few mean tanks we scratch - For the fate of a nation is nought compared with the turn of a cricket match! There's a gutter of mud where there spread a flood from the land-long western creeks, There is dust and drought on the plains far out where the water lay for weeks, There's a pitiful dam where a dyke should stretch and a tank where a lake should be, And the rain goes down through the silt and sand and the floods waste into the seas.
We'll fight for Britain or for Japan, we will fling the land's wealth out; While every penny and every man should be used to fight the drought.
God helps the nation that helps itself, and the water brings the rain, And a deadlier foe than the world could send is loose on the western plain.
I saw a vision in days gone by and would dream that dream again Of the days when the Darling shall not back her billabongs up in vain.
There were reservoirs and grand canals where the Dry Country had been, And a glorious network of aqueducts, and the fields were always green.
I have seen so long in the land I love what the land I love might be, Where the Darling rises from Queensland rains and the floods run into the sea.
And it is our fate that we'll wake to late to the truth that we were blind, With a foreign foe at our harbour gate and a blazing drought behind!

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