Summary Of A. D. Hope's Poem 'Australia'

A.D. Hope’s poem Australia explores the notion of how Country, settled Australian and landscape can some what seem unsettling; his poem explores the spiritual, history and cultural poverty of Australia’s land. Within the seven stanzas of Australia, Hope describes Australia 's culture as being ‘second-hand European’ on ‘alien shores’ (Hope). ‘Second hand Europeans’ raises ideas of a lack of individualism throughout Australia, everyone looks and thinks in the same manner; Australia was not embraced or explored for what it was but instead identified as European land (Hope). The poetic voice in the poem is holding up the European cultural values that arrived on Australia’s land with settlement as the standard; this builds on the notion that there …show more content…
Lawson’s use of a ballet also creates a kind of aura of communication to a wider audience as if the poem want’s to be heard and read, Lawson uses personification which extends this idea of direct communication. This is an instance of personification as Lawson has taken qualities of living things and given them to the river an inanimate thing, this is also due to the fact that the poem is being told by the river; which addressed ideas of …show more content…
Eckermann’s poem Ngingali explores the emotional impact of being apart of the stolen generation and the renewal she experienced in Aboriginal culture after finding her birth mother (Heiss and Minter). Throughout Eckermann’s poem we get this sense that she is speaking about ancestry being about place and land and country; we get a sense of this from the extract ‘my mother is a granite boulder’(Eckermann). Here Eckermann is not just exploring the emotional weight and memory of her mother but that of the country, about country as mother and her own mother as mother and the maternal role and impact they have both played in her reconnection with Aboriginal culture. In the poem Eckermann links her mother, country and language through nature and her physical surroundings, ‘I carry- a people of her in my pocket’ here Eckermann use of imagery gives us the idea that she has put her mother in her pocket but she does not mean this literally (Eckermann). As she is attempting to demonstrate that now she has found and reconnected with both her mother and country she will never loose them again, as now they are forever apart of her identity. Furthermore she as finally reconnected with her birth language, her mother and her country she can no longer ignore her roots her heart culture, she has to now face her cultural legacy and responsibility to