Adam Lindsay Gordon

The man and the myth

by Geoffrey Hutton

Faber and Faber, 1978 [First Edition], ISBN 0571109217, hardcover, dustjacket

Fine Collectible Condition, minor shelf-wear to dustjacket

'When Adam Lindsay Gordon put an end to his troubled and turbulent life with a service rifle in 1870, some seventeen years after he had been packed off tho Australia ss a horse obsessed young ne'er-do-well by an exasperated parent, what fame he enjoyed was as a gentleman-jockey and a writer of horsey ballads and sketches.  He had been a mounted policeman, landowner, Member of Parliament, steeplechase jockey, clubman, failed businessman, journalist - and poet.  By the centenary of his birth in 1933 he was a legend, Australia's National Poet, and a year later his bust was being unveiled in Westminster Abbey by the future King George VI.  Drawing on new material and correcting a number of popular misconceptions, this authoritative and entertaining biography does full justice to its colourful subject, as a man, a poet and a cultural-historical phenomenon against the background of a colonial society that was still evolving a sense of its own nationhood.'