Sydney and the Bush By Les Murray

Sydney and the Bush, by Les Murray, is a poem that illustrates the impact of British settlement on the Australian identity and landscape. The poem displays the way that the development of Sydney has affected and changed the natural bushland of Australia. The poet, Les Murray, is an Australian poet and critic and has a literary career that spans over forty years. His poetry is generally seen as nationalistic and has a certain element of respect, even reverence, for the physical landscape of Australia. Murray often attacks modernism and writes about the importance of the land and its influence on the shaping of Australian character.

The techniques used in this poem help to convey a message about the relationship between the landscape and the inhabitant. This message is that the construction and development of western civilisation and European settlement has affected the natural and physical landscape of the Australia and its inhabitants. Because of the settlement of Europeans on Australian shores the physical landscape of the bush has changed forever and become Sydney.

Metaphors are used in, Murray’s ‘Sydney and the Bush’, for European settlers and Aboriginal Australians. One example of this is in stanza two where the white men and black men are compared, ‘the men of fire and men of earth’ this is a metaphor for European men and the Aboriginal Australians. The word fire has connotations of hell and is used to represent that European migrants, whereas, the word earth suggests nature and natural environment which is representing the Indigenous Australians.  The use of metaphors in this poem adds emphasise to the message and conveys the different ways in which Europeans and Aboriginals relate to their physical landscape.

Another technique that is used in this poem is juxtaposition. An example of this is the line ‘when Sydney and the bush meet now’. In this line the difference between the built landscape of Sydney and the natural environment that is the Australian bush is compared. The following line, ‘there is no common ground’, further emphasises that Sydney and the bush don’t have very much in common because it seems that we have decided that the two cannot co- exist. This helps to convey the message of the poem because it displays the many differences between the constructed, built up ‘civilisation’ that is Sydney and the untouched, natural landscape of the Australian bush.

‘Australia’, by A.D Hope, has some similarities with ‘Sydney and the Bush’ because Hope’s poem also has that tone and feel of the dislike of modernism. Which suggests that the poets dislike what is or has become of Australia. However this poem is different to some of the other poems that have been studied. One of these poems is ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar. ‘My Country’ is different to this poem because in that poem the persona has a different perception of the physical landscape of Australia than the persona of this poem. Mackellar has a deeper appreciation of British colonisation, whereas, Murray’s poem alludes to the fact that he feels that modern civilisation and European settlement has slowly destroyed the physical landscape of Australia.

My anotated version of Sydney and the Bush