Some Notes on This Etext
The poems in this etext by Gordon, Kendall, Paterson, and Lawson were compared to other texts, and it should be noted that a series of dots (.....) sometimes indicates (here and elsewhere) that some lines or stanzas have been omitted. The selections from these poets indicates that Stevens was aware of their importance, but he seems to have missed the mark with regards to Paterson — and (in the original) doesn’t even mention his well-known pseudonym, “Banjo”. Excepting “Clancy of the Overflow”, Stevens neglects Paterson’s best work. There could be many reasons for this, perhaps beyond his control, (“Waltzing Matilda”, for example, was not widely published until 1917), but “The Man from Snowy River” (which the movie of the same name is loosely based upon) should certainly have been included. “The Man from Ironbark”, “A Bush Christening”, and “Conroy’s Gap” would also be good choices, and are fortunately available online in “The Man from Snowy River, and other Verses”.
Accents were necessarily removed as follows:
Parkes, “The Buried Chief”:
Or winge\d chariot rolling past?
Domett, “A Maori Girl’s Song”:
On Arapa/ I’ll launch my skiff, and soon be borne away
Foott, “New Country”:
Conde\ had come with us all the way —
Evans, “A Pastoral”:
Darkly, like an arme\d host
Colborne-Veel, “Distant Authors”:
“Aqu/i esta\ encerrada el alma licenciado Pedro Garcias.”
Jephcott, “A Ballad of the last King of Thule”:
Hy-Bra/sil, Manna/n and Eire/,
Wright, “An Old Colonist’s Reverie”:
I sigh for the good old days in the station whare\ again;
Cuthbertson, “Ode to Apollo”:
The sweet-voiced and immortal violet-crowne\d Nine.
Adam Lindsay Gordon: Poems
Henry Kendall: Poems (ed. Bertram Stevens)
“Banjo” Paterson: The Man from Snowy River; Rio Grande’s Last Race
Henry Lawson: In the Days when the World was Wide (Lawson is best known in Australia for his excellent short stories. One book of these, “Joe Wilson and his Mates”, is also online.)
— Alan R. Light, Monroe, N.C., 1997.