Readers will surely agree that some of the most emotive poems & songs can be those which register feelings of sorrow & loss in response to a loved one’s departure. Regular visitors to this site might already have noted that traditional Australian bush ballads have not been included in Catchment so far; while also being aware that our tanka co-editor Jo McInerney has otherwise written a number of essays on English Language-based poetry in that short Japanese verse-form. You may even have noted how poems under focus in our essays are generally more contemporary, arising from this millennium, or at least from the Twentieth Century. So today’s release will make departures itself on a few fronts. In appraising writing which indeed looks at folk leaving, Jo will compare bush ballads from the late Nineteenth Century; honouring a lifelong love for a poem from a primary school reader in the process.
Where the Pelican Builds
by Mary Hannay Foott
(Originally published under her initials – MHF, in The Australasian, March 5, 1881)
[The unexplored parts of Australia are sometimes spoken of by the bushmen of Western Queensland as the home of the pelican, a bird whose nesting-place, so far as the writer knows, is seldom, if ever, found.]
The horses were ready, the rails were down,
But the riders lingered still, —
One had a parting word to say,
And one had his pipe to fill.
Then they mounted, one with a granted prayer,
And one with a grief unguessed.
“We are going,” they said, as they rode away —
“Where the pelican builds her nest!”
They had told us of pastures wide and green,
To be sought past the sunset’s glow;
Of rifts in the ranges by opal lit;
And gold ‘neath the river’s flow.
And thirst and hunger were banished words
When they spoke of that unknown West;
No drought they dreamt of, no flood they feared,
Where the pelican builds her nest!
The creek at the ford was but fetlock deep
When we watched them crossing there;
The rains had replenished it thrice since then,
And thrice has the rock lain bare.
But the waters of Hope have flowed and fled,
And never from blue hill’s breast
Come back — by the sun and the sands devoured —
Where the pelican builds her nest!
Mary Hannay Foott: “Come back – ”
by Jo McInerney
The work above, written in 1881, is a significant piece of Australian poetry of place. Its author, Mary Hannay Foott, was regularly published in Australian newspapers and journals, a decade before either Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson. However, her full authorship would not have been widely recognised at the time, as her by-line read MHF.
For many years, “Where the Pelican Builds”, her most famous work, held a place of quiet significance in Victorian primary school culture. It appeared in school papers during the 1930s and 1940s and later was the opening poem reprinted in the revised edition of the Fifth Grade Victorian Reader, released to schools in 1950.
It was in the pages of that revised edition that I first encountered it. Its refrain, an extension of its title and the last line of each of its three stanzas, has stayed with me a lifetime. However, it was only on rereading the whole poem in much later life that I recognised the challenge to conventional bush ballads that it represents.
Paterson and Lawson have largely established the norm. Foott’s poem challenges both the style of these form setters and their values, at least as revealed in some of their best-known poems.
Foott – background and perspective
Published in 1889, eight years after Foott’s poem, “Clancy of the Overflow” contrasts the “sallow, sunken faces” of those existing in the confines of the city with Clancy’s expansive outback life where “the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him”.
This was not Foott’s perspective, though she was well placed to contrast the life of the city with that of the bush. Born in Scotland and arriving in Australia in 1853 as a child of seven, Mary Hannay Foott (née Black) was educated at a school for young ladies in Melbourne. After qualifying and working as a teacher, she studied art at the National Gallery School. Foott was twenty-eight when she married Thomas Wade Foott, later moving with him to Dundoo, a cattle station in south-west Queensland. There she lived for seven years, enduring financial hardship and tending her husband in his illness, until his death in 1884.
It was during this period, three years before her husband died, that “Where the Pelican Builds” was published. The poem immediately establishes an order of concern not seen in ‘Clancy of the Overflow’.
Foott opens her poem with a note, stating: “The unexplored parts of Australia are sometimes spoken of by the bushmen of Western Queensland as the home of the pelican, a bird whose nesting-place, so far as the writer knows, is seldom, if ever, found.” It carries wistfulness for a harbinger of home and plenty, persistently unfound.
One of the contrasts between Paterson’s work and Foott’s is that Paterson’s characters are obviously and predominantly male. This is not the case with Foott. In her poem, gender is not unimportant, but it is not emphasised in the same way.
Her opening stanza presents a moment of leave-taking:
The horses were ready, the rails were down,
But the riders lingered still, —
One had a parting word to say,
And one had his pipe to fill.
Those leaving are clearly gendered, those left behind are not. There is an implication of gender difference, but it is not explicit. What is being established at this point is respective degrees of agency.It is those departing who are making a choice. It is they who determine the duration of this farewell. Foott subtly suggests different motivations for lingering – “One had a parting word to say / And one had his pipe to fill”.
This is a complex relational dynamic. One man acknowledges his companions; the other seems simply to be waiting till he can go. However, the significance is not transparent. The second man may be disguising feeling. Whatever the case, the power discrepancy remains clear.
Among the males in Paterson’s work, the power differentials that exist often seem to derive from the capacity for unrestrained action. Clancy is a powerful figure because of the unbounded life he leads. His power is amplified because of his place, as an embodiment of freedom, in the imagination of the poem’s narrator.
Foott’s poem, however, interrogates what Paterson would later present as a determining myth of the bushman. Clancy’s restless roving is the essence of his appeal in Paterson’s idealisation of masculine escapism.
In contrast, the desire to leave home and loved ones is problematised by Foott.
Foott’s second stanza begins with reported recollection. The speaker who stays behind recalls the justifications the men offered for their odyssey:
They had told us of pastures wide and green,
To be sought past the sunset’s glow;
Of rifts in the ranges by opal lit;
And gold ‘neath the river’s flow.
The past perfect tense of the initial verb ‘had told us’ seems to distance the men’s claims from current reality. However, their goals rapidly assume the quality of dreams even at the moment of telling. “Past the sunset’s glow” removes them from this world, while opal-lit ranges and rivers flowing over, if not with, gold read as fantasies.
The third stanza is the emotional heart of Foott’s poem. It tracks the years of waiting for the men to return in language which subtly suggests the gender or at least the gender position of those who wait.
They are those who remain and endure after the adventurers have struck out toward the horizon.
The stanza is quoted here in full:
The creek at the ford was but fetlock deep
When we watched them crossing there;
The rains had replenished it thrice since then,
And thrice has the rock lain bare.
But the waters of Hope have flowed and fled,
And never from blue hill’s breast
Come back — by the sun and the sands devoured —
Where the pelican builds her nest!
The opening four lines contrast the conditions on departure with what has occurred since. Time is not measured in years but in floods and droughts:
The rains had replenished it thrice since then,
And thrice has the rock lain bare.
Some modern reprints of the poem standardise the tenses here, turning ‘had’ in line three to ‘have’, but this is not how it reads in the original.
Foott’s unconventional use of tense seems strategic. The replenishing rains have occurred in the past, yet the bare rock is shown in the present perfect – “thrice has the rock lain bare”.
The tension between the different time references alters the duration of dearth and plenty. Beneath the apparent cycle of rain and drought, there is an underlying constant, the hard bedrock of loss.
The stanza concludes by moving from the rise and disappearance of rivers to ‘the waters of Hope’ which have “flowed and fled”. There is no longer any pretence of a regenerative cycle; hope is gone.
The loss of hope is embodied in the landscape through the distancing of its source – the image of “blue hill’s breast”.
Read in conjunction with this metaphor, the voice that speaks as “we” seems to come from a feminised position of waiting, where experience is structured by separation and endurance rather than action, whether abandonment or return.
In Paterson’s poem, Clancy’s disappearance is an imagined licence to roam, riding leisurely behind stock, “singing”, and thus avoiding “the cashbook and the journal”. His escape is a cause for envy and reflective celebration.
In Foott’s poem, the stakes are far higher. Those who leave face mortal perils and those left behind see hope of life and regeneration vanish.
Foott and Lawson – common ground but different lenses
Lawson’s vision of the bush is not Paterson’s account of carefree adventure. Lawson has more attitudes in common with the earlier poet, Foott, than with his contemporary balladeer.
Lawson’s 1899 poem “The Sliprails and the Spur” has striking points of similarity to Foott’s “Where the Pelican Builds”. However, in a different way to Paterson, Lawson also romanticises the escapee and shows, at least in this poem, less insight than Foott into the interior condition of those left behind.
Lawson’s poem opens at an almost identical point of departure as Foott’s. We are at the sliprails. In Foott’s poem the moment is not quite resolved, the rails are still down. In Lawson’s, the departing lover – repeated farewell kisses signalling his status – has carefully raised them “one by one”. Again, it is the figure leaving who exercises control, though at a cost. Lawson notes his “trembling hand”. But across the images of romantic farewell, the final “Goodbye, Mary! Don’t you fret!” has a slightly jarring quality – a form of comfort that is a directive and minimises loss.
In Foott’s poem, though the cost of departure is felt, the rider who speaks has the cloak of opacity. His “parting word” is not reported. Much more is left for the reader to intuit.
In Lawson’s case, the emotional depth of the lovers is reduced, as the girl’s distress seems deliberately diminished by the male speaker. Lawson later shows some awareness of this limitation in “Jim”. Whether he recognises its effect on the construction of the “faint white form” of the woman left behind is less clear. “Mary”, the female figure, is in danger of becoming a trope. If there is a slight incongruity in my previous designation of her as a “woman”, this derives from her treatment within the poem.
Where Foott seems deliberately to background the gender of those left behind, Lawson reduces his distinctly female character’s maturity. She “gasp[s]”, she “steal[s] across the little run” and she “shyly let[s] the sliprails down”. These stylised gestures of distress and exaggeratedly small, pointlessly self-conscious movements highlight youth but also reduce stature.
Lawson’s short stories can reveal the complexities of the female perspective. That is not happening here.
Compare this with Foott, where the voice of the poem is that of the person left behind. That grief, endurance and ultimate desolation is the central emotional framing of Foott’s work.
In Lawson, the perspective is essentially that of the young man who leaves. The tension between his guilt and the dictates of his “restless heart” is what drives the poem to its conclusion.
Lawson’s difficulties in representing the girl-woman left behind can be seen in the poem’s editorial history where in the original (reproduced at the end of this essay) the death of the “mad girl” is presented at the start of the final stanza.
Lawson put the “mad girl” description in inverted commas, presumably to indicate it was the judgement of those around her, not that of the poem.
In later editions, those first four lines were removed entirely, and the piece ends with its sole focus on a romanticised depiction of the pain of a man who “rides from one who loves him best”, because, as the last line states, he “must”.
Foott – the language of loss
Some might judge that of Foott and Lawson, Lawson has the more assured, felicitous style. However, such a judgement ignores what Foott is often doing in this poem with a structure that ultimately resists fluency.
Written in quatrains with an abab rhyme scheme, “The Sliprails and the Spur” has a quiet inevitability about it, with each four-line unit completing a segment of the narrative.
It is a leisurely piece, with the first stanza establishing scene, characters and situation in twelve lines and the remainder of the story unfolding over four eight-line stanzas.
Line lengths are not quite fixed, so the form has room to accommodate dialogue, exclamations, descriptive elaborations, and what are almost authorial asides or summations without breaking stride.
Foott’s process is different. The poem is more compressed and less casually regularised. Written in three eight-line stanzas, the rhyme scheme is less insistent and the rhythm sometimes a little stilted.
Though there is a pattern across the three stanzas, it is not as obvious to the ear. Rhyme is not used in the same way to give meaning a feeling of predestination.
An initial point of difference in Foott’s poem is the structural tension she establishes within the first six lines:
The horses were ready, the rails were down,
But the riders lingered still, —
One had a parting word to say,
And one had his pipe to fill.
Then they mounted, one with a granted prayer,
And one with a grief unguessed.
The two-part first line conflicts with line two. Departure has been doubly prepared for but is stalled. Note the way in which the comma, followed by an em dash, at the end of line two halts the reading and then moves it forward.
The reason for the brief stasis is not as obvious as in Lawson’s opening – one man’s motivation for delay is contrasted with another’s: one apparently heartfelt, the other seemingly inconsequential.
After the men mount, there is another mid-line break, and the stanza then seems to fold back on itself again with one man granted an unspecified prayer and the other carrying a secret grief. The situation is clear in the broad but begins to disintegrate in the particular. We cannot presume to know these people.
Foott’s method is one of restraint, partial disclosure, and embedded uncertainty. The staged, graduated progress of her first stanza serves this purpose.
Compared to this, Lawson’s parting scene is one of overt declaration and large gesture within a smooth rhythmic structure. Neither framing ensures that all is known, but Foott appears more determined that it not be.
The capacity of style to create meaning becomes particularly important as each poem closes.
The last four lines of “The Sliprails and the Spur” read:
And he rides hard to dull the pain
Who rides from one who loves him best;
And he rides slowly back again,
Whose restless heart must rove for rest.
The departing figure is treated as at least a partial victim, suffering the pain of separation. The irony of that pain being self-inflicted remains tantalisingly in the background.
His motivation is directly stated in the last two lines:
And he rides slowly back again,
Whose restless heart must rove for rest.
Here the tight rhyme scheme and phrasing turn wanderlust into necessity. The paradox of the last line reads like an aphorism, a statement of received bush wisdom – movement is his rest.
The closure is all too pat. The internal logic of the poem is set, and the rider becomes more emblematic than human.
Foott’s close could not be more different. The pain of those who wait without hope drives the phrasing and ultimately destabilises its semantic structure.
Consider the first three lines of the final quatrain:
But the waters of Hope have flowed and fled,
And never from blue hill’s breast
Come back — by the sun and the sands devoured —
The capitalised “Hope” does not read like an abstraction. It is too closely linked to those real-world rivers at the start of the stanza which flowed and dried up again and again. That image of the “blue hill’s breast” suggests a remote source of hope, nourishment, intimacy permanently beyond reach.
It has become progressively harder to tie subject to verb in these lines. Who or what never comes back – the waters, hope, the lost men? The distinction ceases to matter as layers of loss collapse in an image of total devastation.
At this point, Foott breaks the mould, using an extraordinary insertion within em dashes, “by the sun and the sands devoured”, to suggest a depth of conflated pain almost too great for controlled expression.
“Come back”, the words with which the second last line opens, read for a moment as a cry for the lost to return. Then the import of “never” in the previous line reasserts itself and the futility of hope is felt more intensely.
Across these last lines, Foott strains the limits of syntax to voice grief in extremis.
Compared to what is expressed here, the pain named at the end of “The Sliprails and the Spur” appears pre-shaped, romanticised, almost confected.
“Where the Pelican Builds” does not turn away from the cost borne by men who confronted a continent they did not understand but it focuses an unflinching gaze on the tragedy for those who remained behind.
Endnote
Bold acts can end in many ways.
Mary Hannay Foott’s younger son, Arthur, died at Passchendaele in 1917. He had been born at Dundoo Station, two years before his mother wrote “Where the Pelican Builds”.
According to Arthur Foott’s biography on the Virtual War Memorial Australia site, Thomas Foott’s death – five years after Arthur’s birth – was believed to be the result of the “stress” of the Queensland droughts of the 1880s.
Foott herself died thirteen months after her son, following a brief illness.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes Foott as a “minor poet”. That may be a fair summary judgement. “Where the Pelican Builds”, however, is a major work.
The Sliprails and the Spur
by Henry Lawson
The Bulletin, 1 April 1899.
The colours of the setting sun
Withdrew across the Western land —
He raised the sliprails, one by one,
And shot them home with trembling hand;
Her brown hands clung — her face grew pale —
Ah! quivering chin and eyes that brim! —
One quick, fierce kiss across the rail.
And “Good-bye, Mary!” “Good-bye, Jim!”
Oh! he rides hard to race the pain
Who rides from love, who rides from home;
But he rides slowly home again,
Whose heart has learnt to love and roam.
A hand upon the horse’s mane,
And one foot in the stirrup set,
And, stooping back to kiss again.
With ‘Good-bye, Mary! don’t you fret!
When I come back! — he laughed at her —
We do not know how soon ’twill be:
I’ll whistle as I round the spur —
You let the sliprails down for me.’
She gasped for sudden loss of hope,
As, with a backward wave to her,
He cantered down the grassy slope.
And swiftly round the dark’ning spur.
Black-pencilled panels standing high,
And darkness fading into stars.
And blurring fast against the sky,
A faint white form beside the bars.
And often at the set of sun.
In winter bleak and summer brown,
She’d steal across the little run.
And shyly let the sliprails down
And listen where when darkness shut
The nearer spur in silence deep;
And when they called her from the hut
Steal home and cry herself to sleep.
A great white gate where sliprails were,
A brick house ‘neath the mountain brow,
The “mad girl”, buried by the spur,
So long ago, forgotten now,
And he rides hard to dull the pain
Who rides from one who loves him best;
And he rides slowly back again,
Whose restless heart must rove for rest.
References
The two poems reproduced in this essay are in the public domain and can be accessed through Trove in the form in which they were first published (as reproduced here).
Cecil Hadgraft and Margaret Henry, ‘Foott, Mary Hannay (1846–1918)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/foott-mary-hannay-3546/text5473, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 13 June 2026.
‘Arthur Patrick Foott’ Virtual War Memorial Australia
https://vwma.org.au/explore/people/219083, accessed online 13 June 2026.