Sky"
  Wilfred
       Periodical (Sydney)

Arthur H. Adams.
  Bayswater, W.
       Manuscript
  Bond Street
       Periodical (London)

Ethel Turner.
  A Trembling Star
  `Oh, if that Rainbow up there!'
       "Gum Leaves"

Johannes Carl Andersen.
  Soft, Low and Sweet
       "Songs Unsung"
  Maui Victor
       Periodical (Dunedin, N.Z.)

Dora Wilcox.
  In London
       "Verses from Maoriland"

Ernest Currie.
  Laudabunt Alii
       Periodical (Timaru, N.Z.)

George Charles Whitney.
  Sunset
       Manuscript

James Lister Cuthbertson. [reprise]
  Ode to Apollo
       Periodical (Melbourne)

Notes on the Poems

Biographical Notes

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    An Anthology of Australian Verse
   —————————————————

Introduction

As the literature of a country is, in certain respects, a reflex of its character, it may be advisable to introduce this Anthology with some account of the main circumstances which have affected the production of Australian poetry.

Australia was first settled by the British a little more than a century ago, so that we are still a young community. The present population, including that of New Zealand, is a little under five millions, or about the same as that of London; it is chiefly scattered along the coast and the few permanent waterways, and a vast central region is but sparsely inhabited as yet. All climates, from tropical to frigid, are included within the continent, but the want of satisfactory watersheds renders it peculiarly liable to long droughts and sudden floods. The absence of those broad, outward signs of the changing seasons which mark the pageant of the year in the old world is probably a greater disadvantage than we are apt to suspect. Here, too, have existed hardly any of the conditions which obtained in older communities where great literature arose. There is no glamour of old Romance about our early history, no shading off from the actual into a dim region of myth and fable; our beginnings are clearly defined and of an eminently prosaic character. The early settlers were engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with nature, and in the establishment of the primitive industries. Their strenuous pioneering days were followed by the feverish excitement of the gold period and a consequent rapid expansion of all industries. Business and politics have afforded ready roads to success, and have absorbed the energies of the best intellects. There has been no leisured class of cultured people to provide the atmosphere in which literature is best developed as an art; and, until recently, we have been content to look to the mother country for our artistic standards and supplies. The principal literary productions of our first century came from writers who had been born elsewhere, and naturally brought with them the traditions and sentiments of their home country.

We have not yet had time to settle down and form any decided racial characteristics; nor has any great crisis occurred to fuse our common sympathies and create a national sentiment. Australia has produced no great poet, nor has any remarkable innovation in verse forms been successfully attempted. But the old forms have been so coloured by the strange conditions of a new country, and so charged with the thoughts and feelings of a vigorous, restless democracy now just out of its adolescence, that they have an interest and a value beyond that of perhaps technically better minor poetry produced under English skies.

The first verses actually written and published in Australia seem to have been the Royal Birthday Odes of Michael Robinson, which were printed as broadsides from 1810 to 1821. Their publication in book form was announced in `The Hobart Town Gazette' of 23rd March, 1822, but no copy of such a volume is at present known to exist. The famous "Prologue", said to have been recited at the first dramatic performance in Australia, on January 16th, 1796 (when Dr. Young's tragedy "The Revenge" and "The Hotel" were played in a temporary theatre at Sydney), was for a long time attributed to the notorious George Barrington, and ranked as the first verse produced in Australia. There is, however, no evidence to support this claim. The lines first appeared in a volume called "Original Poems and Translations" chiefly by Susannah Watts, published in London in 1802, a few months before the appearance of the "History of New South Wales" (1803) — known as George Barrington's — which also, in all probability, was not written by Barrington. In Susannah Watts' book the Prologue is stated to be written by "A Gentleman", but there is no clue to the name of the author. Mr. Barron Field, Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, printed in Sydney in 1819 his "First Fruits of Australian Poetry", for private circulation. Field was a friend of Charles Lamb, who addressed to him the letter printed in "The Essays of Elia" under the title of "Distant Correspondents". Lamb reviewed the "First Fruits" in `The Examiner', and one wishes for his sake that the verses were more worthy.

The first poem of any importance by an Australian is William Charles Wentworth's "Australasia", written in 1823 at Cambridge University in competition for the Chancellor's medal. There were twenty-seven competitors, and the prize was awarded to W. Mackworth Praed, Wentworth being second on the list. Wentworth's poem was printed in London in the same year, and shortly afterwards in `The Sydney Gazette', the first Australian newspaper. In 1826 there was printed at the Albion Press, Sydney, "Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel" by Charles Tompson, Junior, the first verse of an Australian-born writer published in this country. There was also published in Sydney in 1826 a book of verses by Dr. John Dunmore Lang, called "Aurora Australis". Both Lang and Wentworth afterwards conducted newspapers and wrote histories of New South Wales, but their names are more famous in the political than in the literary annals of the country. At Hobart Town in 1827 appeared "The Van Diemen's Land Warriors, or the Heroes of Cornwall" by "Pindar Juvenal", the first book of verse published in Tasmania. During the next ten years various poetical effusions were printed in the colonies, which are of bibliographical interest but of hardly any intrinsic value. Newspapers had been established at an early date, but until the end of this period they were little better than news-sheets or official gazettes, giving no opportunities for literature. The proportion of well-educated persons was small, the majority of the free settlers being members of the working classes, as very few representatives of British culture came willingly to this country until after the discovery of gold.

It was not until 1845 that the first genuine, though crude, Australian poetry appeared, in the form of a small volume of sonnets by Charles Harpur, who was born at Windsor, N.S.W., in 1817. He passed his best years in the lonely bush, and wrote largely under the influence of Wordsworth and Shelley. He had some imagination and poetic faculty of the contemplative order, but the disadvantages of his life were many. Harpur's best work is in his longer poems, from which extracts cannot conveniently be given here. The year 1842 had seen the publication of Henry Parkes' "Stolen Moments", the first of a number of volumes of verse which that statesman bravely issued, the last