Adam Lindsay Gordon

He began his life in Australia as a Sheep farmer, however his efforts in this field of work did not pay dividends, he lost his capital and left with nothing but the loves of horses and horsemanship.

He tried gold mining and droving enjoying the varied life that was brought, however upon reaching Melbourne he was to become the ‘Best Amateur Steeplechase Rider in the Colonies.’  He won victory in 1868 riding ‘Babbler’, which was a popular win.

Gordon’s poems were said to be of a stirring and adventurous nature.  Horse racing being a favourite topic. He was a shy man, highly intelligent but reticent to exercise or advertise  his talent. His first poems, anonymously  being sent to magazines scribbled on scraps  of paper It wasn’t until one day when he heard people reciting words of his “How we beat the Favourite’ that he decided to forego his natural shyness and announce his identity as a poet.  His last publication of poems in 1868 opened doors into the literary circles and his fame spread to England. So impressive were Gordon’s words they were used to compliment the dashing  equine scenes of Major Whyte Melville.

However Gordon was a melancholy man and even when flushed with success and congratulations seemingly from every corner of the nation he was found dead from a self inflicted bullet in the brain.

Adam Lindsay Gordon shot himself on June 24th 1870- He was 37 years old.

His statue stands in Gordon Square – Melbourne

He is the only Australian Poet to have a bust in Poet’s corner in Westminster Abbey

In 2002 the Royal Grammar School of Worcester U.K. named a new building after Gordon. It was 150 years since he had attended the school.

Engraved on his headstone are the words:

Question not, but live and labour

Til yon goal be won

Helping every feeble neighbour

Seeking help from none

Life is mainly froth and bubble

Two things stand like stone

Kindness in anothers trouble

Courage in your own

‘Ye Weary Wayfarer’

The influence of old ballads, of Macaulay, of Browning, of Swinburne and others is patent in Gordon’s metres and diction; it could scarcely be otherwise in the case of a poet with whom to read once attentively was to know by heart. But his poetry remains so personal in manner, and springs so directly out of his own mind and experience, that Kendall’s poetry seems by comparison the fruit of culture. Opinion is divided as to whether Gordon is a distinctively Australian poet. One good Australian authority says: “Beyond dispute Gordon is the national poet of Australia”; 2  another says: “Gordon’s work cannot be considered as peculiarly Australian in character.” 3  Unless the two statements are compatible, the popularity of Gordon’s poetry in Australia, and the number of quotations from his work which are current in Australian speech would seem to imply that the former expresses the truth. As mounted trooper, as horse-breaker, as steeple-chase rider, as livery-stable keeper, Gordon spent most of his Australian life among horses. He composed many of his poems while on horseback in the bush, and the rhythm of hoofbeats seems to beat in most of his metres. Not letters but horses were his trade; and he sings not the dreams of a remote spirit, but the joys and sorrows, the hope and despair, the energy and the weariness of the man of action, concerned in the common life of his place and period. To English readers Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poetry seems the very voice of Australia.  

 The reason of this is not any great prevalence of local colour in his writings. Most of his narrative and descriptive poems, such as The Sick Stockrider and Wolf and Hound, were written in the last year of his life, when his fame was achieved in Australia and rapidly growing in England. Apparently, his short sight prevented him from seeing many of the details of nature which give particularity to the descriptions of Kendall and other Australian poets. He was the poet of Australia because he was the poet of the sportsman and the adventurer. The youth whose wildness had unfitted him for English life found in the new country the proper field for his daring and high spirit. Partly owing to his own recklessness and extravagance and partly to a hereditary taint of melancholy, his life was unhappy, and he ended it by his own hand; but, in the saddle and out of it, he was adventurous, brave, “a thorough sportsman.” His poetry is the voice of men who lead adventurous lives, who fight gallantly against long odds, and take defeat almost as a matter of course. It is melancholy in so far as it despairs of success or reward; but it is joyous in its love of the fight for its own sake.    

 Gordon was a poet from his youth. On leaving England, in 1853, he wrote a poem of farewell to home which already showed his characteristic pride and definance. Some years, however, were to pass before he published anything of importance. In 1865, he contributed to Bell’s Life in Victoria what purported to be merely one of the riming tips for horse-races that were not infrequent in that journal, but was, in fact, a fine poem, in which his passion for horses, for the sea and for life alike found expression. More of these racing poems followed; contemporary racing in Australia and memories of hunting and steeplechasing in his youth at home supplied him with subjects during the remaining five years of his life. With the possible exception of Whyte Melville, whom he greatly admired and to whom he dedicated, in a beautiful poem, his volume Bush Ballads, Gordon is the only poet who has used sport as the medium for the expression of his views on life. All his gallant, despairing philosophy finds voice in these poems; and, where other poets have turned to tales of ancient heroism at sea or on the battlefield, Gordon turned to a race-meeting. On these sporting poems, rather than on his reflective poems or his dramatic narratives, Gordon’s popularity rests, not only in Australia but among English readers in all countries. And that popularity is deserved.

The best of them have not only an irresistible fire and pace: Gordon, seeing sport as the best thing in life, could give dignity to its treatment, while his knowledge of poetry and his natural gifts made him a secure, if not an riginal, metrist.    

Poems in Bell’s Life in Victoria and in The Australasian came frequently from his pen; and, in 1867, he collected some of them into a volume, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift The same year saw the issue of a long poem, Ashtaroth, partly founded on Goethe’s Faust, which contains much that is characteristic of Gordon with very little that was of his best. In 1868, Marcus Clark persuaded him to contribute poems to The Colonial Monthly, and he began with the mournful poem Doubtful Dreams. In 1869, full of trouble, he found refuge for a time at a friend’s house, where he wrote his best dramatic lyrics, The Sick Stockrider, The Ride from the Wreck, Wolf and Hound and his most famous racing poem, How we beat the Favourite. In 1870, he published his volume Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes and, a few months later, died by his own hand.    

Gordon occasionally handled old themes, and some of his ballads are stirring. Among his autobiographical poems, Whisperings in Wattle-Boughs, in which he looks back to his wild youth, is full of music and pathos. Many of his reflective poems finely express his ardent joy in activity and effort and his profound melancholy, although in these his metrical debt to Swinburne or another is more insistently noticeable than in his narratives or poems of sport. If Gordon is not a poet of the first rank, he is one in whom both the learned and the unlearned can take pleasure. His spirit of daring, of joy in the fight for the fight’s sake, would appear to be alive yet in Australia; and there is much of Gordon, though there is no imitation of Gordon, in the frank feeling and defiant gladness of the recently published Book of Anzac, over which the Australasian soldiers in Gallipoli have made English readers laugh and weep.