Summary
The poet writes of the Australian landscape. It is so familiar to her that she calls it her "blood's country" and knows it inside and out.
It is winter, and the creek and the trees are choked. The tableland is a stark and lean country.
There is a cottage in the tableland where old Dan lives. In the black, cold winter Dan tells story after story of his adventures as a drover, some true and some perhaps not true.
One story is of Dan and other men and boys moving the cattle out in a brutally dry year. The mud hardens around the animals, a boy dies, and the flies come and swarm the cattle near the dusty river.
Another story is of a man named Fred riding his horse up to Dan, and Dan winking at him and telling him to get going soon because the troopers were on their way to get him.
At the end of the poem, the poet tells the old man to wake up since no one is listening anymore.
But, she concludes, other stories remain—ones that "still go walking in my sleep."
Analysis
“South of My Days” is unequivocally one of Wright’s most famous poems. It was first published in the Bulletin in 1945, and was then collected in The Moving Image in 1946, which helped secure her literary fame. Brigid Rooney contextualizes the piece, explaining that “Wright’s vision of pastoral country as an exposed, suffering body struck a nerve, tapping into the unconscious of a settler-colonial culture that hungered for belonging. Australians had felt keenly the threat posed by the war in the pacific. These insecurities were only exacerbated by droughts that had stretched nearly unbroken from 1937 to 1945. A homely love of the land – expressed in imaginative or symbolic terms – is now so central to Australia’s national culture that it is impossible to appreciate the full impact of Wright’s early poetry, which itself, in turn, helped express and affirm that love of the land.”
It is not hard to discern that love for, and deep knowledge of, the land, which the poet calls her “blood’s country.” Its title and opening line sets the beloved tableland in relation to the poet herself. She knows the “high delicate outline” like the back of her hand; she knows the familiar trees and choked creek. Like her, old Dan in his cottage knows the land, and has seventy years of stories to share. He frames them in the style of legend and lore, conjuring a romantic pastoral past of droving and outlaws and adventure.
But people only seeing the poem as expressive of a lamentably vanished past became increasingly noxious to Wright. Jenny Kohn notes that Wright “became distressed by those who took her poems as a simple valorising of the pastoral past, given her ‘own hardening view of it as a process of invasion.’” Indeed, the poem is a lot darker and more complicated than this nationalistic reading suggests. Sandra Brunet sums this up: “Wright's love of land represents a desire for integration with the environment, and by implication, reflects a nostalgia for 'home,'” but “home for Wright is complicated by her feelings of guilt which prevent a harmonious fusion of self and landscape.”
To begin, the land in “South of My Days” isn’t all that idyllic. It is “clean, lean hungry country.” The creek is “leaf-silenced,” the willow “choked,” and the slope “blotched;” these words suggest a sluggish, defaced landscape. The weather vacillates between extremes of hot and cold, with blizzards, droughts, and plagues of insects menacing man and beast. Kohn sees a “palpable sense of threat,” which “is evident in the loving yet almost violent description of the land; though beautiful and even beloved, it is inhospitable… The landscape is embodied and alive, ‘hungry country’ that threatens to consume and devour, a not uncommon fear throughout Australian literature.”
The cottage is also unnerving, for the walls draw in almost claustrophobically, the kettle “hisses” and the roof “cracks its joints.” It is an old, creaking structure just like Dan is an old, creaking man. Dan’s stories are entertaining, yes, but the poet suggests a bit of chicanery in them, saying he “shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards. / True or not, it’s all the same.” Kohn writes that Dan fails to possess the landscape through his stories, which seems to be his aim in order to stave off the cold and harshness, but there is “the sense that the stories are no more than illusion: the elements intrude and the reality of the winter imposes itself. The stories that ‘still go walking’ in the final stanza are plainly not the stories of old Dan to which ‘no one is listening.’ They are the stories of the Aboriginal Australians… inscribed in the landscape, and arise to haunt the colonisers.”
Wright valued her people’s history, yes, but knew that it was not the only story of the land. That story—of colonial conquest of the continent and the near-eradication of the aboriginal people and their culture—was complex, violent, and unjust. Yet the aboriginal people did remain, and their stories remained. Brunet sees Wright’s work as an attempt to “fuse love of an invaded land and guilt of the invasion,” with a hope of rectifying “the issue of indigenous erasure.”
