"Australia," the poem for which Bernard O'Dowd is principally remembered, represents the best of his work in both theme and method. The poem attests to a singular meeting of intellectual interests that in other writers remained disparate and even contradictory. Its subject is the national destiny of a newly federated country, but unlike so much nationalist outpouring of the time, O'Dowd's poem remains an extraordinary piece of literary protest as well as an outstanding testament to a method that combined radical socialism, occasional poetry, symbolist imagery, and fin de siècle mysticism. Even so, as a successful professional writer O'Dowd had his feet firmly placed on the literary earth; a prolific writer of prose, criticism, social commentary, and poetry, he was also the state of Victoria's primary legal draftsperson. An early engagement with Irish sectarian politics formed a clear relationship for O'Dowd between the body politic and...