Following the death of Adam Lindsay Gordon on 24 June 1870, there were many tributes to the man and his poetry, one of the first being from his good friend Henry Kendall who wrote ‘The Late Mr A. L. Gordon: In memoriam’, which first appeared in The Australasian on 2 July 1870.
Another poem in memory of Gordon was contributed by ‘WJH’ and appeared in The Free Lance, Melbourne, Thursday 25 June 1896, p. 3, titled ‘The wattle soon will blossom forth’:
The wattle soon will blossom forth,
And spring come over hill and plain,
But thou who knewest springtime’s worth,
Art buried ‘neath the dew and rain;
And round thy lonely home of earth,
The sheoaks sob a sad refrain!
The love and praise of this fair clime
Are wafted to thy simple tomb;
But Love and Fame, howe’er sublime,
Can’t light the darkness of its gloom;
And thy fell fate in manhood’s prime
Stands out a cruel deed of doom!
Thy name is heard on every hand,
The bushmen feel thy stirring song,
Which breathes the spirit of our land,
And lauds the fearless and the strong.
But thou, alas, by Fate’s demand
Ne’er sipped thy glory’s sweetness long!
Thy wattles every spring will shed
Their golden teardrops o’er thy grave,
And loving friends around thy bed
Will offer up a prayer to save
The soul of the poetic dead
Who in this life so oft forgave!
This contribution was dated 24 June 1896 and signed ‘WJH’.
It is unsure who the author is but it could possibly be William Hutchison (1841-1914) who, with his step-father Andrew Dunn, owned Murra Binna station, about seven miles east of Kingston, south-east South Australia, from 1862 to 1872, and where Gordon was a frequent visitor, and also spent his honeymoon after his marriage to Margaret ‘Maggie’ Park.
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