Nineteenth-century poetry often presented national and social aspiration and a strong sense of occasion. Chris Tiffin explores the public rhetoric in Fryer's collection of early Queensland verse

Tiffin, Chris

University of Queensland eSpace

FRYER FOLIOS | DECEMBER 2009 3
Editors   Chris Tiffin, Ros Follett, Mark Cryle, Laurie McNeice, 
 Cathy Leutenegger, Suzanne Parker 
Photographer Mark Sherwood       
Graphic design  Suzanne Parker 
Printed by Westminster Printing, Milton, Qld
NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY 
OFTEN PRESENTED NATIONAL 
AND SOCIAL ASPIRATION AND A 
STRONG SENSE OF OCCASION.  
CHRIS TIFFIN EXPLORES THE 
PUBLIC RHETORIC IN FRYER’S 
COLLECTION OF EARLY 
QUEENSLAND VERSE.
Apart from ‘Waltzing Matilda’,
1 probably the 
best-known early Queensland poems are Mary 
Hannay Foott’s ‘Where the pelican builds her 
nest’ and George Essex Evans’s ‘The women of the 
west’.  Both speak of exploration and dangerous rural 
expansion involving loss and disappointment. Both at 
least hint at the woman’s role in the establishment of 
pastoral and agricultural industries. But while Foott’s 
poem stops at the plangent sense of frustrated love 
and personal loss occasioned by the disappearance 
and presumed death of the explorers, Evans’s poem 
concludes as a memorial to the previously unsung 
heroism of pioneer women who accompanied their 
men out west at the cost of their comfort, society, 
beauty and health. 
For them no trumpet sounds the call, no poet 
plies his arts–
They only hear the beating of their gallant, 
loving hearts.
But they have sung with silent lives the song all 
songs above–
The holiness of sacrifice, the dignity of love.2 
This tendency to step onto the platform—to write the 
grand ceremonial poem—is surprisingly widespread 
in early Queensland poetry. While there is no short-
age of religious or sentimental lyrics deriving from late 
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanti-
cism, there is also extensive profession of municipal, 
colonial and national aspiration couched in biblical, 
classical or heraldic symbolism. The poetry belongs 
to the same genre as the national anthem, ‘Advance 
Australia fair’, which was composed in Sydney in the 
1870s by Peter Dodds McCormick, a Scotsman who 
had emigrated in 1855. The full version of that anthem 
contains the themes that echo through early Queens-
land poetry in attesting an immense exploitable 
natural resource, the might and courage of British 
naval power, a dedication to work for the international 
standing of Australia, welcome to future (British) 
settlers, and determination to show ‘British’ courage 
in defending Australia. Not all of these themes are 
evident in the one (or occasionally two) verses that 
are used for public events today, so it is instructive 
to revisit the whole poem. English cricket supporters 
might well taunt, ‘God save YOUR gracious Queen’, 
when the song adopted for the Australian national 
anthem contains the lines: ‘Her sons in fair Australia’s 
land / Still keep a British soul’.3 
 
Early 
Queensland 
Public 
Poets
Above: George Essex Evans contemplates the future of a federated Australia. 
Fryer Library. George Essex Evans. Papers. UQFL13, Box 4, Photograph 1
UQ LIBRARY4
Nineteenth-century 
Queensland poetry throws 
light on the most puz-
zling line in our national 
anthem: ‘Our home is 
girt by sea’. The problem 
is not, as the wags have 
suggested, ‘Who is Gert?’, 
but rather what the line is 
doing there in a catalogue 
of the natural attributes of 
the country. The previous 
line referred to ‘golden soil 
and wealth for toil’; does 
this one refer perhaps to a 
future fishing industry? The 
answer can be found in the celebratory references to 
Britain as the island fortress which had defied inva-
sion since William the Conqueror. Britain is addressed 
as ‘Steeled in thine ocean fortress, / Walled by the 
surging seas’4 or protected by ‘The fortress waves 
that gird the Sea-King’s home’.5 It is not a large step 
from associating that defensive insularity with Aus-
tralia’s, and seeing Australia as the new Britain in the 
South Seas, as the illustration shows. So, ‘Advance 
Australia fair’s’ ‘girt by sea’ is actually a reminder of 
Australia’s connections to Britain, both its divinely-
provided sea defences, and its continuing depend-
ence on Britain’s naval power.
What is accepted as the 
earliest ‘Queensland’ 
poem is another public 
effusion. Charles Frederick 
Chubb’s ‘An ode: to Sir 
George Bowen, Knight on 
his arrival in Queensland 
1858’6 was written by an 
Englishman who had emi-
grated to Ipswich where 
he practised as a solici-
tor. He was an important 
figure in local business and 
municipal affairs, serving 
as alderman in 1863-64 
and 1873-75 and as mayor 
in 1877. He helped form the Ipswich Agricultural Show 
Society, served as a churchwarden at St Paul’s Angli-
can church, and was on the committee of the School 
of Arts.7 While there are a range of poems in Chubb’s 
oeuvre, his mainstay seems to have been writing 
Prologues for plays, pageants and public events in 
his home town. The visit of Prince Alfred, Duke of 
Edinburgh, in February 1868, occasioned a welcome 
full of gravitas, sense of occasion and patriotism:
’Tis left to thee to tell in Britain’s isle
The glorious realm she has beyond the sea
What faithful hearts shout praises to her name;
What untill’d fields await her people’s strength
To gild with golden ear and blossom as her 
rose.
[ . . . ]
O Noble Prince, whose advent to these shores
Marks a bright epoch in Australia’s history,
We, but a handful of thy mother’s subjects,
Here give thee welcome.8 
Which, strained as the verse may be, was a decidedly 
better welcome than the Prince received in Sydney 
where an Irishman, Henry James O’Farrell, tried to 
assassinate him during a picnic at Clontarf. Shot in 
the back from very close range, the Prince was saved 
only by the ‘brass-and-india-rubber crossovers of his 
fireman’s braces’.9 
 
Chubb’s ‘Ode to Sir George Bowen’ has five stanzas. 
The first one describes the land as pregnant with 
untapped wealth:
                                    these shores
Where nature wild her untold stores
Of wealth has buried; where teeming mines,
With sparkling gems, yet hidden from the gaze
Of man’s quick searching vision, dwell in vain;
Where glorious sunshine darts alone her rays
On fallow ground unbless’d with yellow grain.10
 
The final image of the sun’s rays being inadequate 
because they do not yet encounter a comparable 
gold of wheat shows the ingenuity with which the 
heraldic material could be reworked. The remaining 
stanzas attest to Bowen’s advance reputation as a 
good governor, and hope for wisdom and justice in 
his rule, but not before some waspish mentions of the 
previous misadministration of the colony from Sydney. 
The colony has been ‘pent up unkindly by . . . dubi-
ous nurses from an uncouth school’ but with Bowen’s 
arrival the ‘tyranny shall cease’.
 
Mary Hannay Foott was not as keen as Chubb on 
these public poems, but she tried her hand at a 
couple, the most occasional of which was a con-
gratulatory poem from Queensland to New South 
Wales on the latter’s centenary, 26 January 1888. The 
themes of the poem are NSW’s demographic and 
agricultural expansion, the slave-free and democratic 
history of its colonial labour, and the development of 
education and medicine symbolised in its university 
and hospitals. Much of the later rhetoric of the British 
Commonwealth (as opposed to the Empire) when 
Britain was recast as ‘oldest among equals’ among 
the former colonies, is anticipated in the final Swin-
burnian stanza:
Joy be with thee, O our Sister! We thy kin are 
glad with thee
For the greatness of thy Present–for the glory 
that shall be
When the Noblest of the Nations–SHE we all 
alike hold dear–
Calls thee not alone her DAUGHTER, but for 
evermore her PEER.11 
Foott also had grand visions for Australia which was 
to acquire her regalia of empire and become a gener-
ous alms mistress for the ‘outcast starvelings’ of the 
Old World. Again Foott takes satisfaction in the fact 
that white Australia has been slave-free, but a point of 
extraordinary sensitivity emerges on another aspect 
of the labour force: 
If there be ever so base a foe
Above: Despite 
Frederick Chubb’s 
unassuming title, 
Fugitive Pieces, the 
Australian crest on 
the cover of his book 
suggests the public 
nature of his verse
Above: Federated 
Australia as a reborn 
Britain. From Black 
& White, 23 February 
1901, p. 247
FRYER FOLIOS | DECEMBER 2009 5
As to speak of a time-cleansed stain–
To say, ‘She was cradled long ago,
‘Mid clank of the convict’s chain;’
Ask–as the taunt in his teeth is hurled–
‘What lineage sprang SHE from
Who was Empress, once of the Pagan World
And the Queen of Christendom?’12
 
Celebratory poetry is not perhaps a place where one 
might expect to find dispassionate historical analysis, 
but the breathtaking non sequitur of these stanzas 
still surprises. Foott doesn’t deny the convict herit-
age, but declares that only the lowest of Australia’s 
enemies would ever mention it since it has now been 
‘cleansed’ by time. Should a base enemy (an Eng-
lish cricket supporter, perhaps?) utter the slur, the 
suggested counterattack is to demand the genesis 
of Rome which, having dominated the pagan world, 
went on to become the seat of Christendom at 
least until the Reformation. The genesis referred to, 
of course, is the myth of Romulus and Remus, the 
founders of Rome being suckled by a she-wolf. The 
effectiveness of this retort would lie in its unexpected-
ness. The base taunter would be so bemused trying 
to comprehend what on earth Rome had to do with 
Australia that he might forget about the convicts alto-
gether. Clearly, there are some things that celebratory 
poems do less well than others.
 
Early Queensland’s most prolific writer of public 
verses was George Essex Evans, farmer, journal-
ist, government publicist and Toowoomba-region 
Registrar of births, deaths and marriages. Evans 
had arrived in Australia from England in 1881 and 
within a couple of years was publishing poems about 
‘Greater Britain’, Charles Dilke’s term for what would 
eventually become the British Commonwealth. Evans 
celebrated many levels of Anglo-Saxon union and 
governance with poems on Toowoomba, The Uni-
versity of Queensland, federated Australia, London, 
and the British Empire. In 1901, he won a £50 prize 
for an ode celebrating newly federated Australia. He 
believed that another of his patriotic poems, ‘A federal 
song’ had earlier played a role in the campaign for 
Federation, and Alfred Deakin apparently agreed, for 
on Evans’s death he eulogised him as a ‘national poet 
whose patriotic songs stirred her people profoundly in 
the arduous campaign for union.’13 Essex Evans was 
very clever at deploying the iconography of patriot-
ism. In ‘A federal song’ he asks, ‘Can we break the 
land asunder God hath girdled with the sea?’14 With 
its faint echo of the marriage ceremony’s ‘what God 
hath joined together let no man put asunder’ the line 
annexes Australia’s insular geography as an indication 
that Federation is part of the divine plan. By making 
the place an island, God showed he wants the colo-
nies to federate into one nation. As with Mary Hannay 
Foott’s reference to the ‘convict stain’ it is hard to 
argue against logic like that.
 
Evans’s ‘Queensland University ode’ was written 
in 1906 soon after the decision was taken to found 
the University, so his poem is less about an actual 
References
1  Now known to have been written at Dagworth Station near Winton by AB Paterson in 1895. Curiously in 
view of its later success, Paterson seems never to have regarded the poem very highly.
2  The collected verse of G Essex Evans, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1928, p. 3.
3  ‘Advance Australia fair’. This line was not in the original version of the song but was introduced about the 
time of Federation. The National Library displays both the 1879 and 190[?] versions of the sheet music at 
http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-an24220024 and http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-an6012195 respectively.
4  GE Evans, ‘Queensland to Britain’, The collected verse, p. 243.
5  GE Evans, ‘The crown of empire’, The collected verse, p. 28.
6  Bowen actually arrived in December 1859.
7  G Harrison, ed. Jubilee history of Ipswich: a record of municipal, industrial and social progress. Diddams, 
Brisbane, 1910.
8  CF Chubb, ‘Prologue’, Fugitive pieces, prologues &c, Warwick & Sapsford, Brisbane, 1881, pp. 80-1.
9  R Travers, The phantom Fenians of New South Wales, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1986, p. 20.
10  Fugitive pieces, p. [9].
11  MH Foott, ‘Queensland to New South Wales’, Morna Lee and other poems, Gordon & Gotch, London & 
Brisbane, 1890, p. 24.
12  ‘The future of Australia’, Morna Lee, p. 19.
13  Quoted F McKinnon, ‘Introduction’, GE Evans, The collected verse of G Essex Evans, Angus & Robertson, 
Sydney, 1928, p. [v].
14  ‘A federal song’, The collected verse, p. 7.
15  ‘Queensland University ode’, The collected verse, p. 247.
16  Ibid.
institution with its staff and students than about the 
idea of a university and its influence in the community. 
In a society whose besetting sin is an isolationist and 
feckless complacency, Evans sees the role of the Uni-
versity as inculcating an extensive set of civic virtues.
What makes a Nation? Not its millions vast,
But the stern mould in which its sons are cast;
Not idle boastings of a strength untried;
Not license crowned and liberty denied;
But reverence, knowledge, minds that will not 
swerve,
The brains to rule, but first the hearts to serve;
A people courteous, disciplined, discreet,
Temperate in victory, patient in defeat.15 
 
There was certainly more politico-visionary poetry of 
this sort written in the early days of Queensland than 
there is now. Tastes inevitably change, of course, but 
there are probably some specific reasons for its per-
vasiveness in earlier days. In the first place, verse and 
oral recitation played a much more prominent part in 
entertainment than they do now, and people’s toler-
ance for a highly ornate and formal style of speech 
was much greater. But a more important reason was 
that there was a profound sense in the young colony 
of being raw and lacking taste and ideas. Patriotic 
poetry was an attempt both to practise a form of 
civilised behaviour and to explore ideas of civics 
and national planning. When Essex Evans deplored 
the colony’s being ‘careless of Nature’s dower, / 
And living solely for the passing hour’,16 and hoped 
for an improvement through the clear ideas, up-to-
date information, and mental strength that the new 
University would foster, he was articulating goals that 
are hardly out-dated, even if the appropriate forms of 
rhetoric seem so different today.
CHRIS TIFFIN is an Honorary Research Consultant 
in the UQ School of English, Media Studies and Art 
History, and a long-time Friend of Fryer.


Early Queensland public poets

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