The Gordon cult

The rise and fall of an Australian literary icon

Featured in

  • Published 20240806
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-98-6 
  • Extent: 216pp
  • Paperback, ePUB, PDF

ON 30 OCTOBER 1932, about 2,000 people gathered to celebrate the unveiling of a monument to Adam Lindsay Gordon at the intersection of Spring and Macarthur Streets in Melbourne.It depicts the poet in riding boots with his sleeves rolled up, clutching, somewhat disconsolately, a book in one hand and a pencil in the other. A passage from the poem ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’ appears on the column’s base: 

Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Into the swamp

Non-fictionSome versions of environmentalism understandably encourage an almost Swiftian misanthropy, with the ecological collapse framed as the inevitable response of nature to a pestiferous humanity, the only species that, by its very existence, destroys all that it touches. But maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be that way.

More from this edition

Conferral

Non-fictionBeneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

Uninsurable nation 

Non-fiction AS I DRIVE into the small Victorian riverside town of Rochester, a banner tied to a metal fence greets me on the main road....

Class acts

Non-fictionSocial media has made available to us whole new audiences and vectors for class and lifestyle performance. Where previously your political commitments or what books you were reading might have been topics of conversation with close friends at the pub, now they can be projected to hundreds or thousands of followers. Eating at a restaurant is another example; a previously private and intimately social act can now be a place to be seen, not by the people you’re dining with, or even the other patrons, but by everybody who follows you.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.