Last Week - Analysis

A joke built on being one beat too late

Paterson’s poem makes a single comic misery run: the new-chum arrives in the bush always a moment after the world has finished being interesting. The repeated refrain last week turns time itself into the antagonist. Each outing promises a bushman’s postcard—game birds, a waterfall, a jaunty drive, a noisy pub welcome—and each time the promise collapses into the same verdict: you missed it. The poem’s central claim is simple and sharp: in a culture of confident stories and local knowing, the outsider’s worst fate is not danger but belatedness, a permanent exclusion from the good version of the place.

Backblock birds and the manufactured past

The first scene is almost cruel in its neatness. He tramps ten miles with a loaded gun, yet sees never a one of the turkey or duck he came for. The locals immediately supply a richer, vanished world—flocks of ’em—and their certainty is the point. Paterson lets They said do a lot of work: it suggests a bush habit of turning recent history into legend on demand, the kind of talk that keeps the in-group entertained while the new arrival sweats for nothing.

A waterfall that shrinks, and a threat that turns into gossip

The waterfall episode tightens the joke by mixing disappointment with menace. He brings a camera legs and all, as if he’s prepared for grandeur, but finds the stream was small. Then the line They drowned a man snaps the scene into darker territory: the place becomes dramatic only after the fact, and only in somebody else’s story. The tension here is between the bush as lived reality (hot, reduced, ordinary) and the bush as a rolling narrative that’s always better—or worse—just out of reach.

The turn: from being mocked to mocking himself

The poem’s funniest turn comes when the pattern finally changes hands. After the dead horse and the boast He trotted a match (another suspiciously convenient memory), the new-chum invites bushies to dinner and is caught with not a drop of whisky. Now the refrain shifts from They said to He said: I drank it all up. For once, last week isn’t a weapon used against him; it’s his own confession. The outsider learns the local art—not by mastering the landscape, but by adopting its casual, self-serving storytelling.

What does last week really protect?

If everything good happened just before he arrived, the poem invites a skeptical question: are the bushies describing reality, or protecting their status by keeping the best of the bush permanently unavailable to the newcomer? In the final stanza, the new-chum’s admission hints that the only way into this world is to stop taking its accounts at face value—and start telling them.