SOURCE: Ackland, M. “Innocence at Risk: Charles Harpur's Adaptation of a Romantic Archetype to the Australian Landscape.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 70 (November 1988): 239-59.

In the following essay, Ackland demonstrates Harpur's linking of the possibility of redemption for man with the relatively untouched Australian landscape.

Charles Harpur, it is now agreed, is a poet of ideas, but the precise nature of his thought remains largely unexplored. Repeatedly his works express faith in a suffusing Divinity, and the related recognition that trust in a Providential presence demands a corresponding advocacy of ‘the capacity of human nature for good’ (‘Have Faith’, A92).¹ Yet these major tenets of his thought, taken in isolation, provide no clear understanding of why an avowed ‘Settler's tale’, such as ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, should contain scenes of violent death and a plaint on man's primal disobedience:

          O God! and...