An Answer To Various Bards - Analysis

A cheerful counter-myth that knows it’s a myth

Paterson’s central move is to argue that the Australian bush shouldn’t be owned by one emotional register—especially not the grim, death-haunted register he associates with Henry Lawson and other realist writers. He opens in a tone of mock patience, saying he has waited mighty patient while the bards arrive with dreadful, dismal stories about smoky fires and boots…always damp. The complaint isn’t that hardship is invented, but that it’s presented as the bush’s whole truth—an artistic habit Paterson caricatures as an obsession with corpses and the tomb. His answer is not simply optimism; it’s a demand for imaginative range, even prescribing (half-jokingly) a tonic: take something for their livers and be cheerful.

Lawson as “graveyard poet,” and the politics that won’t sit still

The poem’s satire sharpens when Paterson lists Lawson’s tragedies: little ’Arvie, His Father’s mate, then the father himself—an escalating tally that turns grief into a kind of comic bookkeeping. By the time Paterson says Lawson has a graveyard of his own, the joke is doing critical work: it suggests an author can become addicted to a signature darkness, building an aesthetic brand out of death. But Paterson also presses a contradiction in Lawson’s public posture. Lawson can speak in terms prophetic about revolution and people in the street, yet he condemns the shearers who would actually start it as agitators. Paterson is not offering a neat political lecture; he’s pointing out how easily “the bush” becomes a stage where writers perform righteousness while mistrusting real collective action.

The “man from furthest out” versus the “lonely grave”

Paterson admits the charge against him—I “over-write” the bushmen!—and then doubles down. He always see[s] the hero in the man from furthest out, and insists a bushman doesn’t naturally belong to the tomb. That insistence creates the poem’s key tension: is Paterson correcting an unfair gloom, or replacing it with a flattering legend? He tries to keep both truths in view. The bush isn’t only golden sunshine under wattle branches, but it isn’t only lonely grave either. The bushman’s life is rough, he says—yet it’s survivable if he’s built of sterling stuff, a phrase that sounds admiring and also slightly promotional, like a motto stamped on the national character.

The wool-team that makes the city body ache

The poem’s most persuasive evidence arrives when Paterson stops arguing and lets a scene carry the feeling. A man in town, jotting down the figures and adding up the bills, hears a wool-team passing with a rumble and a lurch and is pulled off his perch by memory. The sensory detail—the scent of wool and tar—makes the longing bodily, not ideological. The recollection of the woolshed—shear-blades…a-clicking to Wool away!—is vigorous, communal, and rhythmic, the opposite of the lonely graveyard mood Paterson mocks. And then the poem pivots: the man touches his flabby muscles with regret, his eyes return to the dusty little table, and his thoughts go to sickly children who squall. The bush becomes, paradoxically, a place imagined as healthy from within a city life that is financially orderly but physically and emotionally thinning.

A surrender that’s really a taunt

After that intimate turn, Paterson performs a startling “giving up”: we’ll go no more a-droving; our fathers’ hearts have failed us. But the section that follows is so exaggerated it reads like deliberate bad faith. Yes, the bush has a nasty dash of danger when a long-horned bullock wheels; therefore, he says, let’s embrace comfort, reg’lar meals, and even a job washing bottles. The mock-program grows more grotesque: herd into the cities, crush and crowd, learn to hate the bush, trade aspirations for city life and beer, and even slip across to England where theatres and pubs multiply. The cheerful patriot becomes a satirist of urban drift, suggesting that rejecting bush hardship might also mean rejecting a whole kind of aliveness.

The final compromise: go droving, then “vermilionize the bars”

The ending refuses purity. Paterson signs off to Lawson with friendly disagreement—we must agree to differ—but he also admits that the dream of returning to the road depends on if fortune only favours. And the last couplet lands as both celebration and wink: they will go droving down the river under sunshine and the stars, and then return to Sydney and vermilionize the bars. That final verb punctures any simple heroic poster. The poem’s real claim, finally, is that bush and city are not moral opposites; they are a loop of desire and retreat, nostalgia and convenience— and the stories we tell about them can either trap us in gloom or flatter us into forgetting what we’ve traded away.