Cirrus@Austlit

Ackland tests the literary criticism that suggests Wentworth and other colonial poets were inept in their descriptions of the Australian landscape (when compared to the Bulletin school) by arguing that the poet did not primarily attempt such poetic descriptions. Wentworth wrote to describe the European appropriation of Australia signalled by the mapping of the land, and introduced many of the themes taken up by later poets: landscape; exploration; colonisation; aborigines; the cultivation of the enlightenment; and the relationship between old and new worlds.