We're From "Uh-straya" Mate! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Banjo Paterson

Banjo Patterson's ballad, "The Man from Snowy River" (1890), is one of Australia's most recognizable poems with an enthralling dialogue and story line that was fit enough to turn into a movie. The poem tells of a prized young colt that has escaped from its corral and joined the wild mountain horses. A crew of noted horsemen is assembled to recapture the horse and, amongst them, is our protagonist, a scrawny kid saddled up on a most unimpressive pony. He's ridiculed by the veterans but is allowed to ride when he's spoken for by Clancy of the Overflow, the protagonist in an earlier (1889) poem by Patterson, and the team heads off into the wild mountain country to commence the chase. However, when the colt bolts down a dangerous descent, all of the horsemen pull reins... all except the scrawny kid from Snowy River. This is a tale that speaks to Australians about the qualities they value most, courage, tenacity and, most of all, mateship.

Born in the town of Orange in New South Wales, Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson is one of Australia's most revered bush poets whose works went a long way toward romanticizing the bushman and the Australian wilderness. His works spoke of the underdog, the heroic and the independent spirit that his characters exhibited.

Answer: Gwen Harwood

Whilst music and the Tasmanian landscape are strong themes in the 386 poems that Gwen Harwood had published, the most powerful of her works are centred on the complex nature of motherhood. Of this aspect, her best-known, and the most widely studied and anthologized piece is the sonnet "In the Park" (1961). A mother takes her child for a walk in the park where she meets her ex-lover and the pair, superficially, share the tales of the lives, loves and children. The ex-lover walks away thanking God that he didn't end up with her.

Harwood was born in Queensland in 1920 but moved to Tasmania where she began work as a university lecturer. She is regarded as one of Australia's finest poets and, after her death in 1995, the Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize was established in her honour.

Answer: Dorothea MacKellar

Australia has adopted many a great verse from our poets and balladeers as unofficial national anthems. Among them is MacKellar's "My Country" (1908), whose second verse

"I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains"

can be quoted by many of her country's residents. It is a poem that exhibits MacKellar's great love for the land and its qualities... its ruggedness, sparse beauty and its quiet terror.

Born in 1885, MacKellar is considered to be Australia's "quintessential bush poet". Her works were inspired by her early years living and working on her brother's farm in New South Wales. As a young woman, she spent a lot of time travelling the world but, judging by her works, she always carried the Australian landscape with her. The above poem, whilst it was published in 1908, was written in 1904. She was 19 years old at the time, living in London and homesick.

Answer: Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Published in 1965, "We Are Going" speaks of the impact of the British settlers' arrival in Australia and the impact that they have on the Aboriginal people. It takes a poke at the white settlers who have no affinity with the land, in contrast to the Aboriginal people who are its physical and spiritual guardians.

The poem is also the title of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's first published collection of poems, incidentally, the first book to be published by an Aboriginal woman in Australia and it made her one of the best selling poets in the country. Though her poems have been criticized in some quarters as being nothing more than propaganda, Noonuccal embraced the slings, describing her style as "sloganistic, civil-writerish, plain and simple."

Born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska in 1920, Oodgeroo Noonuccal was a political activist who was a key figure in successfully pushing for the removal of discriminatory sections within the Australian constitution. She was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire) in 1970 but returned the honour in 1988, the bicentennial of the British settlement in Australia.

Answer: Les Murray

Born in Nabiac on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Murray has been described as "a traditional poet whose work is radically original." Murray has published over 30 collections of poetry, commencing with "The Ilex Tree" in 1965 and finishing with "Collected Works" in 2018. A further volume "Continuous Creation: Last Poems" was published posthumously in 2022.

Known for his linguistic dexterity and his humour, Murray's work encompassed religious values, democracy, modernism, feminism, mysticism and the influence of Aboriginal culture, both on himself and the Australian psyche. Being raised in a rural setting, Murray had a deft feel for small town Australia, and this is also reflected in his writings.

A good example of his development of mysticism as a theme appears in "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow" (1969). The poem is centred around a man openly weeping in the city square in Sydney. He brings the pedestrians, who are unsure as to whether they should be moved by his actions, fascinated or appalled, to a halt. They wonder if the man is a prophet or a man simply overwhelmed by the modern world.

Among the many awards Murray collected during his lifetime was the prestigious T.S Eliot Prize, which he received for his 1996 publication "Subhuman Redneck Poems".

Answer: Judith Wright

Known for her conciseness, Judith wrote in traditional verse and published her first collection of poems, "The Moving Image", in 1946. A strong advocate for Aboriginal land rights, the interactions between the white settlers and the indigenous Australians found a place in her work. So too did the environment and mankind's relationship with it, which she saw as a "catalyst for poetic creation."

However, the strongest theme in her work were the challenges presented to us in life, which is a feature of one of her best works, "Woman to Man", published in 1949. Seen through the eyes of a pregnant woman, the narrator is in awe of the embryo growing within her, the changes that it is making to her body and the wonder of what the future may hold.

Answer: A.D. Hope

The often controversial Alec Derwent Hope was born in New South Wales in 1907 and wrote his first poem, a birthday gift to his mother, at the age of eight... the desire to continue to create works of literature was born and never left him. He was a founding professor of English at the University of Canberra, which would later become the Australian National University, and he would eventually launch the first full university course on Australian literature. Hope published his first collection of poetry, "The Wandering Islands", in 1955 and would release a dozen more volumes before his passing in July 2000.

In "Australia" (1943) he displays an almost ambivalent attitude to the country that he calls home. A pessimistic piece he disputes the notion that Australia is a young country, declares that its vast emptiness and deserts have given it a survivalist instinct that is an indelible part of its character and decries the "five cities" as parasites where "second hand Europeans pullulate/
Timidly on the edge of alien shores."

Answer: Henry Lawson

Lawson is one of Australia's most influential poets, a man who sparked a revival in Australian realism in writing, and a man worthy of having his image incorporated on Australia's ten dollar note.

Lawson was born in poverty, his parents did not get along, and he suffered an infection that saw him totally lose his hearing by the time he was fourteen years old. This appears to have influenced his writings, which are full of irony, pathos and pessimism. He separated himself from other poets of the age by not describing Australia's harsh terrain as a thing of rare beauty but, instead, drew us into a world full of harsh realities. A great example of this is "Up the Country" (1892) which reeks of disillusionment and the crushing weight of isolation in the outback. You won't find any "shining rivers" or "sunny plains" within these verses, instead you will be assaulted by "everlasting fences" and "burning wastes of barren soil and sand". Lawson goes deeper by repeatedly using the phrase "nothing - nothing" to reinforce the loneliness of the bushman in this environment.

The 1890s saw Lawson at his prolific best but a descent into alcoholism and mental issues would see his output fall away significantly. Sadly, he passed away in 1922 at the age of 55.

Answer: Bruce Dawe

Bruce Dawe is one of Australia's highest selling and influential poets. Raised on a farming operation, he was the only one in his family to have completed primary school. He dropped out of school at age 16 and made his way through a multitude of jobs and managed to complete his matriculation as an adult through part time study. He eventually studied teaching, rising to become an associate professor at the University of Southern Queensland.

He had been encouraged to write poetry at an early age. His host of jobs gave him an empathy for the common man and their interests, and these are reflected within his verse. However, it was his time as a member of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and his involvement in the Vietnam War that provided the greatest intensity to his work. The poem "Homecoming" (1968) is one such example and, whilst the title may speak of a welcome return to home, the poem is anything but happy one. Tinged with the question "Why?", this homecoming speaks of the collection of the dead, zipping them into body-bags and shipping them home. Certainly Dawe's most famous poem and one that has been described by Peter Pierce (editor of "The Cambridge History of Australian Literature"- 2011) as "one of the finest threnodies (laments) in the war literature of Vietnam."

Answer: Adam Lindsay Gordon

Gordon was born in the Azores in 1833, but his youth was spent in England. Wild, rebellious and aimless, his father sent to him to Australia in the hope that the new environment would provide him with focus. Based in South Australia, the flora, the landscape, the weather and, most of all, the people fascinated him. All of these sights, sounds and emotions, he would draw into his poetry, which he crafted with a distinctly Australian idiom and was one of the first to do so. The door he opened would pave the way for balladeers, like Banjo Patterson, who followed in his footsteps.

Published in his last poetry collection "Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes" (1870), two weeks before the 37 year old Gordon, suffering from depression, committed suicide on Brighton Beach in Melbourne, "The Sick Stockman" appears to be a reflection of the writer's own life... as Marcus Clarke of The Australian newspaper said in 1870, "the writer has ridden his ride as well as written it". Though it appears that the dying stockman in the poem is significantly older than Gordon, he shares the writer's love for horses and riding and has indulged in a life of daring and adventure. But where he and Gordon differ is that he has no regrets as he passes and, if given the chance, he would live his life the same way.