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Sometimes Gladness
by Bruce DawePrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed Sometimes Gladness is a collection by the Australian poet Bruce Dawe, and the prescribed HSC selection is five poems: "Homecoming", "Weapons Training", "Enter Without So Much as Knocking", "Drifters" and "Life-Cycle".
Summary
Sometimes Gladness is a collection by the Australian poet Bruce Dawe, and the prescribed HSC selection is five poems: "Homecoming", "Weapons Training", "Enter Without So Much as Knocking", "Drifters" and "Life-Cycle". Written in ordinary Australian speech about ordinary Australian lives, the selection is set for HSC English Studies.
The prescribed selection from Bruce Dawe's Sometimes Gladness is five poems - "Homecoming", "Weapons Training", "Enter Without So Much as Knocking", "Drifters" and "Life-Cycle" - read together as a study of individual and collective human experience across ordinary Australian settings. "Homecoming" is an elegy for the anonymous dead of the Vietnam War, watching the machinery of bringing bodies home rather than telling one soldier's story. "Weapons Training" is a dramatic monologue spoken by a drill sergeant hammering a squad of recruits before they ship out, delivered as one unpunctuated rant that puts the reader inside the barking rhythm of the parade ground.
"Enter Without So Much as Knocking" is a satirical life story following one unnamed man from birth to burial in the language of advertising and traffic signs, a life constructed entirely by its environment. "Drifters" quietly watches an itinerant rural family pack up and move on one more time, its emotion carried in domestic objects rather than declarations. "Life-Cycle" closes the arc with a warm, mock-heroic treatment of barracking for a Victorian football club as a secular religion running the length of a life. Across the selection the same human pull toward the group is shown at its most costly - a war that deals in numbers and freight, a marketplace that packages people - and at its most sustaining, in the shared rituals that give ordinary suburban existence its shape. The movement between those two possibilities is the selection's argument about human experience.
Context
Donald Bruce Dawe (1930-2020) is one of the most widely read poets Australia has produced, in large part because he wrote about ordinary Australian life in ordinary Australian speech. He left school early, worked as a labourer, postman and gardener before university, and served for nine years in the Royal Australian Air Force, and that life outside the literary world is audible in the poems, spoken in the voices of drill sergeants, grieving families, football crowds and suburban consumers rather than in a polished poetic register. Dawe wrote through the decades when Australia was arguing with itself about the Vietnam War, the spread of American-style consumerism and what the good suburban life was actually costing. The Vietnam War supplies the grief of "Homecoming" and the brutal training of "Weapons Training", while the post-war consumer boom supplies the brand names of "Enter Without So Much as Knocking"; his decision to build the poems out of everyday speech, slogans and slang is how those pressures are made to be felt rather than merely reported.
Themes and Techniques
"Homecoming" builds its grief out of grammar rather than incident. The refrain "day after day, they're bringing them home" and the piled participles turn mourning into a mechanical process with no beginning and no end, while "they're zipping them up in green plastic bags" reduces bodies to cargo, the ordinary verb enacting the very reduction the poem protests. The listing of "curly-heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms" names hair and rank but never a person - anonymity rendered formally, so the soldiers become universal precisely because they are nameless.
"Weapons Training" fuses form and content: without full stops the reader cannot pause, judge or step back, and instead undergoes the same relentless pressure as the recruits. The sergeant's crudity makes abstract danger viscerally physical, and his hammered repetition drills mortality into the recruits' bodies through sheer reiteration. The paradox is that this brutality is also, underneath, a distorted form of care: fear rehearsed on the parade ground might save a life on the battlefield.
"Enter Without So Much as Knocking" composes a life almost entirely from found commercial and civic language. A childhood among brand names gives way to a barrage of slogans and signs, a life directed entirely from outside, with no interior at all, and the flat closure withholds mourning as the poem's final verdict.
"Drifters" opens in the future tense - "One day soon he'll tell her it's time to start packing" - so the leaving feels like a law of nature rather than a decision. The wife's disappointment is lodged in objects: "the bottling-set she never unpacked from Grovedale" and the "green tomatoes" picked before they can ripen. Her arc runs from the bright "Make a wish, Tom, make a wish" to the resignation that "she won't even ask why they're leaving this time", hope worn down to a question she has stopped asking.
"Life-Cycle" is the counterweight: babies "wrapped in club-colours" are welcomed into a community before they can speak, the chant "Carn, they cry, Carn" becomes a first language, and the oxymoron "hearts shrapnelled with rapture" captures devotion that is both absurd and genuinely rapturous. The same appetite for shared ritual that processes a person elsewhere in the selection here nourishes one.
Key Quotes
"day after day, they're bringing them home"
- Technique
- Anaphora, present continuous
- Idea
- Mourning turned into an endless mechanical process - grief that is still going on, unfinished
"the bottling-set she never unpacked from Grovedale"
- Technique
- Symbol
- Idea
- The wife's whole deferred hope for a settled life carried in a single unopened domestic object
"hearts shrapnelled with rapture"
- Technique
- Oxymoron
- Idea
- Wartime violence yoked to ecstatic joy - collective devotion that sustains rather than erases
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which course is Sometimes Gladness studied in for the HSC?
- Bruce Dawe's selected poems from Sometimes Gladness are set for HSC English Studies, which asks students to explore how texts represent individual and collective human experience.
- Who was Bruce Dawe?
- Donald Bruce Dawe (1930-2020) was one of the most widely read poets Australia has produced, known for writing about ordinary Australian life in ordinary Australian speech.
- Which Bruce Dawe poems are prescribed for the HSC?
- The prescribed selection is five poems: "Homecoming", "Weapons Training", "Enter Without So Much as Knocking", "Drifters" and "Life-Cycle".
- What are the main themes in the Bruce Dawe selection?
- The poems weigh the human pull toward the group at its most costly, in war and consumerism, and at its most sustaining, in the shared rituals that give ordinary suburban existence its shape.
- What should students focus on when studying Bruce Dawe?
- Students should focus on how Dawe builds each poem out of everyday speech, slogans and slang, and on responding personally to the emotions and behaviour the poems stage.
Studying Sometimes Gladness for the HSC?
Bruce Dawe's selected poems are studied in HSC English Studies, which asks students to explore how texts represent individual and collective human experience and to respond personally to the emotions and behaviour they stage. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.
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