SOURCE: Indyk, Ivor. “Pastoral and Priority: The Aboriginal in Australian Pastoral.” New Literary History 24, no. 4 (autumn 1993): 837-55.

In the following excerpt, Indyk concentrates on the ominous presence of the Aborigine in the pastoral poetry of Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall.

As Virgil demonstrated, the pastoral form can be made to speak of many things. Yet to the relationship between the pastoral singer and the landscape celebrated in the pastoral song Virgil also granted a certain kind of priority. The first of his Eclogues opens directly onto this relationship by comparing the situations of two shepherds, the one in possession of his land, the other dispossessed. Meliboeus:

Tityrus, here you loll, your slim reed-pipe serenading The woodland spirit beneath a spread of sheltering beech, While I must leave my home place, the fields so dear to me. I'm driven from my home place: but you can take it easy...