In The Storm That Is To Come - Analysis

An island continent told to stop daydreaming

The poem’s central push is blunt: Australia’s safest future won’t be won by looking outward to imperial wars, but by building inward—especially against drought. Lawson starts with geography as destiny: furthest seas mean Australia is fated to stand alone, so when nations fly at each other, the country should look to her own. That phrase isn’t cozy self-reliance; it’s a warning that the next crisis will punish a nation that confuses prestige with preparedness. The storm in the title is both literal weather and the coming pressure of war, and the poem insists these two threats converge.

The poem’s scornful portrait of the coastal crowd

Lawson’s tone turns cutting when he asks who will actually defend the continent: who shall gallop from cape to cape? He answers with ridicule—people glares at the cricket scores, and later the nation’s fate is treated as less important than the turn of a cricket match. The repeated images of urban spectatorship—standing on the kerb agape, rushing for the special tram—paint the cities as busy but unserious, mobilized for entertainment and routine rather than for survival. The jab about childless, senseless haste also suggests a spiritual sterility: a society that can’t imagine the long future won’t invest in it.

A poisoned “we”: unity preached, exclusion performed

One of the poem’s sharpest tensions is that it calls for national solidarity—the South must look to the South—while also revealing ugly exclusions. The line about a nigger scorches round is racist and dehumanizing; it shows how easily the speaker’s idea of the nation can slip into scapegoating and contempt. That matters because the poem is trying to create a collective we capable of hard, shared work, yet it models a citizenship narrowed by prejudice. The contradiction weakens the moral authority of the speaker even as it clarifies the social world he’s attacking: a defensive nationalism that can turn mean as quickly as it turns practical.

The hinge: drought becomes the real invader

The poem’s key turn comes when war talk is eclipsed by the inland emergency. Lawson admits there may be plenty to man the forts, but the East must look to the West for food. Then he sharpens the claim: every penny and every man should fight the drought, because a deadlier foe than any foreign army is already loose on the western plain. In other words, the invader is not only at the harbor gate; it’s behind the population too, grinding down the interior that ultimately feeds and steadies the nation. The poem reframes defense as water policy—less flags and cannons, more dams, channels, and long-term planning.

Water wasted, futures wasted

Lawson’s most persuasive evidence is his inventory of mismanaged water. He shows the West swinging between excess and absence: a gutter of mud after floods, then dust and drought where water recently lay. The land has a pitiful dam where a dyke should be, and the rain sinks through the silt and sand while floods waste into the seas. These details make the poem’s anger feel earned: the catastrophe isn’t purely natural, it’s also infrastructural and political. When he says they never drive a pile of a lock—only scratch a few mean tanks—he’s accusing the nation of choosing smallness, of refusing the scale the continent demands.

The dream of canals, and the nightmare that wakes “too late”

Near the end, Lawson shifts into visionary mode: he saw a vision of reservoirs, grand canals, and a network of aqueducts turning the Dry Country green. The dream isn’t escapism; it’s a blueprint for what national seriousness could look like. But the poem closes on prophecy, not comfort: we’ll wake too late, with a foreign foe at the harbour gate and a blazing drought behind. That final image pins the country between two fronts—sea and interior—suggesting that neglecting the West doesn’t just impoverish it; it turns the whole nation into a narrow, besieged strip along the coast.

The hardest question the poem leaves hanging

If Australia will fight for Britain or even for Japan, why won’t it fight for its own rivers and plains? The poem’s most unsettling implication is that the country’s loyalties are easier to mobilize than its responsibilities: it can imagine enemies abroad more readily than consequences at home. Lawson’s storm is coming partly because the nation has trained itself to look in the wrong direction.