Bullocky - Analysis

A man ground down until history floods his head

The poem’s central claim is that the bullocky’s brutal, monotonous labour does not merely exhaust him; it turns time inside out, so that private hardship swells into a prophetic, half-mad vision that later Australia quietly benefits from and forgets. From the start he is fixed beside a heavy-shouldered team, caught between drought and rain, and his life is defined as endurance: he weathered all the striding years. But those years don’t pass in an orderly way. They begin to ran widdershins in his brain, suggesting memory and imagination reversing direction, unspooling into hallucination. The bullocky becomes a kind of conduit: the harder he strains forward, the more the past, the biblical, and the uncanny press in around him.

The road that won’t stay empty

Wright makes the track itself feel like an engine of mental transformation. The long solitary tracks get etched deeper with every lurching load, as if work carves grooves not only in the ground but in the mind. Then comes the poem’s first major distortion of reality: those empty routes become populous, filled with fiends and angels. It’s an important contradiction: the bullocky is physically isolated, yet his imagination becomes crowded. That crowding reads as both compensation and invasion. The road is no longer just a practical line across country; it becomes a haunted corridor where moral forces travel, as if the landscape is judging or witnessing what is being done to it and to him.

Apocalypse as a name for exhaustion

When the poem calls the journey a mad apocalyptic dream, it doesn’t feel like decorative drama. It’s a way of naming how total the work is: it occupies his body all day and takes over his inner life at night. Wright’s choice to cast him as old Moses is pointed because it elevates a working driver into a biblical leader, yet it also traps him inside a story of command and burden. Even his bullocks are reimagined as slaves, and the phrasing his suffering and stubborn team makes the bond double-edged: they are both his companions in hardship and his property under the yoke. The tension here is uncomfortable and deliberate. The bullocky’s identification with Moses gives him dignity, but it also reveals how easily suffering can be converted into a narrative that justifies domination—of animals, of land, perhaps of people who will come after.

Night camp as a rough cathedral

The poem’s emotional pitch rises in the camp scene, where the bush becomes a strange sanctuary. Under half-light pillars of the trees, he filled the steepled cone of night with shouted prayers and prophecies. These are not quiet, measured devotions; they are loud, urgent, maybe desperate. The image of the night as a steeple suggests a church built from darkness, but it is a precarious church: the worshipper is alone, and his congregation is the bush. Beyond the campfire’s crimson ring, the star struck darkness is not comforting; it cupped him round, enclosing him like a hand that could be protective or trapping. Even the sound that should be ordinary—centuries of cattle-bells—arrives as sweet uneasy, a music of pastoral settlement that carries its own anxiety.

The hinge: from vision to aftermath

The poem turns sharply when it leaves the bullocky’s living presence and shows what time has done to his world. Grass is across the wagon-tracks: the road that once cut into the earth has been healed over, or erased. Then comes the most jolting line of the aftermath: plough strikes bone across the grass. Progress does not simply replace the old labour; it hits it, literally. The bone is what remains of the teams that hauled the loads, and the casual violence of the plough suggests how thoroughly the new order depends on the old and yet collides with it blindly. The slopes are now softened by cultivation—vineyards cover all the slopes—but the poem refuses to let that fertility seem innocent. It has grown over a path of exhaustion and death.

Promised Land, purchased and half-denied

The closing address to the vine is both blessing and accusation. O vine, the speaker asks, grows close upon that bone and hold it with a rooted hand. The vine is instructed to remember, to grip the evidence rather than letting it vanish into soil. Yet the final couplet lands with a troubling serenity: The prophet Moses feeds the grape, and fruitful is the Promised Land. The bullocky’s earlier self-mythologizing is confirmed after the fact; his suffering becomes nourishment for a later abundance. The contradiction is the poem’s sting: fruitfulness arrives, but it arrives through the unacknowledged bodies—animal bodies, worker’s body, perhaps a whole era’s bodies—embedded under it. Wright lets the biblical language confer grandeur while also showing how that grandeur can mask a ledger of costs.

A harder question the poem won’t let go

If the vine must hold the bone, is that remembrance an act of respect, or a way of making exploitation feel sacred? The poem ends by declaring the land Promised, but it has already shown that the promise is kept by forgetting the road’s lurching load and the teams that died on it. The sweetness of the grape, like the sweet uneasy sound of bells, asks whether prosperity can ever be cleanly separated from what it grew over.