ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

THE STORY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON is on-going and can be summed up in three words:  horses, horses and horses.  He was a legend with horses, the greatest amateur steeplechase jockey of his time and of course, a poetic genius. He led an eventful life and touched many people who all admired his personal qualities of daring, courage and gentlemanly conduct.  He is the only Australian Poet immortalised in The Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.  A suburb of Canberra (The Nation’s Capital)  has also been named after him.

The story of Clan Gordon goes back to 1319 when the son of Adam of Gordon obtained Strathbogie in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.  The time line then goes through wars and battles and includes ancestors such as Mary Boleyn (and possibly King Henry V111th ), and James 1 Stewart, King of Scotland. Lord Byron is also a relative. A wealthy wine merchant, Robert Gordon, emerges in the 1700s and invested in two estates, Hallhead and Esslemont.  Upon his death the estates were entailed to his eldest son until a descendent, Charles Napier Gordon died unmarried and left Esslemont to his niece.  This fact is crucial to the story of Adam Lindsay Gordon and his fight for survival in Australia.

Lindsay was born on the island of Azores on 19 October 1833, the only son of five children, three whom died young.  His father, Adam Durnford Gordon, was a strict Army type and had married his cousin, Harriet, a restless woman, fond of travel always drifting off to the continent for long holidays.  Harriet was also melancholic  and moody, traits that Lindsay was to inherit.  He fought it all his life until it finally overcame him.  In those days, there was no Lifeline to call or the Salvos to turn to.

The family then moved to Madeira and on to Cheltenham, England, arriving about the year 1840.  Cheltenham was the favoured place of retirement for conquering veterans of provinces in India where Durnford had served,  and Lindsay was brought up on stories of his father’s military tales.

Gordon was amongst the first intake of pupils to Cheltenham College where he spent only a year.

In 1848, he joined the Woolwich Royal Military Academy and was removed from there in June 1851 for breaking rules.  A short stay followed back at Cheltenham College.  His father had hoped to secure for him an Addiscombe Cadetship.  This failed, and to occupy his time he sent him to Worcester Royal Grammar School. 

Lindsay was thus 16 years when he came to Worcester.  His time there must have been mainly a stop-gap, for his father continued to look for a cadetship in the military for him.   A cousin of Lindsay, R. G. Gordon, had entered the Grammar School in December 1851.  Lindsay came to live with his cousin and his family at Greenhill Place, Worcester in January 1852, and soon afterwards became a private pupil.

Gordon was the despair of his family, even though he learnt enough to put him in good stead.  Horse racing and boxing were his preferred sports, and he liked the company of the racing fraternity at racecourses.  Lindsay was a bit of Larrikin, the term today would be a ‘hoon’.  He did with horses what the lads do with cars, risking life and limb.

Always acting on the spur of the moment, he broke open the stables of a horse that had been impounded for non-payment of a debt, to race it the next day.  This act brought him up before the law.  As all avenues for Lindsay’s advancement according to his father’s wishes had now failed, in desperation, Durnford looked to Australia and arranged passage for Lindsay to sail to Adelaide.

While at Worcester, Gordon had fallen in love with Jane Bridges who like Gordon himself, was passionately fond of horses.  She was a beautiful and popular girl, and Gordon’s rather highly-strung nature deterred him from an open profession of his love.  She encouraged his poetic gift and became his chief poetic audience.  When the time arrived for his departure to Australia, Gordon at last revealed his true feelings.  She had but to ask him to stay, but the girl’s affections were now engaged in another quarter, and after a dramatic farewell, Gordon departed mortified and sick at heart.  He has left a record of this last meeting in the poem To My Sister written on 4 August 1853, three days before he sailed for Australia:

I loved a girl not long ago,

And, till my suit was told,

I thought her breast as fair as snow,

'Twas very near as cold ;

And yet I spoke with feelings more

Of recklessness than pain,

Those words I never spoke before,

Nor never shall again.

When the barque Julia docked at Port Adelaide on 14 November 1853, there was a remarkable change in Gordon from the wild youth who departed Gravesend in August.  He neither sulked nor rebelled, but accepted his fate and got on with his life, intending to go back home in a few years.  He had letters of introduction to present to the authorities when he arrived but in true character he put those letters aside and joined the South Australian Mounted police.  Gordon wanted to start afresh, unimpeded by social class and the police suited his adventurous spirit.

After a short period in Adelaide, Gordon was stationed in Mount Gambier where he met William Trainor, at the time a circus clown.  Gordon had mistakenly arrested Trainor during a performance for being drunk but once back at the police station, Trainor revealed his circus costume underneath his performance clothes.  Gordon let out a haughty laugh and let him go, and from then on the pair became lifelong friends.  So dedicated was Trainor that he purchased the adjoining gravesite in the Brighton General Cemetery, Melbourne,  and even named his son Adam Lindsay Gordon Trainor.

Gordon was of the type where the quickest way between two points was a straight line and he preferred to go straight through the paddocks and jump all the fences than to use the roads when delivering a police warrant.  Judging by the state of the roads in those days, that wasn’t a bad idea.

In accordance with his restless nature, in November 1855 Gordon resigned from the Mounted Police and took up horse breaking, moving from one grazier to the other.  Near Robe at Lake Hawdon on the station of Harry Stockdale, he met Father Julian Tenison-Woods, a scientist-priest and a classical scholar, who had a library of classical works, which Gordon devoured and amazed everybody with the ease at which he recited  long poems from memory in their native language, Latin, Greek or French.  All the experiences that Gordon encountered in the South East of South Australia were completely foreign to him.  The landscape, flora and fauna and the weather with hot dry summers and clear starry nights.

Through most of his time in Australia Gordon was never off a horse.  He suffered from severe short-sightedness and confessed that everything beyond the horse’s ears was mist and blur.  But that didn’t stop him from becoming Australia’s champion amateur steeplechase jockey who won over 21 races and was placed in a further 24.  Which is all the more remarkable given Gordon was over 190 cm and weighed just under nine stone ten pounds.

He raced in steeple chases just about every second weekend from the time he arrived in Australia until just a few months before he died.  At first he raced for the fun of it, but in the last two years of his life he raced out of necessity.

His leap over the fence on the Blue Lake is legend and well documented with a monument erected near the site.

Gordon left no doubt that he held the horse in high regard when he penned.

In their own generation the wise may sneer,

They hold our sports in derision ;

Perchance to sophist or sage, or seer,

Were allotted a graver vision.

Yet if man, of all the Creator plann’d,

His noblest work is reckoned,

Of the works of His hand, by sea or by land,

The horse may at least rank second.

In 1859, Gordon’s mother died and two years later, Gordon received £6,944 which he used to purchase land in Mount Gambier.  If Gordon was reckless on a horse, he was equally careless with money.  Ten years later he was broke.

Like the hoons of today with their cars, Gordon suffered many injuries from his falls from horses and it was from one of these falls that he met his wife to be, Maggie Park, who nursed him back to health.  They married in 1862 in Mount Gambier.

In March 1864, he and Maggie purchased a holiday home at Dingley Dell near the ocean at Port MacDonnell where Gordon’s love of the sea became evident and he would ride to the cliff tops of Cape Northumberland, close to his home and compose verse about the sea. The Swimmer  (Put to music by Sir Edward Elgar in Sea Pictures, Op.37)

I would that with sleepy, soft embraces

The sea would fold me—would find me rest

In luminous shades of her secret places,

In depths where her marvels are manifest ;

So the earth beneath her should not discover

My hidden couch—nor the heaven above her—

As a strong love shielding a weary lover,

I would have her shield me with shining breast.

Dingley Dell is today a tourist attraction with a vast collection of Gordon relics.

Now a man of leisure, Gordon’s life was monotonous .  Urged by his friends, he was elected to represent the district in the South Australian Parliament.  On polling day, 6 March 1865, the Poet not only topped the poll, but also brought down the Blyth government by defeating the influential sitting member, the Attorney-General Randolph Stow.  As a parliamentarian, his semi-classical speeches were colourful and entertaining but largely irrelevant.  Two years was all that he could stand in Parliament, resigning in November 1866.  His resignation marked the beginning of the end.

Gordon was perhaps the only politician then or since to partake as jockey while an elected representative, though some may argue Kevin Rudd-Australia's current Prime Minister- has the physique to make a career on the race track.

Gordon’s time in politics stimulated him to greater activity – poetry, horse racing and speculation.  He formed a partnership to farm sheep in Western Australia, through Bunbury to the Manjimup area, chartering a sailing ship with over 4,800 Corriedale sheep.  Many died on the voyage and only a few hundred survived.  Nor did it help that the land at Manjimup was heavily wooded country and unsuitable.

Gordon was a literary genius and he set down all his sights, sounds, and feelings into the form of poetry.  Mostly with a pencil whilst horse riding from station to station.  But Gordon was also his own harshest critic, discarding entire poems at whim when a single word exasperated  him.

During his life time in Australia of just 16 years he had published four books of poetry.  His fame as Australia’s National Poet was based on his last and best collection of poems Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.

Gordon’s verses have a human touch direct and sincere, full of reminiscences of England.  Gradually he introduced the descriptions of the Australia he saw as he rode and camped in the bush.

‘Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grass,

To wander as we’ve wandered many a mile,

And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,

Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while.

‘Twas merry ‘mid the blackwoods, when we spied the station roofs,

To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard,

With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs ;

Oh ! the hardest day was never then too hard !

After the failure of Manjimup, Gordon returned to Robe, where Maggie gave birth to Annie.  They then moved to Ballarat and he took up a livery stable behind Craig’s Hotel. 

Fire destroyed the livery stables, and his daughter Annie died, both within a month of each other.  He had many falls from horses with many broken bones and the only cure was rest.

Before the clouds of darkness and despair that marked the final chapter of Gordon’s life appeared, he spent an enjoyable two months at Yallum Park Station, the home of John and George Riddoch.  It was here in early 1869 that Gordon wrote three of his most outstanding poems, The Sick Stockrider, The Ride From the Wreck and How We Beat the Favourite which only an expert jockey like Gordon could write.

Dark-brown with tan muzzle, just stripped for the tussle,

Stood Iseult, arching her neck to the curb,

A lean head and fiery, strong quarters and wiry,

A loin rather light, but a shoulder superb.

After leaving Ballarat, Gordon was a welcome guest in the spacious and tranquil surroundings of Robert Power’s Toorak home Myrnong.  In late 1868, Gordon wrote the poem A Song of Autumn for five-year-old Maude Power who picked flowers with him in the garden and queried where they went when picked, along with the fallen leaves.

 Child ! can I tell where the garlands go ?

Can I say where the lost leaves veer

On the brown-burnt banks, when the wild winds blow,

When they drift through the dead-wood drear ?

Girl ! when the garlands of next year glow,

You may gather again, my dear—

But I go where the last year’s lost leaves go

At the falling of the year.

He was expecting to inherit the Scottish estate, Esslemont, and all his hopes were pinned on his entitlement which he was told would come to him, thus solving his money problems.  But the claim failed.

Gordon and Maggie took up lodgings in Lewis street Brighton, and Lindsay joined the Brighton Artillery Corp.  He was also a member of the Yorick Club in Melbourne where his friends such as Marcus Clarke and Henry Kendall discussed their literary works over liquid refreshments.

On the very morning that his fourth book of poems Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes was being placed in the book shelves for sale, he woke early, kissed his sleeping wife and took his service rifle and walked down New street to the Marine Hotel.  There he tried to raise the publican, who was asleep, he then walked down Park Street to the tea tree scrub on the beach, put his hat on the ground beside him together with his pipe and lucky shilling that he had since arriving in Australia, placed the rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger by means of a cleft stick.

Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,

With never stone or rail to fence my bed ;

Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,

I may chance to hear them romping overhead.

After his death he was quickly raised in status in the eyes of the public and many organisations were formed on the basis of his poems.  The Australian Literature Society and the impressionists painters – McCubbin, Streeton and Condor - were all influenced by the themes of Gordon’s poems moving one newspaper critic to say “this Gordon craze is all the rage”.  Charles R. Long the founder of the School Readers introduced Gordon’s poems into them. His grave became an annual focal point were thousands would attend the annual pilgrimage held in the Brighton General Cemetery.  The Australian Natives Association  came on board and Wattle day in September was used as the time to remember Gordon because of his many poems on the Wattle.

The centenary of Gordon’s death saw a flurry of activity with Gordon’s cottage in the Botanic Gardens Ballarat and the erection of the Paul Montford statue of Gordon in Gordon Square Spring Street.  Then committees faded and so did the memories until most people have not even heard of our National Poet. Adam Lindsay Gordon.

Website:-   http://www.adamlindsaygordon.org