"In the Park" is a 1961 poem by Australian author Gwen Harwood.
It was first published in The Bulletin on 8 March 1961 as by "Walter Lehmann", a pseudonym of Harwood's, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's collections and other poetry anthologies. Later publications carried Harwood's name as the author.
Synopsis An unnamed woman sits in a park with three children playing around her. She is unexpectedly joined by an ex-lover. As they chat about the children she visualises a cartoon-like speech balloon above his head in which is written "...but for the grace of God."
Critical reception
In his book Reading Australian Poetry Andrew Taylor set out to discuss Harwood's "poetry in relation to questions of identity." He decided to use this poem as a starting point. "Suburban monotony and tedium, the niggardly penny-pinching that often comes from having children, the disharmony, the aimlessness: they are all economically conveyed...What we have here is not a muddled poem, but a subtle demonstration of the textuality of identity, its characteristic, if you like, of not being itself."Reading Australian Poetry by Andrew Taylor, University of NSW Press, 1987, pp. 113-115 Accessed: 13 February 2026.
Writing about the poem's final line ("They have eaten me alive.") Ann-Marie Priest commented: "The sentiment was profoundly challenging for its time. The idea that a woman's children could consume her very being was entirely antithetical to the dominant discourse of motherhood, in which a woman was supposed to find her only true fulfillment in bearing and raising children. Even worse was the suggestion that a mother might resent this unthinking consumption of herself by her offspring."The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry edited by Ann Vickery. "Chapter 10. Burning Sappho: Gwen Harwood's Incendiary Verse" by Ann-Marie Priest, pp. 167-182
Publication history After the poem's initial publication in The Bulletin it was reprinted as follows:
Poems by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 1963 New Impulses in Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott, University of Queensland Press, 1968 The Land's Meaning edited by L. M. Hannan and B. A. Breen, Macmillan, 1973 Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 1975 The Collins Book of Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall, Collins, 1981 Cross-Country : A Book of Australian Verse edited by John Barnes and Brian MacFarlane, Heinemann, 1984 Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Mark O’Connor, Oxford University Press, 1988 The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Vincent Buckley, Faber, 1991 The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead, Penguin, 1991 50 Years of Queensland Poetry : 1940s to 1990s edited by Philip Neilsen and Helen Horton, Central Queensland University Press, 1998 Australian Verse : An Oxford Anthology edited by John Leonard, Oxford University Press, 1998 Selected Poems : A New Edition by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 2001 The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets edited by Geoff Page, Indigo, 2003 Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry 1986 - 2008 edited by Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse, Puncher and Wattmann, 2009 Mappings of the Plane : New Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood, edited by Gregory Kratzmann and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Fyfield Books, 2009 The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Leonard, Puncher & Wattmann, 2009 Australian Poetry Journal, Vol 2 No 1, 2012 The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood, Black Inc., 2014 Love is Strong as Death edited by Paul Kelly, Hamish Hamilton, 2019
See also 1961 in Australian literature
References