Australia, Alec Derwent Hope Poems,Born in 1907 in the Snowy Mountain region of New South Wales, Alec Derwent Hope was a prolific Australian poet and satirical writer. His father was a minister and the young Hope spent his education at Fort Street School for Boys in Sydney and then moved on to take a BA at the nearby university.
After winning a scholarship, Hope found himself heading to England and a place at Oxford University though his studies did not go as well as he expected. He left Oxford with a third class degree and returned to Australia in the early part of 1931. Hope trained to be a teacher though it was a while before he decided to settle down.
Australia by Alec Derwent Hope
Australia
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: “we live” but “we survive”,
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
