South Of My Days - Analysis

Blood-country, not postcard

This poem makes a fierce, intimate claim: the speaker’s deepest sense of belonging is tied to a place that is beautiful precisely because it is hard, and to stories that keep that hardness livable—until the poem forces us to face how easily both place and story can slip into silence. From the first line, the landscape is not scenery but kin: part of my blood’s country. Yet what rises in the mind is no lush idyll. The tableland is a high delicate outline of bony slopes, a clean, lean, hungry country. Even the plants feel spare and resilient—blue-leaved and olive trees, outcropping granite. The diction keeps praising and stripping at once: delicate, but bony; clean, but hungry. The speaker loves the country in the same breath she admits its bite.

The cottage as a small animal against winter

That bite becomes domestic in the second section, where the poem draws inward to survive the cold. The night is black-frost, and the cottage seems to hunch like a living thing: The walls draw in to the warmth, the old roof cracks its joints. Even the kettle is imperfect—hisses a leak—but its sound is life. The tone here is both tender and unsentimental: warmth exists, but it is makeshift, patched, and temporary. Summer is imagined as almost unbelievable, something that will turn up again and thrust it’s hot face in like a visitor barging through a door. When summer arrives, it doesn’t bring serenity; it brings talk, loud and intimate, in a wave of rambler-roses. The poem suggests that in this country, comfort comes less from the weather than from what people do with it—especially what they say to one another while waiting it out.

Dan’s yarns as insulation

Old Dan’s storytelling is presented as a literal survival tool, something you can wrap around a body. A yarn is a blanket against the winter; his seventy years are not simply remembered but clutches round his bones. That image makes age both vulnerable and tough: the old man is cold, but he’s learned how to hold onto heat. When the speaker says Seventy years are hived in him like old honey, she gives his memory a sweetness, but also a thickness, a stored substance made slowly over time. Honey is food, medicine, and preserved summer—all the things winter threatens. Dan’s stories are a hoard of warmth, and listening to them becomes a kind of sheltering alongside the old cottage that lurches in for shelter.

Drought, blizzard, bushranger: a life told through ordeal

The poem then lets Dan’s voice (or the speaker’s ventriloquism of it) spill into a rush of specific Australian ordeals: droving from Charleville to the Hunter, the year nineteen-one and the drought beginning. The details are harsh and concrete—mud round them hardened like iron, the mob reduced to three hundred head of a thousand, the bleak punchline that the river was dust. These lines don’t romanticize endurance; they measure what it costs. Even death is passed in the same blunt current of recollection: the yellow boy died, the horse went on and waited. In the next yarn the threat changes shape—Bogong blizzards that came early, or the sudden, local electricity of bush legend: Thunderbolt on his big black horse, the speaker’s quick warning, I wouldn’t wait long, Fred, and the troopers close behind. The stories create warmth partly because they are charged with danger; they turn suffering into a shared, speakable thing.

The hinge: conjuring versus vanishing

The poem’s emotional turn comes when the speaker steps back and watches the stories dissolve even as they are told: Oh, they slide and they vanish. Dan is no longer just a keeper of history; he becomes a magician dealing time: he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards. That metaphor is affectionate, but it also introduces a key tension: storytelling can be a form of truth, yet it also has the slipperiness of a trick. The poem refuses to settle the question of accuracy—True or not, it’s all the same—because what matters is not factual record but the human act of making meaning in the cold. Still, that line has a chilling underside. If true and not true are the same, then what anchors the stories? What keeps them from disappearing entirely?

Winter answers: the brutal present tense

The present reasserts itself with physical snaps: the frost on the roof cracks like a whip, and the back-log breaks into ash. The warmth is failing in real time. Then the poem delivers its hardest line as an order: Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over. The tenderness of listening turns into something like alarm, even accusation. It’s not only Dan who must wake; the speaker must face what the stories have been defending her from: mortality, the end of an era, the possibility that the whole performance has no audience left. The next sentence lands almost without consolation: No-one is listening. The poem has moved from shared warmth to isolation, from the communal room to an emptying world where speech doesn’t automatically find an ear.

What remains: a country that won’t stop speaking

Yet the poem does not end by simply declaring loss. It circles back to the opening phrase South of my days’ circle, but now the tableland is seen dark against the stars, vast and indifferent, and somehow still inhabited—full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep. The final claim is paradoxical: even if No-one is listening in the cottage, the stories persist as a kind of haunting. They leave the mouth and enter the mind; they move from public yarn to private dream. The country itself becomes a reservoir of narrative, not because it speaks in words, but because it holds the pressure of all that has happened there—the drought where the river was dust, the blizzards, the chase, the years hived up like honey.

A hard question the poem won’t soothe

If True or not doesn’t matter, is the poem honoring Dan’s art—or quietly admitting that the only thing left is the comfort of being warmed by a lie? The line No-one is listening makes that question sharper: a story without a listener risks becoming mere noise, yet the speaker’s sleep proves the opposite. The poem seems to argue that even when community fails, the land and the mind keep receiving what was once spoken aloud.