"No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest" is a poem by Australian poet Mary Gilmore.^[1] It was first published in The Australian Women's Weekly on 29 June 1940,^[2] and later in the poet's collection Fourteen Men. The final two stanzas from the poem appear as microtext on the Australian ten-dollar note.^[3]

Outline

The poem is a "call to arms" to Australians, not in the sense of taking up weapons but more as a call to stand firm in the face of foreign aggression. Each stanza ends with the same two lines (italicised in the original publication): "No foe shall gather our harvest/Or sit on our stockyard rail."

Analysis

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature notes that at the time of publication, the poem "proved a remarkable morale booster in the tense days of the Japanese threat to Australia in 1942." They also note that it "was at the time considered as a possible battle hymn, even national anthem."^[4]

Further publications

• Fourteen Men by Mary Gilmore (1954)
• The Bulletin, 22 July 1980, p79
• Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Kathrine Bell (2007)
• The Book of Australian Popular Rhymed Verse : A Classic Collection of Entertaining and Recitable Poems and Verse : From Henry Lawson to Barry Humphries edited by Jim Haynes (2013)