Allen Hackworth's poem "The Dust on the Tidwell Bible" sits quietly on a personal website that doubles as a family archive, alongside chronologies of the Tidwell, South, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy lines. The poem is short, almost offhand in tone, yet it lingers in the mind long after the page is closed. It begins with an image most readers recognise: a Bible left untouched on a shelf, a fine grey coating settling on its leather cover, the gilt edges slowly losing their shine.
What makes the piece worth returning to is its refusal to scold. The poem does not lecture the family about neglect, nor does it romanticise the past. Instead, it watches the dust gather, then turns that watching into something closer to prayer. For Australian readers especially, where many households keep heirlooms in fibro cottages or in sealed boxes under the house to escape the late-summer heat, the poem's quiet domesticity lands with a familiar weight.
The Tidwell Bible in the poem is not described as a sacred text so much as a piece of furniture. Allen places it on a low shelf between a tin of buttons and a stack of old Reader's Digests from 1987, the kind of pile that accumulates in the back room of a Queenslander or a weatherboard in the Adelaide Hills. The Bible is heavy, bound in dark leather, and its pages have begun to curl from the humidity that creeps in every February.
The poem tracks the dust the way a botanist might track lichen: season by season, year by year. There is dust from the dry spell, dust from the bushfire smoke that drifted hundreds of kilometres east, dust from the red topsoil that blows in from the paddocks. Each layer is a kind of record, and the poem suggests that the dust is writing its own chronicle alongside the names scrawled in the front pages.
A reader might assume the poem is about forgetting, but the texture of the language suggests something more layered. The dust is described as patient, almost courteous, settling without complaint. It does not judge the family for not opening the book. It simply waits, the way an old neighbour waits on a verandah in Tamworth or Castlemaine, expecting no conversation but content to be near.
Allen uses the dust as a stand-in for everything that has been quietly present in the household but rarely named: the great-grandmother who wrote in the margins, the uncle who underlined verses about patience, the child who once drew a horse on the page about Solomon's temple. The poem argues that neglect is not the same as erasure. A Bible left closed still carries the fingerprints of every hand that opened it.
The Tidwell family tree, as documented on the site, stretches back through branches that cross state lines and cross oceans. The Bible in the poem is implied to be the book that travelled with one branch of the family from Tennessee to a new life in New South Wales, then perhaps on to a sheep station west of Mudgee or a dairy farm in Gippsland. Australian genealogy is full of such objects, and a few of them turn up again and again in the boxes people carry into local history rooms:
For readers tracing their own lines through Trove or the state libraries, the poem offers a quiet reminder that documents are only one layer of a family's record. The dust on the Bible, the sun-bleached ribbon marking a birth, the crack along the spine where someone dropped it in 1962: these are also archives. The poem gently insists that the unwritten record is as legitimate as the written one, especially for families whose stories were never given the dignity of print.
Australian readers tend to bring a particular kind of attention to poems about objects. The local habit of treating old books as both sacred and slightly embarrassing, something to keep but not to display, runs deep. In many homes from Broome to Hobart, Bibles sit in wardrobes rather than on mantelpieces, brought out only for christenings and the occasional Anzac Day reading.
The poem also sits comfortably alongside the Australian tradition of bush verse and family memoir, where landscape and lineage are braided together. Where Banjo Paterson might have written about a horse or a tracker, Allen writes about a closed book in a closed room. The geography is interior, but the climate is unmistakably Australian: the slow creep of mould in a Launceston winter, the dry rattle of dust through window screens in a Mallee summer, the afternoon light that turns a back room amber just before the cool change arrives.
The website gathers poems, prose, chronologies, obituaries, and photographs into one quiet whole. "The Dust on the Tidwell Bible" sits at an angle to the genealogical tables. The tables record dates and places with clinical care. The poem does something different: it records the temperature of the room where those dates were kept.
| Artifact | What it records | What it leaves out | Emotional register |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tidwell chronology | Dates of births, marriages, deaths | The feel of the rooms where these events happened | Neutral, factual |
| Family photographs | Faces, clothing, posture | What was said just before the shutter clicked | Nostalgic, warm |
| Obituary clippings | Public statements of loss | The private grief of the household | Formal, restrained |
| "The Dust on the Tidwell Bible" | The slow accumulation of time on a single object | The names inside the Bible itself | Meditative, tender |
The table shows how the poem fills a gap the other materials cannot. The chronology gives the skeleton; the poem tries, gently, to give the skin.
Readers who return to the poem a second or third time tend to notice details that slipped past on a first reading.
These small choices are what give the piece its staying power. A poem that moralised about neglected Bibles would date badly. One that simply watches the dust has the kind of patience the dust itself has.
There is a particular pleasure in reading a poem set in an Australian interior without needing to be told it is Australian. The weather speaks for itself. The shelves speak for themselves. The rhythm of the language carries the dryness of the country in it, even when the words are about a closed book. Readers in Ballarat or Bundaberg will recognise the back room. Readers in Perth or Darwin will recognise the particular guilt of knowing something precious is in the house but not quite knowing how to honour it.
The poem's last gesture is small and perfect. The speaker does not dust the Bible. The speaker does not open it. The speaker sits with it for a while, in the late afternoon, while the light comes through the window the way it does in Australian houses when the day is finally cooling. Then the speaker leaves the room, and the dust goes on settling. That ending is its own kind of benediction, and it is the reason the poem stays in the memory long after the page has been turned.