Essay Questions

This poem is an example of an Australian genre known as the “bush ballad,” but how does it differ from the conventional characteristics of such poetry?

Generally speaking, a bush ballad is work of narrative verse which tells a story of adventure in the Australian bush that features action with an overlay of humor. Consider the standard bush ballad to resemble something along the lines of “Crocodile Dundee” if told in a poem. While maintaining the rhythm and meter which characterize the genre, “Andy's Gone with Cattle” strays from convention by focusing not on Andy’s adventures as he leaves home but on those who have stayed behind. Furthermore, the tone commingles wistfulness and worry to paint a picture of rural anxiety rather than comic adventure.

Despite the change in tone, the poem adheres to the form of a bush ballad. What techniques does the poet employ to maintain the conventional ballad structure of his verse?

Each verse is made up of four lines in the standard ballad construction. A ballad is a song style poem which requires a certain rhythm. This rhythm is established by alternating the number of beats in each line: lines 1 and 3 of each stanza are constructed upon four beats to a line while lines 2 and 4 of each stanza contain just three beats. The consistency allows the poem to maintain the song style necessary for a ballad while the alternating divergence in the number of beats allows the focus to remain on the narrative by keeping it from lapsing into the repetitive sing-songy rhythm more appropriate for childish verse.

What other poetic devices are utilized in “Andy’s Gone with Cattle” to enliven the story of Andy’s adventure without actually writing a traditional bush ballad that follows Andy’s adventure?

The poem opens with a metaphor that provides background information on the impulse driving Andy away from his home. The ranch has been besiege with drought, leaving the green fields looking like the red sands of the Australian desert. This is conveyed through the metaphorical imagery of drought as a “red marauder” with marauder being a word that not only intimates a threat, but a particularly crafty and menacing threat. The poet uses repetition to create a motif that informs the reader of Andy’s progress. The last lines of stanza 1, 4 and 6 track that progress from the Queensland Border, across the Darling and out of Macquarie. Even for readers unfamiliar with these references to Australian geography, the repetition implies a sense of distance. This geographical reference is also strongly implicated by the parallelism at work in stanza 6. A reader need not be able to identify Macquarie on a map to infer the time it has taken Andy to get there since during that time Auntie’s gotten thinner, Uncle has become increasingly worried and the dog won’t stop howling.