SOURCE: Wright, Judith. “The Growth and Meaning of ‘The Bush.’” In Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, pp. 45-56. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965.

In the following essay, Wright explains the origins of the symbolic dichotomy between the bush and the city in late nineteenth-century Australian poetry.

[Henry] Kendall died in 1882, and with him died the nineteenth-century attempt to interpret this new country in ‘serious’ verse. [Charles] Harpur's adjuration to himself—‘Be then the Bard of thy country’—had been heard, beyond his own generation, by no one but Kendall; and Kendall's decision to take over the search for the Harp Australian had … ended at the worst in poems which were time-serving and ‘the words of blind occasion’, and at the best in poems which, in spite of their apparently objective reference to ‘Australia’, were given their chief force by a tormented subjectivity whose chief reference was not to the outer...