Poems from The Full Dress

"Worker Knowledge" first appeared in Poems the Size of Photographs (see Bibliography). "The Selector's Hut: Whelan on the log" is by Arthur Streeton, 1890.

Other Poems from The Full Dress

Worker Knowledge

The very slight S of an adze handle
or broadaxe handle are cut off square.
When adzes stopped licking timber ships
they were Stubbed to scrape rabbit-trap setts.

But the worker's end of a felling axe
where the tapering upsweep levels down
to bulge, is cut slant, to the shape
of a thoroughbred's hoof pawing the ground.