Investigating Flora by Andrew Barton Paterson

Name: Investigating Flora
Author: Andrew Barton Paterson

"Investigating Flora" is a comic bush ballad by Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, first published in The Bulletin on 9 December 1899. It satirizes urban scientific pretension by pitting a workish naturalist against the plain-spoken realities of the Australian outback. The poem centers on Professor Brown, a scholar celebrated for weighty academic treatises on insects, beetles, and other minutiae of natural history — the kind of dry, specialized learning that impresses committees but proves useless in practical circumstances. On the strength of this reputation, Brown is engaged to lead a "Ladies' Science Circle," a group of twenty-two young women eager to be instructed in botany and natural science. He organizes an excursion into the bush, ostensibly to collect and catalogue native plant specimens — to "investigate the flora" of the district, in his own stiff, academic phrasing. The expedition's high-minded purpose collides comically with rural reality when the party, en route, reaches an isolated bush crossing presided over by a rough, suspicious selector (a small-scale rural landholder). When Professor Brown, in his fussy scientific idiom, announces that he has come "to investigate your flora," the selector — unfamiliar with the botanical sense of the word — mishears it as a reference to a person: his own daughter, Flora. The misunderstanding is heightened by the absurdity of the professor's situation, surrounded as he is by more than twenty young women, which only deepens the selector's suspicion that "flora" is some kind of euphemism or ruse. Brown tries to clarify that he means native flowers and plants, not any particular woman, but the selector remains unconvinced and increasingly hostile. Matters come to a head when Flora herself appears: a big, formidable, red-haired young woman, nothing like the delicate blossom the professor had rhetorically invoked. Her father, still bristling with misplaced jealousy and outrage, threatens to set his daughter upon the hapless professor if he does not clear off at once. Confronted with this looming, indignant figure, the professor's nerve collapses entirely. Abandoning both his dignity and his specimen bag, he turns and flees in a blind panic. The chaos is contagious: seeing their leader bolt, the ladies of the Science Circle likewise dissolve into hysterical flight, scattering into the surrounding bush without direction or plan. The poem's closing movement depicts the aftermath of this rout. Stripped of any competent guide, the professor and his flock find themselves hopelessly lost near the crossing as darkness gathers. Paterson evokes the eerie, unfamiliar sounds of the Australian night — the cries of owls, the howling of dingoes, and other bush noises that unnerve the stranded townsfolk — to underscore how far the party's genteel scientific pretensions are from any real command of the countryside they had presumed to "investigate." The ballad ends not with triumphant discovery but with anticlimax and disarray: the expedition collapses into confusion, the ladies frightened and directionless, and the professor's authority thoroughly discredited. Thematically, the poem trades on a favorite Paterson device: the deflation of imported, bookish expertise when it meets the blunt, literal-minded world of the bush. Professor Brown's Latinate vocabulary and academic credentials, so impressive in a lecture hall, render him not merely useless but actively dangerous once removed from his element — he cannot read a simple rural exchange, mistakes plain suspicion for genuine threat, and abandons his charges the moment real (or perceived) danger appears. The selector, though himself the butt of a joke built on a misunderstood pun, nonetheless outmatches the professor in practical shrewdness and nerve; it is the city-bred scientist, not the rustic landholder, who is exposed as unfit for the environment he claims to study. The poem belongs to the same comic vein as much of Paterson's shorter verse, using a simple play on words — "flora" the botanical subject versus Flora the person — as the hinge for a broader send-up of professional condescension, gender-mixed propriety in Victorian-era Australia, and the gap between academic credentials and bush competence. Its humor derives from escalating misunderstanding and slapstick panic rather than pathos, and it ends, characteristically for Paterson's comic ballads, on a note of farcical disorder rather than resolution. Sources: - [Investigating Flora, Andrew Barton Paterson - Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Investigating_Flora) - [Collected Poetry, Project Gutenberg Australia](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607741h.html)

By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: Narrative Poetry, Humorous Poetry, Satirical Poetry · 1,208 words

First lines

'Twas in scientific circles / That the great Professor Brown / Had a world-wide reputation / As a writer of renown. / He had striven finer feelings / In our natures to implant / By his Treatise on the Morals / Of the Red-eyed Bulldog Ant. / He had hoisted an opponent / Who had trodden unawares / On his "Reasons for Bare Patches / On the Female Native Bears". / So they gave him an appointment / As instructor to a band / Of the most attractive females / To be gathered in the land. / 'Twas a "Ladies' Science Circle" -- / Just the latest social fad / For the Nicest People only, / And to make their rivals mad. / They were fond of "science rambles" / To the country from the town -- / A parade of female beauty / In the leadership of Brown. / They would pick a place for luncheon / And catch beetles on their rugs; / The Professor called 'em "optera" / They called 'em "nasty bugs". / Well, the thing was bound to perish / For no lovely woman can / Feel the slightest real interest / In a club without a Man -- / The Professor hardly counted / He was crazy as a loon, / With a countenance suggestive / Of an elderly baboon. / But the breath of Fate blew on it / With a sharp and sudden blast, / And the "Ladies' Science Circle" / Is a memory of the past.

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Investigating Flora is listed on Textopian as a poem by Andrew Barton Paterson, dated 1940 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Andrew Barton Paterson
Date: 1940 CE
Language: English
Genres: Narrative Poetry, Humorous Poetry, Satirical Poetry, Australian Literature, Ballad
Length: 1,208 words
Structure: 1 section, 6 paragraphs
Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)

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Genres

Narrative Poetry — The work is fundamentally a complete story told in verse form with plot development, character arcs, and dramatic resolution across multiple stanzas.
Humorous Poetry — Comedy permeates the entire piece through wordplay (the 'Flora' misunderstanding), absurd situations, exaggerated character descriptions, and farcical plot developments.
Satirical Poetry — The poem satirizes academic pretension, the affectations of the 'Ladies' Science Circle,' the earnestness of scientific endeavor, and period social conventions regarding gender and class.
Australian Literature — Distinctly Australian in setting, references native wildlife (wombats, dingos, flying foxes, Queensland bullocks), flora (gumtrees), and features a characteristically Australian rural figure (the selector with his stockwhip).