This story was written by Dolly Olsson

In Mary Gilmore’s time, a green tram, jaunty as a sprig of parsley, left the precincts of Hyde Park in Sydney amid a bustling confusion of noisy traffic for a kilometre or so and made its way out to the Eastern Suburbs via notorious Kings Cross. When Mary came to live there ‘The Cross’ was a cosmopolitan and popular meeting place with hotels, nightclubs and bars. Nearby Oxford Street housed many brothels, and small cafes catering for the working class, interspersed with enigmatic shop windows displaying posters advertising current shows in the local theatres. This was, as it is now, the seedy side of town where even the road itself belched and farted with a tarry stench, so unlike the many towns in which she had lived as a young schoolteacher.

Mary Jean Cameron (1864-1962) was born at Mary Vale (later known as Merry Vale), the property of her maternal grandparents in the Goulburn area of New South Wales, although she usually gave her birthplace as the nearby area of Cotta Wells. At the age of twenty she became a schoolteacher, educating children in several different country towns.

Searching for an ideal, she joined a group who travelled to Paraguay in a Utopian experiment to find a better way of life. There she married William Gilmore in 1897, but soon they returned to a farm in Casterton in Western Victoria. Will and Mary were to spend most of their married life apart as Will soon went to Queensland to run a sheep property and Mary found that life in a metropolis was more conducive to her talents as a writer. Their son Billy joined his father when he was just sixteen but she continued championing the rights of women, and writing. She edited the Women’s Page of the Sydney Worker for many years. However Mary and Will remained in touch mainly through letters, and their respect and affection for each other never diminished

Her forebears had disembarked at Eden on Twofold Bay in southern New South Wales and walked to the goldfields of Kiandra in the Snowy Mountains. They came with their precious cuttings of lavender, rosemary, rose and poplar, to plant them in the new country. Even now, in autumn the long journey can be traced easily by the scattering of golden poplar trees, which rise like flames marking the way where the immigrants dropped cuttings amidst the indigenous scrub.

When Dame Mary Gilmore was honoured as one of our Nation’s poets, a cutting was taken from a descendant of those poplars which she had grown in her garden, and planted in her honour at Sydney’s Botanical Garden, which has now celebrated its hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

When Mary lived in Kings Cross, at 99 Darlinghurst Road, her first-story flat had a balcony from where she could watch the comings and goings in the busy street below. There Mary Gilmore, a bright eyed, grey haired sparrow-like elderly lady could be found, her desk at the window to catch the light, meticulously putting a comma here, a dash there and a changed stanza elsewhere. Here she would receive visitors when they called. She would sit on an upright wooden chair, dressed in a modest dark dress with a pale scarf. In 1993, when the pictures of poets were chosen to grace our new Australian ten-dollar bill, one was of Mary when she was in her twenties, and on the reverse – Banjo Paterson.

Dame Mary Gilmore, our famous poet and writer, recorded what things were like in those days of early settlement in Australia. She was a radical journalist, an emancipist and true battler for women’s rights. In 1955, the Australian Book Society commissioned William Dobell to commemorate Dame Mary’s ninetieth birthday with a portrait, which he took two years to paint. He did not refer to his sketches but after talking to her and recalling her regal manner and genteel bearing, addressed the work as if painting royalty. It won the Archibald Prize.

Mary said that long after she had gone, generations would know her through the painting, which impressed her greatly. She mentioned the family resemblance, and said, “I saw my father’s eyes looking at me.” Dobell captured the mystery of the personality, both as a poetess and a woman, endowing the individual with status, courage and dignity. This was the little schoolteacher who went from small town to town, often living in the home of a local family.

In one of the towns, she and her mother boarded with Louisa Lawson. There she met Henry Lawson. It was said they were ‘walking out’ – and indeed he asked her to marry him – but as Henry’s poem Rejected tells us, she said ‘No’ to the proposal. Nevertheless they were congenial companions and she is said to have encouraged him, offering gentle criticism of his work. Many of the poets, writers and artists of this particular time of great creativity were friends, and no doubt sometimes rivals in the world of literature.

Robert D. Fitzgerald said,…‘in her work she has expressed so much of Australia -- its outlook, its atmosphere, the under currents of its history, its wild life, its landscape and its peoples; and in herself, pioneer in so many fields, champion of so many causes, she symbolizes so much of its struggle and aspiration, that there are those amongst us who find her image in the mind closely allied to our profoundest thoughts and ideas of our country’.

Although nowadays there are no trams clanging along with bells and whistle stops, amidst the hurly-burly of Kings Cross traffic, there is still a lonely crowd, lost in the sordid darkness of dingy doorways. Hollow laughter rings foolishly, and beggars busk for food. Mary’s voice tells us of a different time when butter was sixpence a pound and people ate dry bread, of convicts labouring in Botany Bay. Her words ring in this excerpt from her poem.

Old Botany Bay

I was the conscript sent to hell,

To make in the desert a living well.

I bore the heat, I blazed the track,

Furrowed and bloody upon my back.

I split the rock, I felled the tree,

The Nation was because of me.

And her voice speaks the poem Nationality

I’ve grown past hate and bitterness,

I see the world as one,

And though I can no longer hate,

My son is still MY SON.

All men around God’s table sit,

And all men must be fed,

But this, this loaf in my hand…

This is MY SON’S Bread.

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The author of this tribute, Dolly Olsson, urges that we read the many stories and poems Mary Gilmore has written. You can find listings at your local Library or on the web. Particularly evocative is the Chapter She was a Scented Land, which tells of the convicts and settlers who came here. The sea breezes carried the scent long before they sighted land and when they disembarked at the rocks on Sydney Cove, there grew an abundance of flowers of all sorts. The women gathered bunches but discarded them when they discovered even more and more beautiful blooms. You can imagine how starved they were for such a sight. Mary’s writings tell us how treasured a pin was; also the hairpins that kept their long hair neat, and when these were lost, the women learned from the Aboriginal women ways to put up their hair. She spoke not about the wealthy settlers who came with their pianos and fine furniture, but the ordinary ‘Aussie Battler’. Her association with Louisa and Henry Lawson when she was young showed her the wretchedness of the ‘have-nots’. Mary Gilmore became a champion of the people. She was disappointed by the experiment in Paraguay so returned to Australia to search here for a Utopia where all people could be equal She wrote many ‘Arrows’ (short, hard-hitting political comments) in The Bulletin to drive home the people’s plight. It is a privilege to get to ‘know’ Mary through her works. In her poetry and writings we learn about a colourful time in Australian history, now long gone. All who fight for World Peace are so proud of Mary Gilmore, her courage and grace.

Acknowledgement:- Courage a Grace by W.H.Wilde, published by Melbourne University Press, 1988