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Noteworthy People
Mary Gilmore:
poet of passion
BY ROS STIRLING
In the 1940s and ‘50s, the kinds of people who were idolised by
Australians were somewhat different to today’s heroes. Dame Mary
Gilmore, who died in 1962 at the age of 97, was greatly revered as
a poet, writer and social reformer. Today, she seems little
remembered and her books are out of print and difficult to find. Even
those who recognise her face on the $10 note may know little of her
poetry and her life.
BORN IN A SLAB COTTAGE
on 16 August 1865 on the
property of her maternal
grandparents near Goulburn
in NSW, Mary Cameron was the first
child of Donald Cameron, an
emigrant from Inverness, Scotland,
and Mary Anne Beattie, born near
Richmond in NSW.
Mary’s childhood was shaped by her
father’s itinerant employment in jobs
ranging from mail runs to sheep
station work and carpentry on
construction projects. She began her
education while the family moved
about from station to station. At a
young age, she started to learn about
the people and the hardships of the
bush, often travelling with her father
in front of the horse-drawn wagon or
with him in the saddle.
It was her grandfather and father
who taught her the alphabet and to
read, and by the age of six she was
teaching her brothers. Learning to
count was a very different experience.
In her book, Old Days Old Ways, she
recollects a period when, as a young
child, she stayed with the Waradgery
tribe of the Murrumbidgee.
When I was with the aboriginals on
the banks of the Murrumbidgee,
….the chief woman of the tribe, in
whose charge I was, tried to teach me
to count in the native way. She began
as she would with her own children,
showing me two fingers, two sticks
laid together, two eyes, two ears, two
elbows, two feet. She did not show
me two thumbs, then, as thumbs had
a group meaning and she did not
want to confuse me. Later she used
tiny sticks, fragments of bark, and
little clods of earth. This was to show
that through differing shapes or
differing places two remained two;
and it was also to make the eye quick
in perception. As soon as I grasped
two I went to threes.
When they were not living in
temporary accommodation on
stations, the Camerons moved back to
stay with the grandparents at
Brooklyn or lived in rented houses in
Wagga Wagga.
Mary’s formal schooling was
fragmented and brief, frequently
interrupted by the family’s constant
moving. In July 1878, just before her
thirteenth birthday, she left school
and started her preparation to become
a teacher, taking unpaid work as a
teacher’s assistant with her uncle, first
at Cootamundra and later near
Albury. At the end of 1879 she
returned home for six months before
joining another uncle at his school at
Yerong Creek, near Wagga Wagga.
There she worked for 18 months
before taking the pupil-teacher
examination and being appointed as a
pupil teacher at the Wagga Wagga
Public School in 1883.
Mary worked as an assistant teacher
in several towns before moving to
Sydney where she worked until 1895
at Neutral Bay and Stanmore. She
lived with her mother, who had
separated from her father and was
writing social notes for the Town and
Country Journal and later the Daily
Telegraph. Throughout this time Mary
wrote verses and contributed to local
papers. From 1890 she became active
in the radical movement of the day,
supporting the maritime and shearers’
strikes and joining the new Australian
Workers Union.
It was while working in Sydney that
Mary met some of the people who
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Noteworthy People
were to have the greatest influence on
her life – William Lane, the founder of
New Australia, the socialist
community in Paraguay; Louisa
Lawson, who was friendly with her
mother; and through Louisa, her son,
Henry Lawson. A strong attachment
grew between Mary and Henry and,
according to Mary, “he said he fell in
love with me at first sight”.
The two spent much time in each
other’s company, and Henry
introduced Mary to the poorer
working class areas of Sydney
including the Rocks area.
He used to take me out to see the
wrong things, the things repressive of
the rights of Australia; the things like
a blot upon her and which prevented
her being herself – the low wage
workers, the Chinamen working at
treadle-saws in underground cellars lit
only by a grating in the street, the
huddled houses by the old Argyle Cut,
and the Rocks where women hung
their washing out on the roof and
from the windows, and where pale
seamstresses sewed at a foot or a hand
machine from daylight till dark for a
few pence and, last but not least, the
mixture of blood and the neglected
children of the Quay and elsewhere.
Mary later wrote that Henry
proposed to her but she refused.
1890 was a tumultuous year for
Australia, with the growth of the
trade union movement and the
formation of employers’ groups
leading to the maritime strike which
spread across the nation in August of
that year. Foremost among the union
leaders was William Lane, an
Englishman who had emigrated in
1885 to Brisbane, where he worked as
a freelance journalist for mainstream
and workers’ publications, and
launched his own socialist newspaper,
The Boomerang.
He played a leading role in growing
the Queensland union movement and
edited the union newspaper, The
Worker. Following the collapse of the
Shearers’ Strike in 1891, and
disillusioned with the entrenched
social and economic divide in
Australia, Lane and a handful of other
socialists founded The ‘New Australia
Cooperative Settlement Association’
with the aim of creating a utopian
communist society.
The group decided it would be
necessary to leave Australia and
Paraguay was settled upon when a
parcel of land was offered by the
Paraguayan government on condition
that a minimum number of people
settled there. The Association set
about attracting recruits to the new
colony and acquiring a ship, the Royal
Tar, to transport them.
It was in 1892 that Mary Cameron
met and was evidently deeply
impressed by William Lane.
Earnest, strong in conviction,
generous-hearted and tender-hearted.
A man to whom Truth is more than
all else – not only truth in word and
deed but in the fulfillment of creation.
….A man with whom utter kindliness
abides. It is good to have touched his
hand.
When the headquarters of the New
Australia Co-operative Settlement
Association moved to Sydney in 1893,
Mary started writing for its journal,
New Australia. Meanwhile, somewhat
chaotic preparations were under way
for the first group of 220 emigrants to
be shipped to Paraguay, and they
finally set sail under Lane’s leadership
on 16 July 1893. Mary was unable to
join them as single women were
excluded from this first trip.
Over the following months, Mary
became a key protagonist for the new
settlement, but all was not well within
the emigrant community. Even during
the voyage, signs of discord emerged as
some of the settlers expressed
resentment at Lane’s strict moral code
and somewhat authoritarian attitude.
Things got worse after their arrival in
September and, by mid-December,
Lane had expelled three men for
breaking the temperance rule. By the
end of the year, more than a third of
the settlers had seceded. A second
group of 199 emigrants set out from
Adelaide on New Year’s Eve, arriving
in late February 1894, but their arrival
A group of people, including Mary Gilmore, at the New Australia Colony, Cosme, Paraguay, 1890s. Photograph; 10.1 x 15.5 cm. National Library of
Australia, nla.pic-an24636968.
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Noteworthy People
Portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore, 1928, Adelaide Perry, 1891–1973, oil on plywood panel on
composition board; 45.3 x 35.5 cm. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an2292680.
did nothing to restore harmony. By
May, Lane and sixty or so supporters
were outnumbered and themselves
seceded to set up a new settlement
called Cosme 72 km from New
Australia, and about 20 km from the
nearest village.
Meanwhile, back in Australia, Mary
briefly became editor of New
Australia, but news of the split in
Paraguay caused confusion and
factionalism within the Association.
Mary cut her links with it as she
prepared to join Lane and the settlers
at Cosme, leaving Sydney in
November 1895.
After an adventurous journey, she
arrived at the new settlement in
January 1896. In the 18 months since
its foundation, Cosme had come a
long way from the primitive camp of
its first settlers, but it was still very
basic. Mary described the little house
that was built for her:
grass walls, grass windows, grass roof.
It had no fireplace. No door. Floor of
clay. If you sat too long on a stool (no
chairs) the legs of the stool sank
inches into the floor.
In the hot, humid climate, the
settlers were plagued by insects,
spiders, snakes and disease, but still
the colony grew. Mary, now 31, was
keen to marry, and she soon
announced her engagement to
William Gilmore, a shearer and farm
labourer who had come to Paraguay
with the second group of emigrants
from Adelaide. They were married in
May 1897 and, in August of the
following year, their only child, Billy,
was born. During this period, Lane
had been away in England recruiting
new settlers to Cosme, and his
absence had resulted in weakening of
the community and its utopian vision.
Mary suffered several bouts of fever
and was becoming alarmed about her
health and that of her son. Then in
June 1899, evidently exhausted and
disillusioned, Lane announced that he
was leaving Cosme to settle in New
Zealand. Will and Mary Gilmore also
resigned from the colony and Will left
for Argentina to work as a shearer in
order to raise money for their return
to Australia.
During the three years that Mary
had been away, both her parents had
died – her father, whom she had not
seen in ten years, in November 1896,
and her mother, at the age of fiftythree,
just six weeks after Will and
Mary made their decision to return to
Australia.
Getting back to Australia was no
easy matter. First, Mary and Billy were
unable to leave when the colony was
quarantined following a suspected
outbreak of bubonic plague. When
they did get away, it was only to stay
for several months at the nearby town
of Villa Rica before catching a steamer
for Rio Gallegos in Pategonia where
Mary taught English and Will found
work shearing on a station 80 km
away.
Finally, the money was raised to
return to Australia via England and in
March 1902, the family embarked on
a difficult voyage during which all
three were assailed by illness. Arriving
in Liverpool with virtually no money,
they heard that Henry Lawson and his
wife Bertha were living in London.
Henry, who by now was drinking
heavily, invited the Gilmores to stay.
Bertha was unhappy with her lot and
wanted only to return to Australia, so
Henry arranged that she and their two
children should return with the
Gilmores (it was to be the beginning
of the end of the Lawsons’ marriage).
Back in Melbourne, Mary’s longheld
ambition to become a writer
crystallised in her mind, but with the
need to earn an income Will took
labouring jobs in the country and
Mary went with Billy first to live with
her grandmother, Mary Beattie, in
Junee, then with friends at Wagga
Wagga and finally to Strathdownie
near Casterton in Victoria where
Will’s parents had a farm. Here, living
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Noteworthy People
in a cottage on the farm, she felt
totally isolated from any intellectual
stimulation, but it was during this time
that her literary career began to take
off.
The Bulletin had published one of her
poems back in 1897 when she was in
Paraguay, and the editor of the
Bulletin’s Red Page, AG Stephens,
undertook to publish a selection of
poems. He began an enduring
correspondence with Mary, sending
her books and the literary journal,
Bookfellow, without which, she later
claimed, she would have broken down.
It wasn’t till years later that I met him
and I always feel that no gratitude and
no good word I could ever give him
could make up for what he did for me.
He was a friend when I most needed
one.
Struggling to devote time to writing
in days packed with domestic work in
her remote and lonely home, Mary
waited in trepidation for the
publication date, 1 October 1903,
when fourteen of her poems, together
with a photo and a brief profile,
appeared in the Bulletin Red Page. It
was to be a turning point in her life.
She began sending her work to a
variety of newspapers and journals, and
over the next few years saw published
articles about her life in Cosme,
parenthood and children as well as a
number of poems. In early 1907 the
family moved to a cottage in Casterton
where she contributed to the local
newspaper and took an active role in
the social and literary life of the town,
including involvement in the local
Labor Party branch and, at the
invitation of the editor, founding and
writing the Women’s Page of the
Australia Worker.
In 1910, Mary’s first book of verse,
Marri’d and Other Verses, was published
– 147 poems described by Stephens as
‘little flutters’ on themes of life, love,
motherhood and death.
Will was meanwhile involved in
building up properties he had jointly
acquired with his brother in
Queensland and was away for long
stretches. Moving back to Sydney,
Mary continued the Women’s Page,
campaigning on issues such as the
maternity bonus that was introduced
in November 1912, age and invalid
pensions and the treatment of
Aboriginals, and writing on aspects of
Australia at war from 1914, as well as
offering advice on domestic affairs and
remedies for common ailments.
Another book of verse, The Passionate
Heart, which expressed her horror at
the war, secured Mary’s reputation as a
leading poet.
Billy had earlier moved to
Queensland to work with his father,
and Mary did not see either of them
for more than a decade. Her health
was increasingly threatened by high
blood pressure and she moved to
Goulburn for several years, during
which period Henry Lawson died. In
1925, a new book of verse, The Tilted
Cart, about life in the Riverina, was
published, drawing, to some degree, on
her childhood memories. It was
followed in 1930 by The Wild Swan
which dealt mostly with death and
reflections on the experiences and
outcomes of life.
By this time, Mary Gilmore had a
considerable reputation as a writer and
social commentator, and had been
appointed to the Censorship Board.
However, her employment with The
Worker, which had lasted for 20 years,
came to an unhappy end after a bitter
falling out with the management. Over
the next five years, through the Great
Depression, Mary focused on
publishing a series of books – two more
books of verse and two of prose, Old
Days, Old Ways; a Book of Recollections
and More Recollections, which explored
life in Australia’s pioneering days.
In 1937, at the age of 72, Mary was
recognised for her social and literary
achievements with an appointment as
the first Dame of the British Empire
(DBE). She had become something of
a living national treasure and enjoyed
the limelight while working, over the
next two years, on another book,
Battlefields, which referred to inner
personal battles rather than the
looming war. When it came, the war
absorbed her attention, as it did
everyone’s, and she wrote numerous
patriotic poems and even a battle cry –
“We are the boomeranglanders” which,
perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to catch
on.
1945 was to be a year of tragedy for
Mary. For many years, she and Will
had lived apart as he still ran his
station in Queensland, and most years
she heard from him only by mail. In
February 1945, at the age of 78, Will
died in Cloncurry hospital of
septicaemia from an infected wound.
Billy, now married with a son, and
running another Queensland station,
had become an alcoholic, and just five
months after Will’s death, Mary was
notified that her son had died from
drinking benzine.
While the grief was undoubtedly
intense, Mary did not give in to it.
With the war over she focused on the
publication of her book, Selected Verse,
and then her final collection, Fourteen
Men. As a passionate pacificist, she
became involved in a peace movement
managed by the Communist Party and
started writing for the communist
paper, the Tribune, which she
continued until the year of her death.
Dame Mary Gilmore made a lasting
impact on Australia through her
writing and through her dedication to
social reform. She enjoyed the
friendship of and correspondence with
many other authors such as Hugh
McCrae, Miles Franklin, Frank Dalby
Davison, Sir Lionel Lindsay and, of
course, Henry Lawson.
In her final years her public standing
only increased. Numerous portraits
were painted, her birthdays were
celebrated, streets, schools and agedcare
homes were named after her, and
she appeared on radio and television
and led May Day processions.
Mary Gilmore died on 3 December
1962, and was given a state funeral
which, while she had seemingly always
enjoyed and even sought the limelight,
was perhaps the antithesis of her
sentiments in a few lines of verse that
she gave to Bill Wood, the associate
editor of the Tribune, to publish after
her death.
When I am gone I ask
No mighty ones to follow me;
No lions, tigers, elephants or tall giraffes,
But just the little ants –
The little folk
Who, day and night,
Carry the burden of the small
And save the world –
These were my friends in life;
In death they will remember me.
Further Reading
Courage a grace: a biography of Dame Mary
Gilmore, W H Wilde, Melbourne
University Press 1988
Old Days: Old ways, A book of recollections,
Mary Gilmore, Angus & Robertson,
1986 ◆
28 Australian Heritage