The Bullocky
"The Bullocky" is a 1946 poem by Judith Wright, first published in her debut collection The Moving Image. The poem depicts a bullock driver transporting goods through the Australian bush, interweaving pastoral imagery with sudden, shocking violence and Biblical allusion.
Wright's poem subverts romantic notions of the Australian pastoral by revealing the brutality underlying colonial settlement. The bullocky, a working-class figure driving a team of bullocks—becomes both perpetrator and victim of violence, his daily labor inseparable from the land's conquest and his own eventual death.
The poem is notable for its stark juxtaposition of lyrical natural description with visceral violence, its use of religious imagery to question colonial righteousness, and its unflinching examination of the costs of settlement. Wright refuses to romanticise the bush experience.
The Poem
thirsty with drought and chilled with rain,
he weathered all the striding years
till they ran widdershins in his brain:
etched deeper with each lurching load
were populous before his eyes,
and fiends and angels used his road.
a mad apocalyptic dream,
and he old Moses, and the slaves
his suffering and stubborn team.
the half-light pillars of the trees
he filled the steepled cone of night
with shouted prayers and prophecies.
the star-struck darkness cupped him round,
and centuries of cattle-bells
rang with their sweet uneasy sound.
and plough strikes bone beneath the grass,
and vineyards cover all the slopes
where the dead teams were used to pass.
and hold it with your rooted hand.
The prophet Moses feeds the grape,
and fruitful is the Promised Land.
Context and Composition
Judith Wright wrote "The Bullocky" during the 1940s while living on her family's property in New England, New South Wales. The poem draws on her childhood memories of bullock teams still working the land, as well as family stories about colonial settlement. Wright's family had been early pastoralists in the region, giving her intimate knowledge of both the landscape and the violence of its colonisation.
The poem appeared in Wright's debut collection The Moving Image (1946), which established her as one of Australia's major poets. The collection marked a new maturity in Australian poetry, combining technical sophistication with unflinching examination of the nation's colonial legacy. Wright would later become a prominent environmental activist and advocate for Aboriginal land rights, concerns that echo in this early work.
Themes and Interpretation
Violence and Pastoral: The poem refuses the romantic pastoral tradition by revealing the violence embedded in agricultural labor. The bullocky's "suffering and stubborn team" endures brutal treatment, while the final stanza's revelation ("plough strikes bone beneath the grass") suggests both the bullocky's burial and the countless Aboriginal deaths hidden beneath pastoral "progress."
Biblical Allusion: Wright transforms the bullocky into "old Moses" leading his team like Israelites through the wilderness toward a "Promised Land." This Biblical framework ironically questions the righteousness of colonial settlement. The bullocky may see himself as divinely ordained, but the poem suggests his "prophecies" are madness born of isolation and labour, and his "Promised Land" is built on bones.
Madness and Isolation: The bullocky's years of solitary labour drive him to religious mania. His tracks become "populous before his eyes" with "fiends and angels," his journey a "mad apocalyptic dream." Wright depicts the psychological cost of colonial isolation, where religious conviction and insanity blur together.
Time and Erasure: The poem's temporal shift—from the bullocky's active labour to "Grass is across the wagon-tracks" shows how quickly the colonial past is buried and forgotten. Vineyards now cover the slopes "where the dead teams were used to pass," transforming sites of labour and death into pastoral beauty. Yet the bone beneath the plough refuses complete erasure.
Language and Style
Wright employs traditional poetic forms—quatrains with consistent rhyme scheme but fills them with unsettling content. This formal control intensifies the violence, making the shock of "plough strikes bone" more powerful through understatement.
Critical Reception
"The Bullocky" was immediately recognised as a significant achievement in Australian poetry. Critics praised Wright's technical mastery and her willingness to complicate nationalist myths about bush life and settlement. The poem marked a departure from the celebratory nationalism of earlier Australian verse, introducing moral complexity and historical guilt.
Later postcolonial readings have emphasised the poem's treatment of Aboriginal dispossession. The "bone beneath the grass" can be read as Aboriginal remains literally ploughed under by pastoral development. Some critics see this as a limitation; others argue the poem's power lies precisely in its revelation of settler violence from within settler consciousness.
Feminist critics have noted the poem's masculine focus, the bullocky is unambiguously male, his team and labor coded as masculine violence. Wright's later poetry would more explicitly engage with gender, but "The Bullocky" establishes her interest in how masculinity, violence, and nation-building intersect in Australian identity.
Legacy
"The Bullocky" remains one of Wright's most anthologised and studied poems, frequently taught in Australian schools and universities as an example of poetry grappling with colonial history. Its influence can be traced in later Australian poets who likewise resist pastoral romanticism in favor of ethical complexity.
The poem's final image suggests both the fertility built on death and the impossibility of separating Australian prosperity from its violent foundations. This ambiguous conclusion refuses easy resolution, leaving readers to contemplate the costs of the "Promised Land."