Said Hanrahan (original) (raw)

"Said Hanrahan" is a poem written by the Australian bush poet John O'Brien, the pen name of Roman Catholic priest Patrick Joseph Hartigan. The poem's earliest known publication was in July 1919 in The Catholic Press, appearing in 1921 in the anthology . The poem describes the recurrent natural cycle of droughts, floods and bushfires in rural Australia as seen by "Hanrahan", a pessimistic man of Irish descent. "'We'll all be rooned', said Hanrahan"—an adage extracted from the poem—has entered the Australian English lexicon.