Southerly Busters

“May every sixpence thou savest / Be armed with a centipede’s sting!” cries a penniless youth to the uncle who has taken his watch, ring and Sunday best. The next poem wanders into still stranger company: a shepherd and his hungry dingo on a lonely bush track.

George Herbert Gibson’s comic verse roams late-19th-century Australia, from the pawnbroker’s “Three Golden Balls” to the river gums and dusty tracks far from Sydney. In “The Ancient Shepherd,” a narrator meets a weather-beaten old man whose dog looks as lean as its master, then tries to draw out the cause of his misery. The shepherd has been on a spree in Bathurst, spent his cheque and lost the easy life he remembers—when a traveller could count on a meal and a place to rest. His account grows hotter by the moment. What did the old days offer that the present has taken away?

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