Manawatu Evening Standard. WEDNESDAY, OCT. 4, 1933. AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 263, 4 October 1933, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. WEDNESDAY, OCT. 4, 1933. AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

Australians, and we would include many New Zealanders also, are proud of the great lion our bestowed upon the name of Adam Lindsay Gordon in the monument to him to be placed in Westminster Abbey. Though Gordon was known as an Australian poet he was not born in the Commonwealth. His birthplace was Eayal in the Azores, m 1833, and he was the son of a retired army captain. He was educated at Cheltenham College, coming from a wild stock. A lineal descendant of Adam o’ Gordon, the founder of the Gay Gordons, he was a great grandson of the wild Lady Henrietta Gordon, and he also had a common ancestor with Byron, whose mother was a Gordon of Giclit. In his youth he became noted for his boxing and riding exploits and at twenty years of age he sailed to Adelaide (South Australia), where he was successively police-trooper, horse-breaker, and livery-stable keeper, withal the best gentleman steeplechase rider in the country. After absorbing the atmosphere of the colony in both bush and city, he had the good fortune to meet Tenison Woods, a Roman Catholic missionary priest, who afterwards became a famous naturalist. The missionary talked literature with Gordon and inspired him with the idea of becoming a poet. But it was not until ten years later, when he had inherited several thousands of pounds and been for a while a member of the South Australian Parliament, that he began to publish the racing poems which founded his name in Australia. But they were not poetry, being merely rhymes of racing life. Subsequently, however, while living near the sea on the South Australian border, his mind turned to the higher forms of poetry which were to make him the national poet. The poems which placed Gordon on a high pinnacle of fame were written in liis last few years. Only a few came into the thin paper volume entitled “Seaspray and Smokedrift,” published in 1867. It was in 1869 that Gordon wrote some of his’ finest poems. Who can forget “The _ Sick Stockrider,” “The Ride from the Wreck,” and that thrilling piece so popular with elocutionists, “How We Beat the Favouritef” Later came his highest flights, “De Te” and “Doubtful Dreams,” and in 1870 he included in‘one volume some of his finest efforts, entitled “Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes” which left him his undying name. At this time Gordon was living with his wife at Brighton, a seaside suburb of Melbourne, in broken health and straitened circumstances, making an income out of riding horses. Gordon had won some classic races and was recognised as the most famous steeplechase rider in Australia. On June 22, 1870, he ..finished correcting the proofs of “Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes,” went to bed early with a severe headache, and the following morning rose at daybreak, went out into the scrub at Brighton Beach and shot himself. Thus ended the career of one of the manliest of men who had • set the stamp of British manhood on poetry. Gordon went to a wild country at a wild time, and,' as a man and poet, he won the admiration of all Australia.