In this poem about life’s extremes,I was inspired by two Australian Bush Poets –
The first was Pat Hartigan, an Australian priest who died in 1952. Using the pen name of John O’Brien, he wrote Bush Poetry.
Perhaps his most famous poem was
‘Said Hanrahan’
In this poem, Hanrahan predicts
‘We’ll all be rooned’, said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.
Needless to say, it goes on, and on, and on. There are 21 verses or 84 lines!
Further inspiration came from Dorothea Mackellar, an Australian poet and fiction writer who died in 1968. Her best-known poem is almost certainly
‘My Country’
She wrote it when she was just 19 and living in England.
The second verse is best known and starts with
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
A parish priest, Pat Hartigan
(as John O’Brien) used Hanrahan,
to illustrate how life’s extremes,
like pessimists, destroy our dreams.
For Hanrahan, with tales of woe,
convinced his friends it would be so:
if God sent rain or God sent drought
we’d all be ‘rooned’, without a doubt.
Mackellar on the other hand
saw beauty in our sunburnt land.
An optimist, she set thoughts free,
with sweeping plains and ‘jewel-sea’!
She knew that famine, fire, and flood,
would bring new growth, life out of mud,
and nature would, a veil of green,
spread o’er the land that’d sunburnt been.
Yes, hist’ry’s shown, Australia’s clime,
can fool us all, can seem sublime!
A sudden storm may swamp a town,
or endless drought turn bushland brown.
Though now there’s more than flooding rain,
or sunburnt land that gives us pain.
For neither rhymester could foresee,
the changes wrought this century.
Though Covid lockdowns and vaccines,
and free ‘Rat Tests’ and facial screens,
side-tracked our fear of C O 2,
Deep down we knew, ‘We’re in the poo!’
It’s ‘climate change’ that now gets blamed,
for droughts, and rain, and hurricanes.
The poles will melt, the seas will rise,
‘we’ll all by rooned’, no second prize.
I – P – C – C says we’re too slow,
they warned us thirty years ago,
just one-point-five degrees of heat
would rise the seas, wet all our feet!
And ‘Inconveni’nt Truth’ declared,
that Arctic’s bears could not be spared.
Our way of life we must transform.
Our world must deal with, ‘Perfect Storm’.
Perhaps old Hanrahan was right,
though I prefer Mackellar’s sight!
She knew, for drought to wash away,
we need the clouds and skies of grey.
When life is done, the pessimist,
knows nought of frogs he hasn’t kissed.
He took no chances, weighed each breath,
was left a miser, bored to death.
But optimists know life is hard,
and going broke may leave one scarred.
Yet their mistakes will make them strong,
so they’ll keep striving all day long.
When economic times are tough
the tough get going soon enough.
They turn things ‘round, rebuild their dreams,
and ‘give the bird’ to life’s extremes.
© Marty Langenberg 2011