The Sick Stockrider

Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade.
Old man, you've had your work cut out to guide
Both horses, and to hold me in the saddle when I swayed,
All through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride.
The dawn at "Moorabinda" was a mist rack dull and dense,
The sun-rise was a sullen, sluggish lamp;
I was dozing in the gateway at Arbuthnot's bound'ry fence,
I was dreaming on the Limestone cattle camp.
We crossed the creek at Carricksford, and sharply through the haze,
And suddenly the sun shot flaming forth;
To southward lay "Katawa", with the sand peaks all ablaze,
And the flushed fields of Glen Lomond lay to north.
Now westward winds the bridle-path that leads to Lindisfarm,
And yonder looms the double-headed Bluff;
From the far side of the first hill, when the skies are clear and calm,
You can see Sylvester's woolshed fair enough.
Five miles we used to call it from our homestead to the place
Where the big tree spans the roadway like an arch;
'Twas here we ran the dingo down that gave us such a chase
Eight years ago -- or was it nine? -- last March.
'Twas merry in the glowing morn among the gleaming grass,
To wander as we've wandered many a mile,
And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,
Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while.
'Twas merry 'mid the blackwoods, when we spied the station roofs,
To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard,
With a running fire of stock whips and a fiery run of hoofs;
Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard!
Aye! we had a glorious gallop after "Starlight" and his gang,
When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat;
How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang,
To the strokes of "Mountaineer" and "Acrobat".
Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,
Close beside them through the tea-tree scrub we dash'd;
And the golden-tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath;
And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crash'd!
We led the hunt throughout, Ned, on the chestnut and the grey,
And the troopers were three hundred yards behind,
While we emptied our six-shooters on the bushrangers at bay,
In the creek with stunted box-trees for a blind!
There you grappled with the leader, man to man, and horse to horse,
And you roll'd together when the chestnut rear'd;
He blazed away and missed you in that shallow water-course --
A narrow shave -- his powder singed your beard!
In these hours when life is ebbing, how those days when life was young
Come back to us; how clearly I recall
Even the yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung;
And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?
Ay! nearly all our comrades of the old colonial school,
Our ancient boon companions, Ned, are gone;
Hard livers for the most part, somewhat reckless as a rule,
It seems that you and I are left alone.
There was Hughes, who got in trouble through that business with the cards,
It matters little what became of him;
But a steer ripp'd up Macpherson in the Cooraminta yards,
And Sullivan was drown'd at Sink-or-swim;
And Mostyn -- poor Frank Mostyn -- died at last, a fearful wreck,
In the "horrors" at the Upper Wandinong,
And Carisbrooke, the rider, at the Horsefall broke his neck;
Faith! the wonder was he saved his neck so long!
Ah! those days and nights we squandered at the Logans' in the glen --
The Logans, man and wife, have long been dead.
Elsie's tallest girl seems taller than your little Elsie then;
And Ethel is a woman grown and wed.
I've had my share of pastime, and I've done my share of toil,
And life is short -- the longest life a span;
I care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil,
Or for wine that maketh glad the heart of man.
For good undone, and gifts misspent, and resolutions vain,
'Tis somewhat late to trouble. This I know --
I should live the same life over, if I had to live again;
And the chances are I go where most men go.
The deep blue skies wax dusky, and the tall green trees grow dim,
The sward beneath me seems to heave and fall;
And sickly, smoky shadows through the sleepy sunlight swim,
And on the very sun's face weave their pall.
Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush-flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.
I don't suppose I shall though, for I feel like sleeping sound,
That sleep, they say, is doubtful. True; but yet
At least it makes no difference to the dead man underground
What the living men remember or forget.
Enigmas that perplex us in the world's unequal strife,
The future may ignore or may reveal;
Yet some, as weak as water, Ned, to make the best of life,
Have been to face the worst as true as steel.

About this Poem:

Though Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) was born on a plantation in the Azores, this poem, first published in the year of his death, has a genuinely Australian flavour and was recited around campfires for decades afterwards. Certainly Gordon was a romantic figure with his horsemanship, his reputed aristocratic connections, his scandalous exile as a kind of 'remittance man' and his suicide at 37 on Brighton Beach, Melbourne.
Gordon has, perhaps deliberately, embodied something of his own mythology in 'The Sick Stockrider'. The speaker seems to have lived rather more than Gordon's 37 years, but he has clearly been, like Gordon and by his own admission, a great horseman and a lover of escapades. Unlike Gordon himself, who ended his own life in depression, he regrets nothing and would live the same life over, if (he) had to live again' Realistically, as might be expected when delivered by a dying man, the narrative wanders somewhat after its arresting beginning. Initially, the stockman is dazedly recalling the 'hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride' that has brought him to this location, but by the end of the first stanza he has recovered enough to boast about the dingo he and Ned chased down together some eight or nine years earlier.

More exploits follow (chasing the 'wild scrub cattle'; fighting it out with 'Starlight' and 'his gang'), but soon he is reduced to less energetic musings and speculations (the fate of sundry companions, destroyed by the hazards of being 'hard livers' (alcoholism, drownings, droving misadventures and so on).

Eventually the mood becomes more valedictory and somewhat philosophical. The stockrider feels no need for any 'last rites'; he thinks "the chances are I go where most men go. He wants no marker for his grave and will be content if, by chance, he happens to hear 'the sturdy station children... romping overhead'.

The persona generated by this monologue slips very readily into Australian outback mythology and, indeed, may have done something to create it. He's adventurous, skilled with horses, a good 'mate, has few if any domestic or property attachments and is more than a little self-dramatising. As a member of the 'old colonial school', Gordon knew what he was talking about. He'd experienced at least a few of these adventures himself and was nursing his wounds (both physical and mental) at the time of his death.

On the other hand, the reader can sense that Gordon, for all his efforts, is not yet truly assimilated. The landscape, despite the scattering of place names, is still rather generalised, even English, in its descriptions. The trees are merely 'big', 'tall' or 'green'; the 'morn' is 'glowing'; the grass is 'gleaming'. In 1869, when The Sick Stock-rider' was written, there is no sense yet of the washed-out, hyperheated, intensely Australian landscapes created by the impressionist painters Streeton and Roberts in the 1890s. Gordon has caught the mythology, and something of the diction, but not yet the landscape to put them in.

Clearly, however, Gordon started something with this poem. The personality type of the stockrider was going to be around for a century and more - either in reality or in shared nostalgia. Quite a few Australian males still measure themselves against 'The Sick Stockrider and by no means all of them live in the country. Women, of course, are mentioned only briefly and sentimentally in the poem. Logan, with whom both the narrator and Ned squandered days and nights, did actually have a wife but she has long
been dead'. Ned, the narrator's faithful friend, does seem to have a daughter but little is made of her.
It's as if The Sick Stockrider' created the template which later and perhaps more sophisticated balladists like 'Banjo" Paterson and Henry Lawson could utilise.
It's interesting to note, too, that the structure Gordon uses here is essentially the same as that used by Paterson in his even more famous The Man from Snowy River, namely a kind of 'fourteener' followed by a line of iambic pentameter. Consider, for instance, 'Now west ward winds the bridle-path that leads to Lindis farm /And yon der looms the double headed Bluff" and compare it with the opening lines from Paterson's poem: 'There was movement at the station for the word had passed a round/ That the colt from old Regret had got a way'. Apart from an extra unstressed syllable at the beginning of Paterson's lines, the metre is the same. One also sees the buried ballad stanza here, the four stresses followed by three stresses in the first line and then the five stresses of iambic pentameter in the second.

But it is more than these similarities with Pater son's classic that explain why The Sick Stockrider been such a popular and durable poem despite infelicities such as its unspecific landscape and its occasional sentimentalities and poeticisms. Certainly, something of the author's own romantic aura surrounds the poem, even invades it, but this in itself could not be enough. There were plenty of wild versifiers ('Breaker" Morant among them) whose poems have not survived nearly as well.

Clearly, it has a little to do with the frequent and resonant use of Australian place names (a technique that was to be used ad nauseam by latter balladists and bush poets). It probably has more to do with the laconic philosophy and the self-mythologising of the
narrator: the reckless rider, the good mate, the nostalgic anecdotalist, the man who is content enough to say that he ill 'go where most men go and will be content to lie in his (probably early) grave hearing someone else's children 'romping overhead'.

The sick stockrider is a likeable, if unrealistic, figure and it's not hard to see why he and his author - have survived so well, despite our changing mores and increasingly urban and multicultural society. Adam Lindsay Gordon, in The Sick Stockrider, was on to something essential - whether we care to admit it or not.