Australia 1970 - Analysis

A curse that is also a grief-struck love song

Judith Wright’s central claim is brutally paradoxical: the speaker commands the land to Die not out of hatred for it, but because Australia’s wildness is being conquered in a way that can only end in mutual ruin. The poem sounds like an execution order—Die, wild country—yet the insistence on wild creatures dying dangerous till the last breath’s gone reads as admiration for a ferocity the speaker can’t bear to see domesticated. The voice is furious, but it’s the fury of someone watching something loved get dismantled in daylight.

The tone is confrontational from the first line, but it isn’t simple scorn. It’s closer to a hard, prophetic address: the country is spoken to as if it were a living opponent, a proud captive, and a victim all at once.

The dying animals: models of resistance, not trophies

The poem’s first examples—eaglehawk and tigersnake—set the emotional pitch: death is acceptable only if it remains unbroken. The eaglehawk dies clawing and striking, still able to curse through a raging eye. The snake’s last energy is distilled into pure hatred that stains the killer’s sleep with fear like suicide’s invading stain. That simile turns the usual triumph of the hunter inside out. Killing does not purify or prove mastery; it contaminates the human mind with something intimate and self-destructive.

There’s a key tension here: the speaker praises the animals’ fierce refusal to submit, but can only imagine that refusal in the language of dying. The poem can envision resistance vividly, but endurance is harder to imagine under the pressure of conquest.

The ironwood and the dozer-blade: modern violence made ordinary

The poem pivots from animal combat to industrial clearing, and the mood changes from mythic struggle to bleak witnessing. The ironwood doesn’t die in a dramatic duel; it gaps the dozer-blade. That verb makes the tree’s body into a torn mouth, but the real horror is how casual the agent is: a machine doing routine work. When the speaker says, I see your living soil ebb, the damage is framed as a slow hemorrhage—life draining away with each felled tree toward naked poverty.

This section sharpens the poem’s accusation: what’s being destroyed is not only charismatic wildlife but the ground itself, the living soil. Conquest becomes ecological: a stripping down to something exposed, exhausted, and unable to recover.

The soldier-ant’s endurance versus the human mind’s corruption

The command intensifies into a strange, almost desperate request: Die like the soldier-ant, mindless and faithful to your million years. The ant represents deep time and stubborn continuity, but the speaker immediately admits that humans break that continuity: Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind. That phrase is a dagger. It suggests the problem isn’t only tools and appetite; it’s a particular kind of consciousness—planning, dominating, justifying—that becomes torture when applied to a living world.

The speaker’s instruction—stay obstinate; stay blind—is another contradiction. Blindness is usually a lack, but here it’s imagined as protection: if the wild country could remain stubbornly itself, unpersuaded and uneducated into submission, it might keep some integrity even in dying.

When the poem names us: conquerors who poison themselves

The poem’s major turn comes with For we are conquerors and self-poisoners. The address shifts from commanding the country to indicting the human we. The speaker doesn’t pretend neutrality; they are inside the guilty group. Humans are declared more than scorpion or snake, not in nobility but in toxicity: we invent venoms that we make and then die from them even while you die of us. The symmetry is chilling. Australia’s death is caused by human action, but human society is also pictured as ingesting its own poisons—morally, psychologically, and physically.

This is where the earlier images of hated, staining death snap into place: the killer’s dream is haunted because the act of conquest corrupts the conqueror. The poem isn’t sentimental about nature, but it is merciless about what domination does to the human spirit.

Praising drought and dust: the last ally against conquest

The final stanza shocks because the speaker begins to praise what is usually mourned: the scoring drought, the flying dust, the drying creek. The praise isn’t for suffering in itself; it’s for opposition. Even the furious animal is valued because they oppose us still. Nature’s harshness becomes a kind of resistance movement, the last force not yet fully domesticated.

But the ending is not triumphant. It lands on a bleak moral mathematics: we are ruined by the thing we kill. The poem’s final insight is that conquest fails even on its own terms. The wild country’s suffering does not secure human flourishing; it guarantees a shared desolation.

A hard question the poem refuses to soothe

If the speaker can only imagine the country’s integrity as a fierce kind of dying—eaglehawk, tigersnake, ironwood, soldier-ant—what does that imply about survival under conquest? The poem seems to suggest that a tamed, managed, compliant Australia would be a deeper death than extinction: a living body without a raging eye, a landscape stripped to naked poverty while the conquerors quietly drink their own venoms.