But Whats The Use - Analysis

A poem that doubts its own assignment

Lawson’s central claim is blunt: writing the bush for an audience that hasn’t lived it is a kind of forced translation that will fail. The poem opens like a complaint to the literary marketplace—editors demand it—and immediately turns that demand into a problem of perception. The bush isn’t just hard to describe; it’s hard to receive. City and farming readers can never understand it, not because they lack intelligence, but because their eyes are trained for different distances, different rhythms, different stakes.

Even the speaker’s voice carries a weary irony. The repeated question But what’s the use isn’t only rhetorical; it’s the sound of someone who’s been asked to perform authenticity on cue, and who suspects the performance will be misread anyway.

Seeing as the bushman sees: the paradox of shut eyes

The poem’s most revealing contradiction is packed into one strange boast: the bushman sees things The best with eyes shut tightest. Lawson suggests that “seeing” out there is not just optical. It’s memory, endurance, and bodily knowledge—heat, glare, thirst, distance—so intense that ordinary looking almost fails. That line also hints at defensiveness: if outsiders are blind to the bush, the bushman’s authority becomes private and self-sealing, something you can’t test unless you’ve been there.

The landscape is defined by extremes—sun is hottest, stars are most and brightest—so the poem frames the bush as an environment that forces perception to its limits. Understanding isn’t a matter of better description; it’s a matter of being remade by the place.

Not picturesque: the bush as scavenging, watchful, worn

When Lawson does begin “writing bush,” he refuses the postcard version. The first vivid scene is almost brutal: crows at sunrise flopping round where some poor life has run down. The bush opens on death and scavenging, not romance. Even the emus at the lonely tank are defined by vigilance—eyes / Well out for man’s manoeuvres—as if the land has taught its creatures to anticipate human intrusion.

That watchfulness slides into the human figure of the swagman: tramping ’cross the plain, with nothing sadder except the dog that slopes behind. The inventory of gear—water-bag and billy, nose-bag, the fly-scaring turkey-tail—makes hardship tactile and slightly humiliating. There’s no heroic silhouette here; there’s a person being slowly simplified by need.

Distance that lies: the plain’s tricks on the newcomer

Lawson sharpens the idea that outsiders can’t understand by showing how the country misleads the eye. To Jackaroos the plain looks like gently sloping rises, and shrubs and tufts are magnified from miles away. The track itself seems to appear and change—seems arisen up or gently slopin’—as if the land constantly edits what it allows you to believe. This is perception as error-correction: you learn by being wrong, repeatedly, until your body recalibrates.

In that light, the poem’s opening claim becomes more pointed: a reader who hasn’t had their sense of distance rewritten will naturally misread a bush description as exaggeration, dullness, or emptiness.

The hinge: Darling Timber and a breath of home

The poem’s emotional turn arrives with The joy and hope the swagman feels returning after shearing or six months’ tramp Out Back. Suddenly the bush is not only deprivation; it’s a field that makes the smallest sign of settlement feel like rescue. The speaker’s language loosens into relief: weary spirit breathes again, aching legs seem limber at the sight of the Darling Timber to the East. After so much flatness and mirage, a line of trees becomes almost spiritual infrastructure—something that gives direction, scale, and the promise of water and people.

This hinge matters because it shows what the poem thinks “understanding” really is: not admiring scenery, but feeling how a landmark can physically change you.

Back to the refrain, but stranger: bushman, whaler, cockatoos

When Lawson returns to the refrain, it’s altered, and the alteration is the poem’s final sting. Now it’s city folk and cockatoos who won’t understand—cockatoos being noisy imitators, a comic insult aimed at empty repetition. And the bushman oddly becomes a whaler, as if the poem widens from inland hardship to any harsh, specialized Australian work that outsiders consume as story but can’t truly read. The repeated claim—outsiders are blind, real workers see best with eyes shut tightest—hardens into a refusal.

The tension never resolves: the poem insists it’s useless to write the bush, yet it keeps writing it, in energetic, exact snapshots. That contradiction is the point. Lawson’s protest becomes a proof: the bush may not be “understood” by the intended market, but it can still be rendered with enough pressure and truth that the reader feels, at least, the glare, the distance, and the lonely tank at sundown.