Portrait of Adam Lindsay Gordon

Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870) was a poet and horseman. Born into a relatively well-to-do family, he learned to ride as a boy in England and secured a position in the South Australian Mounted Police in 1852. After a couple of years he resigned and took up horsebreaking. In 1861 he received his inheritance, enabling him to marry and speculate in land while continuing his horsebreaking and steeplechasing pursuits. His first published poems appeared in the Border Watch in 1864. Invited to stand for the South Australian parliament, he was elected to the House of Assembly for the Victoria district, combining his duties with riding and versifying. He resigned in 1866, having bought land in Western Australia, which he stocked with sheep that failed to prosper. His first two volumes of poetry, Ashtaroth and Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, were both published in June 1867; neither brought him financial reward. The following year he rented livery stables in Ballarat, and joined the town’s Light Horse troop. A number of injuries, the death of his only child and the failure of the stables reduced his health, although his reputation as a poet and horseman grew. In June 1870, having missed out on an expected inheritance and a day after his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes were published, he killed himself. A bust of Gordon was unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 1934, and there is a statue of him, nonchalantly seated, near Parliament House, Melbourne.