On 27/3/05 1:29 PM, "Janet Jackson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I found this in an old children's anthology (my favourite
> sort of poetry book!)
My favourite children's anthology is Stevie Smith's. But I have all the
books I scrounged from jumble sales and so on when I was a kid, and this -
and Easter and all - gives me the excuse to post a wonderfully awful poem
called "Bannerman of the Dandenong" by someone called Alice Werner. (The
Dandenongs are the hills behind Melbourne). In the little screed before it,
there's a question: What evidence in there in this poem to suggest that it
was written by a person who had never lived in Australia? Well, see if you
can spot it in the first couple of stanzas -
I rode through the bush in the burning noon
Over the hills to my bride -
The track was rough and the way was long,
And Bannerman of the Dandenong,
He rode along by my side.
A day's march off my Beautiful dwelt
By the Murray streams in the West; -
Lightly lilting a gay love-song,
Rode Bannerman of the Dandenong
With a blood-red rose on his breast.
(&c)
It's all about heroic sacrifice during a bushfire (Bannerman, who has the
swiftest horse, swaps it with the narrator's slower grey, and dies
chivalrously with Her name on his lips). Probably the only true thing about
it, given the convict heritage of sodomy, is the "gay love-song". Still, I
was always struck by the image of a stockman/knight with "blood-red rose on
his breast"...haven't seen many of those in my years here, even when I lived
in the country -
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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