This poem, which is best described as “an anti-nostalgic demystification of chivalric heroism” (Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910, Turnhout, Brepols, 2011, p.143), draws…
To describe everyday life in colonial Australia as entirely rural-based in 1900 would be misleading, for the country’s major urban centres, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, housed much of the population and fuelled its commercial vitality…
Henry Lawson produced several interrelated medieval poems c. 1908 which The Bulletin published. ‘Because of her Father’s Blood’ is the third poem of the Sir William series. While the knight is away crusading his aunt, Dame Ruth, is…
At the time Victor Daley composed this poem, a debate had erupted over whether chivalry and romance, at least within the Australian context, were dead. That was certainly the argument put forward in an earlier poem, ‘Romance’ by L. D.,…
This political cartoon by ‘Hop’ enacts a scene from William Shakespeare’s historical play, Henry V. In the scene, Fluellen the Welshman angrily berates the unfortunate Pistol, a crony of Sir John Falstaff, and forces him to eat a…
As a young man, William H. (‘Will’) Ogilvie spent 12 years in outback Australia, ‘horse-breaking, droving, mustering and camping out on the vast plains’ before returning home to Scotland in 1901 (See Clement Semmler, 'Ogilvie,…
Victor Daley was an Irishman who came to Australia as a young man. He wrote romantic verse and was referred to by Vivian Smith as, “one of the most attractive poets of the nineties in Australia” (Vivian Smith, ‘Poetry’, The…
This article from The Argus in 1955 quotes Mr W. A. Townsley, a lecturer in Political Science, on the outlook of Australian Universities as ‘still mediaeval’. Criticising lecturing on the reasoning that it turns out ‘poorly…