Almost every noun that matters in this poem is a place name, and that is the joke. A heatwave sweeps through, and everything wilts: the Bombola faints, the Koppio sorrows, the Goomeroo "sinks in the slumber of death." But the poet never tells us what a Bombola or a Goomeroo is. Place names have been slotted into the grammar of creatures. We get a "Ballarat Fly," a "Whangeroo wombat," a "Wallaroo swan." Even the geography wanders: Timaru and Oamaru are New Zealand names, swept into a poem whose title says Australia. The result is a mock-elegy in which the mourners, the dying and the graveyard are all made of the same syllables. Whatever its history, the poem works as a comic argument that grand feeling can run on sound alone, with very little sense underneath.
The sound is carefully managed. The lines roll along in a lilting, ballad-like beat, with four main stresses to a line: "The Bombola faints in the hot Bowral tree." Quatrains with alternating rhymes give the whole thing the sing-song confidence of a drawing-room recitation. The fun is in watching the rhyme scheme cope with impossible words. "Tree" is made to chime with "Coolgardie," and "Murrurundi" is nudged into rhyme with "Jerrilderie." Sometimes the poem is delightfully neat, as when "Taroom" lands against "tomb," or when "Wakatipu" and "Oamaru" rhyme with each other and need no help from ordinary vocabulary. The soft, rounded sounds of these names (Woolloomooloo, Woolgoolga, Wallaroo) also pile up the long vowels and heavy W's, so that reading aloud feels sluggish, as if your own mouth were wilting in the heat.
The diction is the other half of the trick. The poem borrows the costume of solemn Victorian verse: "complaineth," "sigheth," "garlanded bowers," "gloaming," "in sables is drest." These words belong to pastoral lament, and the poem drapes them over wombats and swans. The heat itself is described in inflated terms. There are "smothering fires" that "burn ghastly and blue," a "weltering hell," a "hell's holocaust." The weather is promoted from discomfort to apocalypse, and the bigger the language gets, the sillier the occasion looks.
The poem also escalates with a mock-heroic sense of timing. The opening stanzas are all fainting and sighing, with each creature homesick for somewhere cooler: the wallaby "sighs for the Murrubidgee," the wombat is "an exile from Jerrilderie." Then come panting, gasping and death, then a stanza of mourning, in which the winds "fall asleep in the sails." The ninth stanza breaks the pattern. It addresses towns directly, like sentries asleep at their posts, and the line breaks lurch: "There's death in the air! / Killanoola, wherefore / Shall the prayer of Penola be scorned?" By the end the scale is that of a battlefield. "All that was best / In the earth are but graves and a tomb," and a final roll-call is met with silence: "Cameron answers not." That name is one of the few in the poem that sounds ordinary, and it makes the silence oddly sharp.
There is a neat irony in all the longing. Every sufferer pines for somewhere else, such as the "peace of the Timaru shade" or the "balmy soft airs" of Mittagong, yet those refuges are on the same list and are doomed along with everyone else. "From Onkaparinga to far Oamaru / All burn." Homesickness has nowhere to go because the whole map is on fire. The poem is funny partly because the grief is so thorough and so empty.
Its significance lies in that emptiness. By stripping out meaning and keeping the machinery of sorrow (apostrophe, archaic verbs, rolling meter, the roll of the dead), the poem shows how much of a conventional elegy depends on sound and habit. It rewards being read aloud, and it flatters the reader who notices the trick. It is also a affectionate tribute to a landscape whose names are so rich in music that they can carry a poem on their own.