SOURCE: Mitchell, Adrian. “Writing up a Storm: Natural Strife and Charles Harpur.” Southerly 53, no. 2 (1993): 90-113.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1992, Mitchell considers the reasons and methods for reading Australian colonial poetry and focuses on Harpur's efforts to combine new experiences and expressions of thought with a sense of the familiar.

Australian colonial poetry is considered, if it is considered at all, more with sorrow than delight. The colonial writer lived with the inevitability of failure, one recent commentator tells us, leaning over the counter of the post-colonial theory store.¹ Others concede that the poetry is not all that great, though acknowledging obliquely that some of the poets, and Charles Harpur not least, did have a hankering after greatness. Somewhere behind that is a principle of diminishing returns: the more the hankering, the more unlikely the greatness. For one reason or another, the Colonial...