Investigating Flora - Analysis

A joke about flora that turns into a bush nightmare

Banjo Paterson builds this poem around a single comic misunderstanding—the word flora—and then lets it unravel an entire little world of social pretension. What starts as a light satire of fashionable Ladies’ Science becomes, by the end, a rough-edged parable about how thin that fashion is once it’s dropped into the Australian bush. The poem’s central claim feels bluntly practical: you can’t import a dainty, status-driven version of science into a place that doesn’t care about your labels, and language itself can betray you when your audience hears it differently.

Professor Brown: authority made ridiculous

Paterson introduces Professor Brown with the inflated grandeur of reputation—world-wide, writer of renown—but immediately punctures it with absurd subject matter: his Treatise on the Morals / Of the Red-eyed Bulldog Ant and his Reasons for Bare Patches / On the Female Native Bears. The joke isn’t anti-science so much as anti-importance. Brown’s authority is real inside scientific circles, but it reads, in this poem’s world, like a man using big titles to cover small human need. Even his role as instructor to the most attractive females is framed as a social weapon—to make their rivals mad—not a serious inquiry.

The “science circle” as picnic theatre

The club’s outings are staged like a parade: a parade of female beauty / In the leadership of Brown. Paterson keeps the science and the social performance constantly rubbing against each other. The women catch beetles on their rugs, but what they call them matters more than what they are: Brown says optera; they say nasty bugs. That tiny translation gap tells you everything: the professor wants classification, the group wants a tasteful story about itself. The poem even suggests the enterprise is doomed because it lacks real desire—no lovely woman can / Feel the slightest interest / In a club without a Man—a line that is both a crude period joke and a clue that this “science” is being treated as a kind of flirtation economy.

The hinge: when flora stops meaning “flowers”

The narrative flips when the party reaches Dontknowwhere, at Lost River, on the road to No Man’s Land—place names that already announce disorientation. The old selector with a stockwhip is not impressed by lectures; he reads bodies and motives. So when Brown says, primly, To investigate your flora, the selector hears not botany but a woman named Flora, and the poem detonates into insult: you howlin’ Brigham Young! and Mormonite gorilla! The humor comes from the collision of registers—Brown’s thin and reedy voice against the selector’s blunt, jealous protectiveness—and from the way Brown’s learnedness becomes useless the moment his key word is misheard.

The poem’s sharpest tension: women as subjects vs. women as “property”

The strangest pressure in the poem is that the “ladies” are constantly described as a collective spectacle—two-and-twenty members, mostly young and mostly fair—yet the conflict is sparked by a local man insisting you don’t get ours! when he thinks Brown wants Flora. The women’s own voices register mostly as noise—shrieked and jabbered—while men argue over what is being “investigated.” And when Flora’s self finally appears, she blows up both fantasies at once: she’s six feet high and freckled with turkey-red hair, not a delicate object of pursuit. Brown’s reaction—a whimper, a dropped bag, a sprint—shows how quickly the authoritative “investigator” becomes a frightened body.

From picnic to Gothic: the bush takes over the story

After the chase, Paterson lets the bush swallow the club. The setting turns grimly animate: ghostly gumtrees block the view; night creatures press in—the mopoke’s hooting, the dingo’s howl, flying foxes jabber. The tone shifts from social satire to something close to black comedy-horror, capped by the macabre line that wary wombats are a-digging... / At those wretched people’s graves. It’s as if the poem is saying: you came to label nature, but nature will happily relabel you—as lost, noisy, preyed upon by fear.

A final, uneasy question the poem leaves behind

Brown insists What I meant was native flowers, but the poem keeps showing how meaning is never fully controlled—especially when class, gender, and place are in the room. If one polite word can trigger a threat to write it with the whip, what does that say about the “civilized” knowledge the club thinks it carries into No Man’s Land?