Unit: The Changing Australian Voice ('The Man from Snowy River' and 'Municipal Gum')

Paterson’s other purpose of this text is to promote nationalism amongst Australian men, persuading them to enlist. He deliberately emphasises on how everyone in Australia is an Australian, through this line ‘English, Scotch, and Irish-bred, They're all Australians now!’ This would make everyone at the time feel obliged to join.

By bringing up well known Australian icons and brands, the author involves himself with the audience.

Initial Thoughts: Municipal Gum by Oodgeroo Noonuccal is a poem that interacts with readers emotions and creates a sense of empathy for the audience. The poem directly addresses the gum tree and associates its existing location in the city to its regular surroundings in the bush/forest. She uses emotive language and sight, sound and touch imagery to make the readers identify with the trees situation, which also relates to the situation of the Indigenous people. This poem represents how Oodgeroo Noonuccal feels about the way that the white men have constrained the Aboriginal people and made them feel as though they can’t be themselves in the world of the white men. An example is ‘O fellow citizen, what have they done to us?’

Australia’s identity has always been a complicated one. Starting with Aboriginal genocide, 1800’s cowboys and villains, two world wars and a bunch of poems describing them, it makes it difficult to conclude on what being an ‘Aussie’ really is. Thankfully, the two thought-provoking poems Nobody Calls Me a Wog Anymore by Komninos Zervos, and My Country by Dorothea Mackellar both use their discerning selection of themes to reflect modern attitudes in some extent. Along with their themes, Nobody Calls Me a Wog Anymore and My Country both use their story to capture the attributes modern Australians possess to some degree.

Gilbert’s poem portrays many Aboriginals plight’s within Australia and conveys notions of despair, anguish and anger for his fellow Aboriginal comrades. Again, Gilbert uses strong visual imagery in “the anguished death you spread” which helps convey the persona’s feeling of horror and anger at the Europeans. This is further emphasised through the poet’s vehement and repetitive use of second person pronouns in “you” which conveys a sense of blame and accumulates into an accusatory tone and generates a strong sense of detachment between the author and the European settlers. Furthermore enjambment enhances the accusatory tone in “you pollute all the rivers and litter every road” because the lack of punctuation and pauses makes the lines sharp and quick, creating a sense of anger in the author. In addition the author’s use of metaphors in “humanity locked in chains” creates a sense of struggle and inability to escape the oppression the Aboriginals are in, whereby the word “chain” is symbolic for trapped and lack of freedom. Kevin Gilbert’s emotional poem brings light to the pain and suffering Aboriginals are going through, which is a stark contrast to the image of Australia, being a free and accepting

Paterson’s Bush Poetry and his love of the bush, seen in his tendency to romanticise rural Australia and the stereotypical outback “Bushman,” assisted in immortalizing many of ideals and values that Australia’s felt they possessed and hence the formation of an Australian identity that people were proud of.

We can presume from the numerous emphasized lines indicating Australia’s uniqueness, that the distinctiveness of Australia is the main reason for the persona’s perplexing attachment and love for her country.

These words represent her love and patriotism towards Australia. She also personifies the land, referring to Australia as ‘her’, which could

White Australians state “shame when [their] kids they die from colds or from sheer neglect. Shame when [they] live on the river banks. While collectin' [they’re] welfare cheques. Shame when [they’re] blind from trachoma. Shame when [they’re] crippled from blights.” The rhyming scheme in the stanza makes poem flow seamlessly constructing a conversational tone as if the narrator is speaking directly to the audience. This feature purposefully lulls the reader into agreeing with the white Australia’s arguments as it constructs an image that the Indigenous people are refusing to integrate themselves with modern society and suffering the consequences of those decisions. The mention of welfare cheques also contribute to the perspective that white Australians are attempting to mend the lives of Indigenous individuals, however this could not be further from the truth and message of this

Mackellar and AD Hope use literary devices like imagery, personification and tone to convey their perspective of Australia. The Poem Australia by AD Hope describes his negative opinion of Australia as he looks down on Australians way of life. Contrastingly, the poem My Country was written by Dorothea Mackellar at age 19 in 1904. She wrote while she was homesick in England and she expresses her deep passion and love for Australia as she compares the natural beauty of Australia to the landscape of Britain.

Australia is filled with many different aspects in which makes it the country it is today. I believe it is important to study texts that explore aspects of Australia by studying texts such as ‘The Club’, by David Williamson, a play written in 1977 about an Australian football club and movies such as “The Castle”, directed by Rob Stitch in 1997, about the daily life of an Australian family when their happiness is threatened when developers attempt to buy their house to expand the neighboring airport. Both these texts show us what Australian life was like in the past. By us looking at themes such as language, tradition and the mateship shown we are able to explore different aspects of Australia that make it what it is today.

This poem relates to Aboriginal Australian as it was written by the hand and views of one, and was written for the Aboriginals. The text itself is very emotive and powerful and I personally was unable to resist the emotions it reverberates however I cannot say whether it would be the same for anyone who could read it.

Identify a relevant topic and describe it in detail and how it relates to your context

Mateship. Adventurous. Loyal. Free. Proud. These are the typical words Australians use to describe themselves, to identify themselves as different from the rest of the world. But who is an Australian? Someone that was born in Australia? Only people we choose to call Australian? People with great achievements that we choose to take credit for? Only people that love sport and vegemite? Or maybe only people with ‘Aussie’ accents? The Australian population is a proud one indeed, proud of their nation, their achievements and their own independent way of life, but sometimes us Aussies, forget about the rest of the world and all those other people that make us, who we are.

The controversial poem was written by Walwicz in 1981, 20 years after she first migrated to Australia from Poland. She expresses her feeling towards Australian observations, Australians and the overall Australian identity. The poem is most likely to target native Australians. Where in which she effectively rants about how cruel and narrow-mindedness they were to her by continuously using the pronoun