Dear reader we are disturbed deeply by those who write depressingly about Australia. We know that there is nothing wrong at the heart of this country, because, there is no HEART in Australia. So enjoy with us this snippet from the celebrated poet and scholarly writer A.D.Hope. It tells us much about ourselves, and that’s a damn good thing. Cos our politicians don’t read poetry. They abhor that sort of thing. It reminds the of ” bedwetters”
AD Hope before he karked it. He popularised the broad brimmed hat as equipage for intellectuals before it was commandeered by Manning Clark and Barnaby Joyce.
Editors Note. If you know of someone who is afflicted with bedwetting syndrome, or are a sufferer yourself, please fell free to ring the pcbycp bed-wetter help line. Our trained therapists and psychologists will ensure that you remain marginalised and ineligible for a penny of support from the NDIS. Because bed- wetters are beyond contempt. And besides; they waste water.
AUSTRALIA
A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
“The river of her immense stupidity”, contemporary Australian intellectuals wear an AD Hope Hat as a symbol of respect for deep thinking and Rivers.
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.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
“The Arabian desert of the human mind”Another deep thinking intellectual, Corey Bernardii, who had a taste for literature but lacked the gravitas of AD Hope. Possibly because he lacked a broad brimmed hat like A.D or Barnaby
Which is called civilization over there.