Les Murray's "The Wilderness" and Henry Lawson's "The Roaring Days" offer profound, yet distinct, reflections on the Australian landscape and its impact on identity. While Lawson, writing from the trenches of colonial experience, often portrays the bush as a harsh but ultimately rewarding frontier, a site of struggle and self-definition, Murray, with a later sensibility, looks to the wilderness not as a battleground but as a sanctuary, a repository of ancient energies and a vital counterpoint to the encroaching artificiality of modern life. Both poets capture the enduring power of the natural world, but their focus shifts from the human drama of settlement to the intrinsic, almost spiritual, value of the untamed.
Lawson's "The Roaring Days," published in 1889, evokes the era of gold rushes and early settlement, a period characterized by bold ambition and often brutal realities. The poem's speaker describes a past filled with "a thousand men" seeking fortune, where "the river ran with gold." This is a landscape shaped by human endeavour, a place where "every man was a king," at least in spirit. The "roaring days" are not peaceful; they are loud with the sounds of industry, desperation, and wild celebration. The bush, here, is a challenge to be overcome, a source of wealth and hardship that forged a particular brand of Australian character. The imagery is active and immediate: "diggers rushing, yelling, plunging," "the thunder of the claim." The wilderness is less about its inherent state and more about its potential for human exploitation and the social formations that arise from it. The poem acknowledges the cost, too, with lines like "the best of all the good things" being "the last." Yet, the overarching impression is one of a formative, if volatile, experience that defined a nation in its nascent stages.
Murray's "The Wilderness," penned much later in 1974, presents a different relationship with the land. His wilderness is not defined by human activity but by its own ancient, irreducible existence. He writes of "The Great Dividing Range," not as a resource to be mined, but as a primal entity, "all rock and scrub and silence." The poem contrasts this with the "cities" and their "neon glare," highlighting the artificiality of human constructs against the enduring power of the natural. Murray’s wilderness is a place of "old Australian time," a repository of ancestral memory and ecological wisdom. He speaks of the "quolls" and "bandicoots" as denizens of this untouched space, emphasizing its intrinsic value and the life it sustains independently of human needs. The tone is one of reverence and a quiet lament for what is being lost. Where Lawson celebrated the human conquest of the land, Murray mourns its diminishing wildness, seeing the wilderness as a necessary balm and a source of authentic being.
The contrast between the two poems can be seen in their approach to "the bush." For Lawson, the bush is the stage for a dramatic human narrative, a place where character is tested and national identity is forged through toil and aspiration. The "bushman" is a heroic figure, albeit often flawed. For Murray, the bush is something larger, older, and more sacred. It is a counter-discourse to the modern world, a reminder of a more profound reality. He describes the wilderness as "unpeopled," but not empty; it is filled with its own life and history. This is a more ecological and spiritual perspective, one that sees humanity as part of, rather than master of, the natural world. While Lawson’s "Roaring Days" captures the pioneering spirit, Murray’s "The Wilderness" calls for a rediscovery of our connection to something wild and elemental, a necessity for survival in an increasingly mechanized existence. Both poems, however, remain powerful testaments to the profound influence the Australian land has had on its people and their artistic expression.