SOURCE: Elliott, Brian. “Blue, Burnished Resistance.” In The Landscape of Australian Poetry, pp. 75-99. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1967.

In the following excerpt, Elliott evaluates Adam Lindsay Gordon as the quintessential poet of the Australian colonial landscape.

Charles Harpur remained always at heart a topographical romantic. He was gratified with typical and illustrative prospects, even though his object was always a native Australian one, never uneasy in its orientation. His landscapes tend to fit into formal frames. Gordon's might well have followed the same pattern but for a particular limiting factor. His eyesight was defective.¹ There is never to be found in Gordon's landscapes the careful proportioning of the parts which marks the discipline of most contemporary watercolour sketches and formal topographical description in general. This kind of precision was not given to him. He could distinguish foreground from background, and did so effectively: but one or the other...