The Incantation

The Incantation by Andrew Barton Paterson

"The Incantation" is a topical political satire by Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, first published in the Sydney *Evening News* on 6 May 1905, and it borrows its entire dramatic frame from the witches' cauldron scene in Shakespeare's *Macbeth* to lampoon the Australian federal parliament of the day. The poem opens with stage directions setting a darkened cave and a boiling cauldron, into which three witches enter chanting portents — a braying "Federal Jackass," a neighing "Bruce-Smith War-horse," and the arrival of "Georgie," a thinly veiled jab at contemporary parliamentary figures (Bruce Smith and George Reid among them). Declaring it time to "chant our rhyme," the witches begin dropping ingredients into the pot exactly as Shakespeare's hags do, but every ingredient is a piece of Australian political and social grievance rather than a supernatural horror. The First Witch's brew mixes a "fillet of a tariff snake," home-made flannel that is "mostly cotton," moth-eaten and rotten apples, drought-perished lambs, starving stock from the outback, and the sweat of struggling farmers and cultivators used to bankroll legislators' salaries — a satire on protectionist tariff policy and rural hardship. It also includes "grime from a white stoker's nob, toiling at a nigger's job," a barbed reference to the White Australia policy debates and labour disputes over who performed manual and stoking work, reflecting the racial anxieties embedded in contemporary industrial and immigration politics. After each stanza the witches join in a chorus adapted directly from Macbeth — "Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble" — anchoring the parody unmistakably to its Shakespearean source while redirecting the menace toward Australian public life. The Second Witch adds heel-taps from cheap "threepenny" bars, ash from socialist cigars, the "leathern tongue" of a hardened drinker afflicted with "the great Australian thirst," a furtive two-up gambler, and a park-dwelling loafer, tossed in "to prove the sequel" of the egalitarian ideal that "all men are born free and equal" — a wry comment on the gap between Australia's democratic self-image and the vices and inequalities of everyday colonial society. The Third Witch's ingredients turn explicitly toward named political actors: the "lung of Labour agitator," the "gall of Isaacs turning traitor" (a jab at Isaac Isaacs), the "spleen that Kingston has revealed" and "sawdust stuffing out of Neild" (targeting Charles Kingston and St John Neild), combined with the "duplicity of Lyne" (William Lyne) and "Alfred Deakin's gift of gab" — a roll call of real federal politicians of 1905, each reduced to a grotesque bodily ingredient symbolizing their perceived political vice, whether treachery, inconsistency, or empty rhetoric. This stanza's chorus darkens further, ending "Heav'n help Australia in her trouble," signalling the poem's mounting satirical despair at the state of federal politics. The scene culminates with Hecate, the witches' queen, entering to praise their work and direct the final stage of the spell: the People's rights are thrown into the cauldron and cooled with "an Employer's blood" so that "the charm stands firm and good." Hecate's closing command — to "ring in the coming Fed'ral Session" amid "chaos in possession" — casts the impending sitting of the Australian Parliament as the hellish product of this witches' brew, implying that federal politics is conjured from confusion, self-interest, and class antagonism between labour and employers. As a whole, the piece functions less as narrative than as a compact verse cartoon: using the ready-made theatrical apparatus of Macbeth's supernatural conjuring to mock, name, and catalogue the tariff disputes, racial and labour tensions, personal vices, and factional betrayals that Paterson saw animating Federation-era Australian politics, ending on the resigned, half-comic prayer that heaven help the nation through the session to come.

By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: Political Satire, Parody, Social Commentary · 486 words

First lines

Scene: Federal Political Arena

A darkened cave. In the middle a cauldron boiling. / Enter the three witches.

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poetry · ballad · Australian literature · 19th century · narrative verse · mystical · magical · rhythmic · dramatic · pastoral · classical · verse

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

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