The Scapegoat - Analysis

A Bible story retold as bush farce

Paterson’s central move is to take a solemn ritual and make it look like a very human dodge: a community inventing a neat mechanism for moral escape, then discovering that escape won’t stay where they put it. He opens with a jokey, knowing summary of Exodus—Pharaoh’s men go in the soup, the Israelites turn into wandering sundowners—and that tone matters. By the time Moses gives the scapegoat instructions, the poem has already trained us to hear sacred history through an Australian vernacular that treats grandeur as something to be gently mocked.

That mockery isn’t just for laughs; it sets up the poem’s argument that public piety can coexist with private convenience. The scapegoat plan is advertised as perfectly practical—the plan ought to suit—and the line his troubles crystallizes the transfer: sin becomes a load you can shift like debt.

The scapegoat as moral bookkeeping

Once the ritual is established, Paterson pushes its logic until it looks absurdly transactional. The people can do anything—burgled, murdered, even cheated at loo—and still get a spiritual discharge like a bankrupt’s certificate. The key tension here is between sin as a real moral fact and sin as a paperwork problem. Confession, in this world, risks becoming clerical work performed on an animal rather than transformation performed in a person.

Even the choice of goat is suspect. Paterson’s aside about Hunt’s painting near our door—and the guess that it wasn’t their choicest Angora—suggests a community eager not only to offload guilt but to do it cheaply, on one of their weediest. The ritual that pretends to purify the people ends up revealing their meanness: they save their best and sacrifice the seediest.

The hinge: the “accurst” goat refuses the script

The poem turns sharply when the goat, freed, charged straight at the elderly rabbi and rams him just near the back. Until this moment, the scapegoat is treated like a passive container. Now it becomes a character with its own force, and the comedy carries a barb: the community’s transferred ugliness rebounds physically onto the man who officiates the transfer. The rabbi’s sermon has just declared the people’s sins whiter than snow, but the goat’s sudden violence makes that whiteness ring false—too easy, too self-congratulatory.

Crucially, the goat doesn’t merely attack; it studies the scene, gets the lay of the ground, and runs back to the camp. That choice is the poem’s moral engine. The wilderness is supposed to be the end of the story—sin sent away to die alone and unshriven. Instead, the goat’s homing instinct turns banishment into return, forcing the community to face what it tried to export.

Chasing guilt across the desert

The ensuing pursuit is written like a race-day yarn: Abraham has too much toe to handle, odds are shouted, the crowd admires how mighty light the sins ride. That line is funny, but it’s also the poem’s sharpest indictment: other people’s guilt is always easy to carry. The whole mob joins in—priests and deacons, strong and weak—because once the goat comes back, everyone’s invested in sending the burden away again.

Even the rabbi’s surprise history as a bold metallician matters: the dignified moral authority turns out to be an old gambler who can shout Any price when it suits him. Paterson doesn’t need to argue that hypocrisy exists; he lets the rabbi’s own breathless betting expose it.

The camp’s small damages: paste, children, geraniums

When the goat reappears, the poem shifts from epic chase to petty consequence. The bill-sticker’s posters—Use Solomon’s Pills, Great Stoning of Christians—turn the camp into a marketplace of religion, medicine, and spectacle. The scapegoat eating his latest advertisement is more than slapstick: it’s the poem’s way of showing how moral life gets plastered over with slogans, and how reality (a hungry animal) tears right through them.

Then come the traces: a child in the gutter, the dry-licked pail, frightened spouses, and finally the domestic insult of the Rabbi’s geraniums. Sin, once “returned,” isn’t abstract; it shows up as disruption in ordinary spaces—streets, houses, flower-beds. Paterson makes guilt feel less like thunderbolt judgment and more like a mess that spreads everywhere when you pretend it can be cleanly removed.

The moral, and the poem’s last refusal

The ending states its lesson outright—Don’t shift your own sins—but the poem has already earned it through narrative embarrassment. It also widens the moral from human accountability to animal treatment: Be kind to dumb creatures, don’t let them perish of thirst. That addition is telling. The ritual’s cruelty is not incidental; it’s part of the same moral laziness as blame-shifting. If you can treat a goat as a garbage cart for your soul, you’re already practicing the kind of hardness that produces more sin.

And the final joke—Don’t you believe it! about dying in the wilderness—lands as a last, bracing claim: what you send away comes back, whether it’s guilt, responsibility, or the living creature you tried to make into a symbol. The poem’s comedy keeps insisting on that stubborn return, until the only sensible conclusion is personal ownership: your sins will find you, and so will the scapegoat.