The Story

‘Plains of Emu’ is one of the prettiest, and most complex and intriguing songs from the early settler period. The lyrics were written by the Reverend John McGarvie and published in the Sydney Gazette in 1829, under a pseudonym ‘Anambaba’. They were suggested to be sung to the traditional Irish tune of ‘Savourneen Deelish, The Exile of Erin’, a fitting choice given the subject matter. This was a common way of publishing new lyrics at the time, and melodies were chosen for their broad popularity and singability.

The song is from the point of view of an Irish convict, sentenced and transported to Australia for a crime he didn’t commit, undertaking forced labour ‘felling the tall gums’ of the forest of the Emu Plains (a convict settlement outside Sydney). The narrator of the song compares the landscapes of home – the  ‘heath-covered mountains’ and the ‘glens, lakes, and rivers, Loch-Con and Kilkerran’ to this strange new landscape of ‘iron-bark, wattle, and gum trees extending’ and the colours ‘black-butted and blue’. However, while the new landscape is strange and presents huge physical challenges, it is also described with a sense of wonder and awe, a sense of being alive to its beauty. While the narrator is exiled from his native shore, he is also noticing the charms of the new place. It also paints a  picture of what the Emu Plains looked like – a deeply wooded forest, which is interesting to those who know it mostly as cleared farming land, and then later an outer suburb of Sydney. In this song McGarvie shows himself alive to the tensions of living in a new place: a sense of wonder of the natural world, while simultaneously clearing it; being forced into exile yet keeping the home country close to the heart; being caught between two worlds; and the injustice of the convict system.

McGarvie was a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, associated with John Dunmore Lang and other figures of liberal politics at the time. McGarvie was an inveterate chronicler, writer of very long poems and biographies of notable religious figures, much of which he published in the Gazette.  Looking at his papers in the Mitchell Library one gets the sense of someone very curious about the new world around him. He complied a dictionary of Aboriginal (Darug) words collected ‘native names of places on the Hawkesbury below A Doyles’ and was clearly interested in local Aboriginal languages and the ways in which they invoked place. ‘I must acknowledge our names of places are so impractical, and ill applied, that let you travel from Dan to Beersheba, you will scarcely meet one sonorous, poetical appellation, deserving remembrance in the journey of a day. The native names are exceptions, and but for these, the Australian poet, might hang or down his muse at discretion.’ (‘London University’, April 1829, letter to the Gazette, ‘McGarvie Papers, MLS)

Despite McGarvie’s interest in Darug words and place names, there is no sense of Aboriginal presence in the Plains of Emu. The only occupation seems to be by kangaroo and cockatoo – with its ‘wattle-scrub echo’ lingering hauntingly in the otherwise empty valleys and plains. This song was written immediately following the particularly violent years of the early nineteenth century in which hundreds of Aboriginal people were killed in the Cumberland Plains and Hawkesbury River region. Is the emptiness of the song reflective of that? The song a lament for many kinds of loss? Certainly McGarvie must have been aware of the violent history of the place.

He may have also been aware of the fact that Aboriginal people themselves were forced into labour in the forestry industry. The history of the forest clearing of the colony of NSW is also the history of enforced Aboriginal labour – Aboriginal men forced to cut timber, strip bark and in general clear ancestral and spiritual spaces (Castle and Hagan 1998, 28; Feary 2005, 2). Playing this song made me think of yarning with Uncle Roger Knox and his stories of his family having to clear trees, some of them sacred, to make way for cotton plantations in Gomeroi country in the twentieth century, as well as many other similar stories.

The violent intervention into sacred landscapes is represented in our 2023 performance of the Plains of Emu through a musical intervention. The ‘bridge’ section reproduces phrases and images from an 1827 article about a convict ‘clearing party’ working on the Cumberland plain. The musical material of this section is less lilting and beautiful, and more ugly and dramatic, helping reinforce the juxtaposition. It is not as the song would have been performed, but it helps to remind modern audiences of what the song left out and to provide a living connection between the knowledge and concerns of the 21st century and those 200 years earlier.

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References

Robert Castle & Jim Hagan, 'Settlers and the State: The Creation of an Aboriginal Workforce in Australia', Aboriginal History, vol. 22 (1998), pp. 24-35.

Sue Feary, Forests to Forestry: an overview of Indigenous involvement in forest management in Australia (Canberra: ANU, 2005).