Contending Ideologies: "Something of Value"

Something of Value

Eric Bogle

I can see the Southern Cross tonight,

While here below, wrapped in its light

The Dreamtime land, safe snug and tight, is sleeping.

Wrapped in complacency and contentedness,

No discordant dreams disturb our rest

While the gentle souls we dispossessed are weeping.

We took it all by the gun and the sword,

By the right of our race and in the name of our God

Though as exiles ourselves, transported, condemned

None knew better than we the injustice of men.

We took it all in our hunger and greed

Condemned by our past and consumed by our greed

And we left them to beg for the scraps at our door

Calling them drunkards and wastrels and whores.

We've been drowning,

Drowning in their tears,

For the past two hundred years.

From England's new Jerusalem, to the Dreamtime land, the tall ships came

With human cattle with convict chains to bind them

In the grim fight just to stay alive, dreams must struggle to survive

And few could see the glittering prize before them.

We had it all in the palm of our hands,

A new dream, a new life, a new hope a new land.

One last chance to break with the chains of the past,

To build something of value, something to last.

This ancient land was a vast empty page

Waiting for the providers of a brand new age

The future was ours to protect or profane,

Here was paradise lost, or paradise gained

And tell me, is paradise here,

After two hundred years?

So now beneath the southern cross,

It's time to tally up the cost

Of what we've gained and what we’ve lost forever.

Though much has gone we can't replace,

Those of us who love this place

Together now must turn and face the future.

So here's to us all, frail human kind

Who wander through life, mostly helpless and blind;

To our humour and calmness our anger and pain

Our hundred steps forward, ninety-nine back again.

Here's to us all, the wise and the fools,

The indifferent the caring, the kind and the cruel

As we march to the beat of an uncertain drum

Stumbling towards what we may yet become.

Towards, the brave new frontier

Of the next two hundred years.

Bogle’s poem explores a different ideology/representation to that of Advance Australia Fair. Use the following questions to determine this ideology/representation.

1. What criticism does Bogle make of white Australia in the first 5 lines?

2. In what manner was Australia ‘taken’ according to the poet?

3. How did the British justify their taking of Australia?

4. Why should those who came and took Australia have known better?

5. What words were used by the white invaders to describe the aboriginal inhabitants?

6. According to Bogle, what opportunities did the whites have?

7. What is implied by the poet in the rhetorical question at the end of the second verse?

8. In the last verse what does the poet urge Australians to do now and in the future? List words and phrases which deliberately position the reader in promoting Bogle’s ideology about the future.

Extension Task:

How do the texts,  "Advance Australia Fair" and "Something of Value", position the reader to accept their invited reading? In your opinion, which of the texts is the most successful? 

Image taken from Google images on 28/01/11