Gettin Back - Analysis

A comic ritual of re-entry

Lawson’s poem insists that going back to the bush is not just travel but a re-training of the self: the body, the mouth, the habits, even the conscience have to be coaxed out of city-life and into older rhythms. The repeated curse Damn the city! is funny, but it also works like a chant—each stanza another step in shaking off urban polish. The voice is boisterous and communal at first: When we’ve arrived, When we’ve walked, When we have crossed. It’s a shared experience of relief, as if the speakers are recovering from an illness.

The early details are deliberately heavy and physical: heavy gladstones hauled to the Great Norsouth Hotel, wash and brush, the swapping of biled rags for something soft, then the deep sleep in soft white beds. Even comfort is treated as transitional—something you pass through on the way back to what feels real. The mood is eager, slightly aggressive, and packed with self-mockery: the speakers can’t stop swearing, yet they narrate it with pride.

How the bush returns: tracks, hunger, and talk

The poem’s homecoming isn’t sentimental; it’s practical. The land is read like a working map: box and stringy-bark, newer tree-marked track, gullies dark. What proves you’re getting back is not a vision but appetite: how far it is to tucker, the clear streams that whet our appetites. Lawson makes the “bush” feel like a system that tunes you—distance makes you ask different questions, water changes how you hunger.

Then the re-entry becomes social, even linguistic. On the coach, they try to draw the driver out, cautious about what he knows; they make bloomers and feel awkward, as if city-time has made their bodies clumsy in bush space. The moment of relief is not heroic: they discover the driver is just a liar, like ourselves. That line quietly punctures the romance of bush authenticity. The “real” bush includes bluff, exaggeration, and performance—only the style differs.

Dropping the “g” and picking up the old self

One of the poem’s sharpest jokes is that “getting back” shows up in tiny behaviors. They start to drop the ‘g’ in ing words; good old oaths return; they can sleep at night. Even table manners enter the tally: they can eat our fish with knives and forks. The tension here is deliciously contradictory: the speakers reject the city, but they keep bits of civility, and they’re proud of that too. Lawson suggests identity is a mixed kit, not a pure creed—bush competence can coexist with small imported refinements.

The turn: from “we” to “I” at Nevermind

The poem pivots when the collective travel narrative narrows into a single scene: I’m staying at a lake-side home in a place called Nevermind. Suddenly the stakes aren’t only belonging, but age and desire. The domestic detail—the small hand ‘separator’—anchors the setting in work, not postcard scenery. Then the girl arrives: kind grey eyes, reddish gold hair, and a half-silly, half-powerful belief that poets don’t grow old. The tone shifts into flirtation and boast, but it still keeps Lawson’s bluntness: She’s twenty-two, I’m forty-three.

“Poets don’t grow old”: charm, deception, and bush-backed youth

The poem’s boldest claim is that youth is partly a social agreement. By week’s end, she is only in her eighteenth year, and he is twenty-one—not literally, but as an atmosphere they generate together. Yet Lawson doesn’t let this be purely romantic. The city-bush rivalry returns in new clothing: dandy tourists and straight young bushmen both wonder how the match happened, as if each group polices its own rules of desirability. The speaker’s winning move is not poetic talk but labor: turned out at six o’clock and helped her milk the cows. In this world, youth is earned through usefulness.

Here’s the poem’s prickly question, implied by its own swagger: if the driver is a liar and the lovers revise their ages like a story, is the bush really a place of truth—or just a better stage for the kinds of lies men prefer to tell about themselves? Lawson seems to answer: it doesn’t matter, because some performances are closer to work, and therefore closer to life.