Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870) was a poet and horseman. Well-educated, from a relatively well-to-do family, he learned to ride as a boy in England and secured a position in the South Australian Mounted Police in 1852. After a couple of years at Penola he resigned, citing his intent to become a drover, but instead he took up horsebreaking. In 1861 he received his inheritance; the legacy enabled him to marry and continue with his horsebreaking and steeplechasing. In 1864 he bought the coastal cottage Dingley Dell, speculated in land and published his first verse in the Border Watch. Invited to stand for the South Australian parliament, he was elected to the House of Assembly for the Victoria district, combining his duties with riding and versifying. He resigned in 1866, having bought land in WA, which he stocked with sheep that failed to prosper. His first two volumes of poetry, Ashtaroth and Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, were both published in June 1867; neither brought him financial reward. The following year he rented livery stables in Ballarat, and joined the town's Light Horse troop. A number of injuries, the death of his only child and the failure of the stables reduced his health, though his public stature as an equestrian and a poet increased over 1869. His expectation of inheriting the family estate in Scotland was dashed in June 1870. The same month, the day after his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes were published, he killed himself. In the view of his biographer, Leonie Kramer, 'his real love was steeplechasing yet he had sufficient poetic talent to develop into a more substantial writer than he ever became'. The Duke of York unveiled a bust of Gordon in Westminster Abbey in 1934, and there is a statue of him, nonchalantly seated, near Parliament House, Melbourne.
