The Two Devines - Analysis

Fame measured in fleece

The poem sets up a world where a person’s worth is counted in work, and work is counted in numbers. At Myall Lake, the shed rings with the constant clash of shear-blades, and the two Devines are introduced less as sons or men than as a benchmark: there wasn’t a man who could match them. Their reputation has travelled across a big map of Australian shearing country—east and west, Walgett, Cooma, southern slopes, western pines—so their identity is already public, already legendary, before we learn anything private about them. The tone in these opening stanzas is admiring and competitive, like camp talk that has hardened into fact.

But even here the poem hints that the Devines’ greatness is not romantic; it is transactional. Their skill is tied to earning power and to the pride of being unbeatable in a shed where everyone is measuring everyone else.

Hard sheep, hard arithmetic

The first real friction comes from the type of sheep: the wether flock is described as Great struggling brutes, their fleece filled with the grass and sand, and seventy sheep counts as a big day’s work. The Devines complain in the language of rates—At a pound a hundred—so the poem makes money talk sound like the natural grammar of shearing. In contrast, the station ewes are pictured as almost designed for profit: bare of belly and bare of neck, with a fleece as light as a kangaroo’s. The Devines’ confidence—We will show the boss—isn’t only about pride; it’s about the sweet spot where speed, ease, and tally line up.

This sets the poem’s key tension: the Devines are both admirable workers and men who can’t stop calculating. The shed is a place where labor becomes sport, but also a place where every joke and boast is tethered to the cheque.

The message that should change everything

The poem’s hinge arrives with sudden seriousness: a message comes that their father lay at the point of death. Paterson gives the moment a hush by placing it in the landscape—stunted pines, dawn-wind’s breath, whispering pines—as if the bush itself has lowered its voice. The Devines ride away at speed, and the distance is concrete and heavy: fifty miles to the hut. For a beat, the poem allows the reader to expect a conventional moral story: famous men brought back to family duty.

But the timing is sharp. They leave at dawn and return by the time the shed was shut, coming back through darkening pines on weary steeds. The physical exhaustion is real; what’s in question is what it was spent for.

Love displaced by the tally

The emotional climax is delivered as deadpan dialogue. The supervisor’s blunt question—Is the old man dead—sets a rough, shed-side standard for what counts as a valid reason to leave. The eldest son answers with an evasive precision: not exactly dead, as good as dead. Then comes the poem’s punchline and its moral exposure: we couldn’t bear such a chance to lose, so they return to tackle the ewes. The phrase chance to lose makes the father’s dying into a kind of scheduling inconvenience, a threat to earnings and reputation rather than a crisis of feeling.

Paterson doesn’t need to sermonize; the comedy is the judgement. The poem holds two truths at once: these are astonishing shearers, and they are capable of treating a parent’s last hours as secondary to a better class of sheep.

A triumphant ending that doesn’t quite settle

The final stanza returns to the shed’s music—merry all day, blades clashing when the fastest shearers are at play—and crowns the Devines with huge tallies: a couple of hundred and ninety-nines. On the surface, it’s a clean triumph: they came back, they proved it, the numbers sing. Yet the poem has already planted an unease that the celebration can’t erase. The shed’s merriment now sits beside the image of a father left behind, still not exactly dead, while the sons chase the perfect run of ewes.

The poem’s central claim seems to be that in this world, excellence can become its own moral system: the Devines are so devoted to winning—by speed, by tally, by cheque—that even family duty gets translated into the language of missed opportunity.

The uncomfortable question the joke leaves behind

If the Devines can ride fifty miles for a dying father and then ride back the same day, what does that say about what truly commands them? The poem invites laughter at their brazenness, but it also asks whether the shed’s values—rate, tally, reputation—are strong enough to make ordinary human grief feel, to them, like a luxury they can’t afford.