An Anthology of Australian Verse | Page 4

other Verses"
Jennings Carmichael.
An Old Bush Road
A Woman's Mood
"Poems"
Agnes L. Storrie.
Twenty Gallons of Sleep
A Confession
"Poems"
Martha M. Simpson.
To an Old Grammar
Periodical (Sydney)
William Gay.
Primroses
"Christ on Olympus, and other Poems"
To M.
Vestigia Nulla
Retrorsum
"Sonnets"
Edward Dyson.
The Old Whim Horse
"Rhymes from the Mines, and other Lines"
Dowell O'Reilly.
The Sea-Maiden
Periodical (Sydney, 1895)
David MacDonald Ross.
Love's Treasure House
The Sea to the
Shell
The Silent Tide
The Watch on Deck
Autumn
"The After Glow"
Mary Gilmore.
A Little Ghost

Periodical (Orange, N.S.W.)
Good-Night
Periodical (Brisbane)
Bernard O'Dowd.
Love's Substitute
Our Duty
Manuscript
Edwin James Brady.
The Wardens of the Seas
Manuscript
Will. H. Ogilvie.
Queensland Opal
Periodical (London)
Wind o' the Autumn
Periodical (London)
Daffodils
Periodical (Edinburgh)
A Queen of Yore
Periodical (Sydney)
Drought
Periodical (London)
The Shadow on the Blind
Periodical (London)
Roderic Quinn.
The House of the Commonwealth
Periodical (Sydney)
The Lotus-Flower
Manuscript
David McKee Wright.
An Old Colonist's Reverie
"Station Ballads, and other Verses"
Christopher John Brennan.
Romance

"XXI Poems: Towards the Source"
Poppies
Manuscript
John Le Gay Brereton.
The Sea Maid
"Oithona"
Home
"Sea and 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

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