In his excellent new biography of Burns, Robert Crawford points out that the Americans have, from the beginning, taken Burns to their hearts. The same is true of Australians. Our cities and country bear visible witness to this. Burns statues were erected in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. On 26 January 1935, the day after his birthday, the Burns Monument was unveiled in Canberra. The monument, commissioned by the Canberra Highland Society and Burns Club, was preceded by a procession from a Scottish rowan tree planted in the grounds of St Andrew’s Presbyterian church. The occasion was thus replete with Scottish associations, but it was at the same time an Australian occasion: the monument was accepted on behalf of the Commonwealth government by the prime minister, Joseph Lyons, a man of Irish descent; and January 26 is not only the day after Burns’s birthday but also, of course, Australia Day. There is a sense in which this occasion marked the adoption of Burns as a kind of national bard of Australia. The bardic role was one that Burns actively promoted for himself in Scotland, as Crawford demonstrates – he has called his life The Bard – but such was the extraordinary popularity of Burns in Australia that there was clearly a desire to claim him for ourselves as well.

Burns associations have likewise been fixed on the Australian landscape. Two homesteads called Mossgiel and another called Ellisland must be named in commemoration of Burns, since these are the names of two of his farms and are otherwise unknown. It is highly likely that the popularity in Australia of the names Alloway (his birthplace) and Kilmarnock (where his first book of poems was published) owes something to Burns.

Our literature contains many references to Burns: Lawson, Kendall, Spence (to name a few) refer to his work as being entirely familiar to their audience. There were copies of Burns’s poems in many homes: my great-grandfather’s Burns has come down to me, inscribed ‘John Tulloch from Robt Shaw 1/8/79’. Although the reading and love of Burns was not confined to those of Scottish descent, undoubtedly the giving and receiving of a copy of Burns was an assertion of Scottish identity in Australia.

At least two of our prime ministers of Scottish descent, Andrew Fisher and Robert Menzies, shared an interest in Burns, though coming to him from quite different political directions. Many of the elaborate editions of Burns produced in the nineteenth century included an engraved portrait based usually on the 1787 portrait by Alexander Nasmyth. The South Australian town of Penola, heavily Scottish in its original settlers and recently the setting of Peter Goldsworthy’s Everything I Knew (with its pointedly named protagonist, Robbie Burns) displays in its John Riddoch Centre a rather appealing portrait of Burns. Painted by the local artist Lilian Jean Neilson (1885–1963) but based on the Nasmyth painting, it is no doubt mediated through an illustration in one or other of the editions of Burns, but Neilson shows Burns dressed in bright blue, whereas the original portrait shows him in a rather sombre brown. It appears that, basing her painting on a black and white engraving, she has taken the detail of Burns’s blue clothing from Lockhart’s life of the poet, another indication of the intense interest aroused in Australia by information about Burns.

Burns died only eight years after the arrival of the First Fleet. In the early years of the colony, Burns’s spectacular success with the publication of the Kilmarnock poems in 1786 would have still been a recent memory. Some of the many Scots who came to Australia in those early years must have brought with them a love of Burns, including at least one convict. Andrew Stewart, rescued from the gallows by the intervention of Walter Scott, had published his own collection of Burnsian poems in 1809, using Burns’s own title Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

Our knowledge of early Australian interest in Burns has been much enhanced by the National Library of Australia’s wonderful Australian Newspapers Beta site (ndpbeta.nla.gov.au). For instance, on 3 January 1829, when Lockhart’s life of Burns had just appeared, the Sydney Gazette (followed before the end of the month by the Hobart Town Courier) excerpted a letter from the book in which Walter Scott described his one and only meeting with Burns. The newspapers seized this heaven-sent opportunity to present a memorable scene which brings together the two most famous Scottish writers of the age. The adolescent Scott observes Burns shedding tears over a picture of a soldier lying dead in the snow beside his widow, and provides Burns, when no one else knows it, with the name of the poet whose lines adorned the picture. He is rewarded with ‘a look, which, though of mere civility, I then received, and still recollect, with great pleasure’.

Scott indeed represents the greatest rival to Burns as a Scottish writer with profound influence in Australia. Scott, too, is memorialised in the Australian landscape, in place names such as Marmion, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Abbotsford, Rokeby, Deloraine, Ellangowan and St Ronan’s Well; and is frequently cited in Australian literature. However, to my knowledge, there are no statues of Scott in Australia. Widely and enthusiastically read as he was, Scott lacked something of that universal appeal that Burns possessed and still possesses.

Burns has never been without his detractors, but the criticism has tended to soften over time. What some could not forgive in his lifetime, later readers have been willing to overlook, as much as anything, one suspects, because of the beauty of his love songs, or, as Lawson sardonically put it, ‘The living bard’s a drunken rake / The dead one loves the lasses.’ Walter Murdoch, in one of his early essays in the Argus in 1905, suggests that Scott, rather than Burns, is ‘the real spokesman of the [Scottish] race and the real representative of what is best in the [Scottish] national character’, and that ‘It is a question of a national hero; and you may search for weeks ere you may light on a sorrier hero than Robert Burns’. Despite this, Murdoch praises his love lyrics (‘Here is the lyrical cry, if ever lyric had it’), his satires (‘in branding the national sin of hypocrisy Burns showed himself the consummate satirist’) and his descriptions of rural life (‘he painted some pictures of life, as he knew it, with rare vividness and fidelity and spirit’). And, what is perhaps more relevant here, in referring to these aspects of Burns’s work Murdoch confidently relies on his audience’s intimate knowledge of the poems (and their knowledge of Scott). Burns, then, and Scott could be counted to be amongst the expected reading of Australians in the early twentieth century. Both writers contributed to a culture still very oriented towards Britain.

So the influence of Burns, along with that of Scott, was fundamental to our literary culture well into the early twentieth century. But what of now? Today, Scott struggles for a readership (even his name is unknown to many of my students: ‘The Great Unknown’ indeed). Burns, however, is not forgotten – everyone can quote at least one line, the first, of his most famous love song; we all know ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (or, at least, as Lawson expresses it, ‘They knew one verse of “Auld Lang Syne –” / The first one and the chorus’); ‘the best laid schemes of mice and men’ still ‘gang agley’ or, in anglicised form, ‘go astray’, even if few people recognise this as a quotation from Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’; and ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’ has survived our move to gender neutral language. Burns Clubs and Caledonian Societies have also done sterling service in keeping alive the ‘Immortal Memory’ and ensuring that we know the haggis as ‘Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race’. But does Burns have any deep meaning for us any more? Does he get the readership he deserves? Does he indeed deserve a readership such as he had a hundred years ago, or any readership at all?

For me, Burns still has much to offer, not least in the sheer quality of his verse. As everyone agrees, these are amongst the best love lyrics ever written – and nor do they represent only the viewpoint of a male who died in his late thirties. Later in his life, Burns gave much of his energies to the preservation and rewriting of traditional Scottish songs such as he had first heard from his mother in his earliest days. Amongst those he remodelled is ‘John Anderson, my Jo’, in the voice of an old woman addressing the man with whom she has spent her life:

John Anderson my jo, John,

We clamb the hill the gither;

And mony a canty day John,

We’ve had wi’ ane anither:

Now we maun totter down, John,

And hand in hand we’ll go;

And sleep the gither at the foot,

John Anderson my Jo.

(The fact that there is also a bawdy counterpart to this does nothing to detract from the beauty of Burns’s version).

The satire on religious hypocrisy – for example in the devastating ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ – still has plenty of contemporary relevance; ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ remains one of the best tales of the supernatural ever written (as well as one of the best descriptions of joyful drunkenness); and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ provides us with a picture of the family life of those from whom so many Australians of Scottish descent derive (a picture of even broader relevance if we remember how many other Australians are descended from rural workers in different countries around the world). Finally, there is the democratic Burns who proclaims that

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Its comin yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the warld o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

It is possible that Burns was easier to approach for earlier generations. It may indeed be that his particular political stance – where, on the one hand, he felt great sympathy for the ideals of the French Revolution and, on the other, as a public servant, was obliged to express and perhaps to feel loyalty to the British crown – was more congenial to an earlier, more monarchically inclined British Australia, as perhaps was his Jacobitism, but the declaration that ‘The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd for a’ that’ retains plenty of resonance. Again, because everyone read Scott and Burns in the nineteenth century, the language of Burns’s ‘Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’ was no barrier. Not for them today’s ignorance which turned Burns’s well-known ‘Address to the Unco Guid’ into ‘Address to Unico Guild’ in the Advertiser of 29 January 2001.

For all that, Burns is worth another visit. For those who do not have a treasured family Burns or who have one but want a sleeker modern edition, the Burns anniversary has spawned new editions more attuned to the sympathies and linguistic aptitude of modern readers. Crawford has teamed with Christopher MacLachlan to produce a handsome and scholarly selection with a helpful biographical introduction, marginal glosses of the now unfamiliar Scottish words, explanatory notes and careful attribution of the texts to the editions used. This is a good way to read Burns if you want to understand all the words and allusions (as ideally you should), and how the poems relate to Burns’s life.

However, I am even more inclined to recommend the new selection by Andrew O’Hagan. It comes with far fewer notes and only a short glossary at the end, but contains a deeply felt and very personal introduction (which nevertheless addresses some of the complexities of Burns and his reputation) as well as brief introductions to each poem. If you want to know what each of his selected poems means to one of Scotland’s best contemporary writers, choose the O’Hagan. And if you want to see how the themes and language of Burns can still inspire Scottish writers today, you can turn to another Crawford enterprise, a selection of poems by some of Scotland’s best writers under the title New Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

To return to my beginning, Darwin is important to us – but so is Burns, at the very least because of his influence when Australia’s culture was being formed. Moreover, Darwin writes well, but Burns writes really well. Two hundred and fifty years after his death, we need to return yet again to this truly great writer.

Main books considered in this article

Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, Jonathan Cape, $59.95 hb, 466 pp

Robert Crawford (ed.), New Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Polygon, $29.95 pb, 128 pp

Robert Crawford and Christopher MacLachlan (eds), The Best Laid Schemes: Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Burns, Polygon, $39.95 pb, 306 pp

Andrew O’ Hagan (ed.), A Night Out with Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems, Canongate, $22.95 pb, 250 pp