AUTHOR'S NOTE: I first visited TMAG in 2018 on a family holiday to Hobart, having previously found inspiration in a couple of mainland Australian paintings for formal poems in the style - or rather, one of the styles - of John Betjeman. As such, I visited TMAG half in search of further inspiration, which struck a few times; one such was in the form of this apparently charming John Glover painting (My Harvest Home) which, on reading the gallery description, nonetheless struck me as having some slightly sinister undertones. I have attempted to convey this in some form in the poem, and through the thoughts of its persona.
The sun is bright above the hills,
The oxen pull with iron wills,
The workers do not wipe the rills
Of sweat away.
The sun is bright. It’s afternoon;
They’ll all put down their pitchforks soon,
And then the sun will be the moon,
And night the day.
To work like that one must be strong;
The sun is harsh, the shadows long.
And even though I may be wrong,
I’d say it’s true
That they are working very hard
To end the day with bread and lard,
And sleep within the convicts’ yard –
What else to do?
And yet from here it almost seems
To be a place one finds in dreams;
Wide open spaces, sundown beams
And all the rest,
The convicts really rather small,
The hay bales nearly just as tall,
And three-by-two, the oxen all
Standing abreast,
As I sit where the painter sat,
And looked out from a broad-brimmed hat –
I wonder if he said, “Now that
Is quite the prize,
To capture man, and nature, too;
And so I pass this on to you,
That you may see this harvest through
Its master’s eyes.”
Stephen McCarthy is a young writer from Sydney. He won the 2018 Nan Manefield Young Writers’ Award and the Senior Poetry Prize in the Mosman Youth Awards in Literature for his poem, “On the Ellipsis”. He has had works published in the UNSWeetened Literary Journal, including poetry, short stories and non-fiction. His poem "Cabbage-Tree Day Break" was featured on the website of the Society of Classical Poets, while his short story "Hello Llandilo" was published by WestWords in the BAD Western Sydney Crime Writing Anthology for 2023.