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Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870), poet and horseman, was born on 19 October 1833 at Fayal, Azores, the only son of Adam Durnford Gordon, a retired captain of the Bengal cavalry and teacher of Hindustani. His father secured Gordon an offer of a position in South Australia. He sailed in the Julia and arrived in Adelaide on 11 November 1853. On the 24th he joined the South Australian Mounted Police. For two years he was stationed at Penola in the Mount Gambier region where he led a routine life with no remarkable incidents or exploits to interrupt his daily duties. He resigned on 4 November 1855 ostensibly to become a drover. His superior officer wrote that he had conducted himself 'remarkably well' and that he was sorry to lose him. Instead of droving Gordon took up horse-breaking in the south-east. He was in touch either directly or indirectly with his family in England, and his father gave him financial assistance until his death on 17 June 1857. In that year Gordon met Julian Tenison-Woods who was able to supply him with books and whose friendship stimulated Gordon's interest in literature. A new phase in Gordon's life began on 11 January 1865 when he received a deputation asking him to stand for the South Australian parliament. In the next two months he managed to combine steeplechasing and political campaigning. The sitting members were defeated and with John Riddoch, a loyal friend and lifelong supporter, Gordon was returned to the House of Assembly for the Victoria district, topping the poll. He combined his parliamentary duties with steeplechasing, travelling to races in Adelaide, Ballarat and Melbourne, and publishing poems. He resigned on 10 November 1866. The pattern of Gordon's life was strange. If the purpose of his migration to Australia was to escape the debilitating attractions of the company into which he had fallen as a young man in England, the life that he led merely served to exacerbate his own temperamental weaknesses. His real love was steeplechasing yet he had sufficient poetic talent to develop into a more substantial writer than he ever became. Long after he died, enthusiastic admirers made pilgrimages to his grave, to Dingley Dell and to other places associated with him. A bust unveiled on 11 May 1934 in Westminster Abbey by the Duke of York attests his extraordinary popularity. His literary reputation has now declined. His popular ballads with their narrative drive and vitality are in marked contrast to his more ambitious poems which, heavily imitative of Romantic and Victorian poetry, are marred by carelessness and inattention to detail. But his successes and failures in his poetry, as in his own life, are a reflection of the tastes and interests of his time.

A statue by Paul Montford is near Parliament House, Melbourne.