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Dame Mary Gilmore (16 August 1865 – 3 December 1962) was a prominent Australian socialist poet and journalist. She also campaigned for better working conditions for working women, for children’s welfare and for a better deal for indigenous Australians. It is Gilmore’s image that appears on the Australian $10 note, along with an illustration inspired by one of her poems, No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest.
She was born as Mary Jean Cameron was born at Cotta Walla near Goulburn, New South Wales.. Her family moved a lot when she was growing up, as her father built homesteads on properties throughout NSW, and this itinerant existence afforded Mary only a spasmodic formal education.
However Mary completed her teaching exams in 1882, and accepted her first position as a teacher at Wagga Wagga Public School. But it was when she took a teaching post at Silverton near the mining town of Broken Hill, that her socialist views developed and she began writing poetry.
In 1890, she moved to Sydney, where she became part of the “Bulletin school” of radical writers. Although the greatest influence on her work was Henry Lawson, it was Alfred “A. G.” Stephens, literary editor of The Bulletin, who published her verse and established her reputation as a fiery radical poet, and champion of the workers and the oppressed.
She followed William Lane and other socialist idealists to Paraguay in 1896, where they had established a communal settlement called New Australia two years earlier. There she married Billy Gilmore in 1897. By 1902 the socialist experiment had clearly failed and the Gilmore family returned to Australia, where they took up farming near Casterton, Victoria.
Gilmore’s first volume of poetry was published in 1910, and for the ensuing half-century she was regarded as one of Australia’s most popular and widely read poets. In 1908 she became women’s editor of The Worker, the newspaper of Australia’s largest and most powerful trade union, the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU). She was the union’s first woman member, and the paper gave her a platform for her journalism, where she campaigned for better working conditions for working women, for children’s welfare and for a better deal for indigenous Australians.
By 1931 Gilmore’s views had become too radical for the AWU, but she soon found other outlets for her writing. She later wrote a regular column for the Communist Party’s newspaper Tribune, although she was never a party member herself. In spite of her somewhat controversial politics, Gilmore accepted an appointment as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1937, becoming Dame Mary Gilmore.[1] She was the first person to be granted this award for services to literature. During World War II she wrote stirring patriotic verse such as No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest.
In her later years, Gilmore, separated from her husband, moved to Sydney, and enjoyed her growing status as a national literary icon. Before 1940 she published six volumes of verse and three editions of prose. After the war, Gilmore published volumes of memoirs and reminiscences of colonial Australia and the literary giants of 1890s Sydney, thus contributing much material to the mythologising of that period. Dame Mary Gilmore died in 1962, aged 97, and was accorded the first state funeral accorded to a writer since the death of Henry Lawson in 1922.
Gilmore’s image appears on the Australian $10 note, along with an illustration inspired by No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest and, as part of the copy-protection microprint, the text of the poem itself. The background of the illustration features a portrait of Gilmore by the well-known Australian artist Sir William Dobell. |
