Essay Questions

What infamous Australian political dispute stimulated Lawson to write this poem?

The 1891 Shearers’ Strike remains one of the definitive labor disputes in Australian history; a showdown pitting unionized workers versus non-unionized counterpart. The disagreement eventually erupted into large-scale strikes by the unions and attempts to disrupts those rights to protest working conditions. Unfortunately, for the union workers, the call to strike came at inopportune time to prepare properly for the long term and they were forced into premature negotiations from a position of weakness due to running low on food supplies. The longer-term outcome was the strike’s great influence on the development of the Labor Party as well greater notoriety and power for the Australian Socialist League. Where Lawson’s sympathy lay is made evident the poem’s publication in the socialist-leaning newspaper The Worker.

How did publication of this poem almost result in Lawson being arrested on charges of sedition?

Armed members of law enforcement were sent in to break up the strike at the workers’ camp in Barcaldine. This response prompted the Queensland Legislative Council to convene for an official “Vote of Thanks” to members of the police on behalf of the government. During those proceedings, an MP named Frederick Brentnall read into the official record the lines of the final two stanzas of the poem:

"So we must fly a rebel flag,

As others did before us,

And we must sing a rebel song

And join in rebel chorus.

We'll make the tyrants feel the sting

O' those that they would throttle;

They needn't say the fault is ours

If blood should stain the wattle!"

Brentnall’s implication that Lawson was making a direct plea for violent response to law enforcement officers working in the service of the government predictably rose the ire of other party members and before the session ended some were already calling for his arrest for sedition. Lawson’s response was to write another poem, the corrosively critical “The Vote of Thanks Debate” which took aim directly at the motivations behind Brentnall’s alleged outrage:

“The other night in Parliament you quoted something true,
Where truth is very seldom heard except from one or two.
You know that when the people rise the other side must fall,
And you are on the other side, and that explains it all.”

Although Lawson took the possibility of arrest seriously, ultimately it proved an empty threat on the part of the anti-worker political party.

What does this poem have to do with the Australian marsupial best known in America for being the species of the title character in Rocko’s Modern Life?

Not only is “Freedom on the Wallaby” not about a Nickelodeon cartoon character, it isn’t even about the actual animal—Australia’s other less famous hopping marsupial. The phrase “on the wallaby” at the time was common slang for to be on the move. The meaning derives from the full phrase “on the wallaby track” which referenced the movements mirroring of the tracks of the animal. The significance of “wallaby” as it relates to the poem is limited to the title’s metaphor of freedom being on the move; nowhere in the text is there any reference or allusion to the animal itself.