SOURCE: Wright, Judith. In Australian Writers and Their Work: Charles Harpur, pp. 5-32. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1963.

[In the following excerpt, Wright addresses Harpur's family background, early employment, and the unprofessional editing of a posthumous edition of his works. The essay concludes with an attempt to summarize the importance of Harpur's work in Australia's literary canon.]

I

Many poets have been born in unfortunate circumstances; some have lived and died unfortunate; but poets can usually trust to a posthumous future for justice. Few are as unlucky as Charles Harpur, Australia's first and least-regarded poet.

Harpur was born under precisely that cloud which in early-Victorian Australia was least forgivable—he was the son of convicts. His father, Joseph Harpur, an Irishman, was indicted in London for highway robbery, with others, and was sentenced to death. Reprieved and transported, he arrived in Sydney in November 1800, at the age of 24, and was later assigned to the service of John Macarthur, “the Perturbator” of the young colony.

Sarah Chidley, Charles's mother, seems to have been about thirteen or fourteen when she was tried at Taunton in 1805 for what we would now think a very minor offence, and sentenced to seven years' transportation. She reached Sydney in 1806, and was apparently also assigned to the Macarthurs, where she met Joseph Harpur. Charles was their second son and third child (the eldest son, also named Joseph, was himself a remarkable man, something of a versifier, and later a politician).

Charles was born in 1813. His father, who had evidently earned the goodwill of John Macarthur, had now been made Government schoolmaster at Windsor, on the Hawkesbury River. His qualifications for the post we do not know—he was described officially at the time of his trial as “a labourer”, but it seems he may have been an attorney's clerk, and clearly he was literate enough to encourage his sons' ambitions. So Charles and his brother received at least some education, and Charles seems to have had access to a private library, or libraries, where he read all he could. The Windsor schoolmaster may quite well have been on amicable terms with the local clergymen, who included in their number Rowland Hassall at Parramatta, and the Rev. Henry Fulton at Castlereagh on the Nepean, an Irish clergyman who, like Joseph Harpur himself, had been transported. The excitable and controversial Samuel Marsden, the “flogging parson”, may also have allowed the use of his library to the studious young man, in spite of his prejudices.

At any rate, Joseph Harpur and his young family seem to have spent a few comparatively peaceful and happy years in Windsor, until Charles' sixteenth year. In the little town with its central square, its Greenway church and the bridge across the river, Charles discovered his love for poetry and determined on his vocation. Later, in “The Dream By the Fountain”, he wrote of those days, making the Australian Muse address him:

For I felt thee—ev'n then, wildly, wondrously musing
Of glory and grace by old Hawkesbury's side,
Scenes that then spread recordless around thee suffusing
With the purple of love—I beheld thee, and sighed.
Sighed—for the fire-robe of thought had enwound thee,
Betokening so much that the happy must dread,
And whence there should follow, howe'er it renowned thee,
What sorrows of heart, and what labours of head …

What kind of boy was this, who dreamed of glory by a river in a convict colony, and suffused its landscape with love? In a manuscript book¹ dated 1851, he gives us a self-portrait:

“I was earnestly imaginative, simple of mind, and single of heart. I could greatly venerate whatever I could believe in, as being righteous and true. I was affectionate to all-forgivingness—perhaps to weakness. I was proud to my sorrow. I was impolitic to my loss—that is, in worldly matters: for in things spiritual there is nothing, in the end, to be gained by policy. I was naturally social, though solitary in my habits from wounded goodwill, and from a shyness superinduced by the everlasting evilness of my circumstances: for I know, of my own hard experience, that men in general can only value the fortunate. I was (as I am still) an enthusiast in the cause of human liberty and progress: liberty in all directions and progress infinite … To complete the portrait with its most perilous details—I was wilfully good or wilfully wicked; fiery as a furnace; daring as a devil; and lastly, sensual, but in the best sense of the word …”

Self-portraits are automatically suspect; few of us can look ourselves, even our younger selves, steadily in the eye and put down what we see without faltering. But the man who speaks to us through Harpur's poetry—even the least interesting and least successful of his verses—the man who with an impetuous heat protested to the end of his days against injustice in man or fate, and dreamed to the end of his days of the recognition that was always denied him, must have been much of the fiery yet gentle temper that he shows us here.

Charles Harpur began to write verse, and to publish it, very early. That he loved the country round Windsor, and the great river that runs through that fertile plain, we know from his poetry. But the recurrent image that haunts him is of the Blue Mountains, whose foothills lead up and away from the Hawkesbury plain; the mysterious mountains that must have obsessed his mind in his youth as they did the minds of many of the settlers on the coast. He gives us many splendid pictures of them; the best known comes from his narrative poem, “The Creek of the Four Graves”:

… O what words, what hues
Might paint the wild magnificence of view
That opened westward! Out extending, lo!
The heights rose crowding with their summits all
Dissolving as it seemed, and partly lost
In the exceeding radiancy aloft;
And thus transfigured for awhile they stood
Like a great company of archaeons, crowned
With burning diadems, and tented o'er
With canopies of purple and of gold.

So Harpur began his life with a certain advantage, for a poet who had to lay the foundation for a transition from the English to the Australian atmosphere in poetry. The fertile cultivated countryside of the Hawkesbury Valley, the almost English grace of the little town, planned by Governor Macquarie, stone-built—even though built in bitterness by convict labour—made as it were a natural stepping-stone between the old and the forbidding new.

Today we cannot realise how forbidding that untouched, unknown, unlimited wilderness must have seemed. Australia—what was it? It was scarcely even the germ of a country, scarcely even a vision, except to the most prescient, among whom the boy by the Hawkesbury was certainly one. It was a dubious and strife-torn convict settlement at the forgotten end of the world, a dump for the unwanted. And the free settlers, the respectable of the community, felt this most bitterly of all. England was not merely the home to which they all hoped, sooner or later, to return; it was a cult, it was an image of worship, it was Respectability. They clung the more to their cult, that the unrespectable, the convicts, the Irishmen, the ticket-of-leave men with old scars on backs and ankles, were so far from sharing it. To the respectable, the very existence of these shoddy and rebellious men sharpened their nostalgia and negated any image of Australia that might begin, somewhere, to take shape.

So a literature could hardly be respectable that had its source in, and tried to affirm, this tatterdemalion country. What was not English and had not been praised by the English magazines, could not be allowed to be poetry. To write of Australia as she looked and was—the dark wild land, with its savage and miserable outcasts and its life of monotony relieved by rum and quarrels; with its few influential men, its constant political intrigues and squabbles, and beyond them the ancient silence—would have been to win no friends and find no publishers.

The picture was dark; Harpur in his young idealism gilded it, but with the gold of a Utopia that the material-minded settlers cared little for. And Harpur, son of a convict and an Irishman, was by his birth precluded from being the poet of respectability that the influential men might have recognised—if they had wanted a poet at all.

So an Australian poet was doomed, since an Australian poetry was not yet possible. In fact, how could such a poetry begin to be written? The English tradition was built in an island of safety and pride, of rain and greenery, of power and confidence. Here, it sometimes seemed, none of these things existed. Moreover, Christmas came in the summer heat and Easter in autumn; the old rituals became a kind of nonsense, the English customs stood on their heads. The stars were in the wrong places, the trees shed bark instead of leaves, the animals were comic nightmares, the very plants and birds were strange. The natives were obstinately unamenable; they would not work, nor would they fight, except in a ragged guerrilla warfare that ate away at the outskirts of settlement. It was no time and no climate for poetry.

Harpur understood this, but he went on obstinately with his determination to be a poet for all that—to be the first Australian poet, no hanger-on of the other side of the world.

Lyre of my country, first falls it to me
From the charm-muttering Savage's rude-beating hand
To snatch thee …(2)

he wrote; but he knew that on that strange lyre he might not yet have the art to play.

Yet, though the English tradition was oddly out of place, was even perhaps irrelevant, in this country, it must somehow be adapted. Harpur set himself earnestly to learn all he could. He read whatever he could get hold of; he made copious notes, and many of them were astute. A young man with as little teaching and encouragement as Harpur might laboriously find out much for himself; but he could not, without a sensitive and independent taste, have written, for instance, of Chaucer's rhymed couplet:

It is the true English heroic couplet, not composed, like Pope's, of two lines having each a caesural balance, but flowing freely forth, and yet at the same time open to every variety of modulation. And notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, I cannot help thinking the true English heroic verse the best of all kinds of verse—entire, compact, continuous, and yet admitting of all the heroic pauses being located anywhere in it, from the first syllable to the last.³

He wrote, also, a number of critical verses on various of the English poets, each in the particular style of the poet—no mean feat for any versifier, and carried out well enough to make those critics who have denigrated his technical powers look foolish, if they could read them. Unluckily, they cannot read them, for like so much of Harpur's work they are buried in manuscript form in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

All this was training. But for what Harpur was himself to write, experience was also necessary. What kind of experience did Harpur's life afford, to a young poet all faith and ardour and determination?

In 1829, when Charles was sixteen, his family life came to an end. His father had been given a small grant of land, and the family had been relatively well off. But in 1829 depression came. Many small settlers were ruined, and Joseph Harpur among them. The Harpur family had to break up, and Charles went away to work on the Hunter River, inland from Newcastle, probably as a farm-labourer.

When he was twenty years old, Charles's verses began to appear in various of the Colony's newspapers, and thereafter he wrote, and was published, fairly continuously. He was at this time in Sydney, where he found occasional employment. He also produced the first draft of a play, on an Australian bushranging theme, which began by being called “The Tragedy of Donohoe,” but in its later form was re-titled “The Bushrangers.” It is interesting as his first attempt at a serious handling of an Australian theme; but Harpur's gifts were not dramatic, and the play was never acted. Most of it was, however, published later, in successive issues of the Sydney Monitor.

The latter part of this time in Sydney seems to have been the unhappiest period of Harpur's life. He was a target for criticism, and his temperament did not allow him to take this quietly. He made some friends—including perhaps, W. A. Duncan, later editor of the Weekly Register—but he probably made many more enemies; he seems to have been unhappily in love, and he began to realize the difficulties of his chosen career of writing. For a time he worked as a clerk in the Post Office, but a crisis came in his life; he began, according to his own account, to drink, and in 1839 he left Sydney in despair of making his way there, and returned to the Hunter Valley and his old life of hard work and few pence.

It is not often easy to date his poems accurately, but perhaps it was at this time that he wrote two of his most characteristic poems, “The Dream by the Fountain” quoted earlier, and “To the Spirit of Poesy”. A few verses must be quoted from the second poem:

Yet do not thou forsake me now,
Poesy—with Hope together.
Ere this last severest blow
Did lay my struggling fortunes low,
In love unworn have we not borne
Much wintry weather?
… Ah misery, what were then my lot
Among a race of unbelievers,
Worldly men who all declare
That Gain alone is good and fair
And they who pore on Beauty's lore
Deceived deceivers?
Half at rest upon thy breast
How often have I laid me, musing
That in the golden eventide
All the dead to Thought allied
Around me dwelt, unseen yet felt,
Great hopes infusing …
But if there lives, as love believes,
All underneath this silent heaven,
In yon shades, and by yon streams,
As we have seen them in our dreams,
A deathless race—still let thy grace
My being leaven!
Thy mystic grace, that face to face
Full converse I may hold with nature,
Seeing published everywhere
In forms, the soul that makes her fair;
And grow the while to her large style
In mental stature.

So he seems to have resolved that he would live as simply as possible, working for a bare existence, and meanwhile practise his vocation.

His brother Joseph was acting as postmaster at the small settlement of Jerry's Plains, on the Hunter. Charles accordingly went to Jerry's Plains, and here he seems for a time to have subordinated his life to writing, remaining content with the barest of livings from labouring work, or from acting as proxy postmaster for his brother, with perhaps occasionally a few shillings from such newspapers as paid their contributors.

Harpur's life in Sydney had led him into the company of reformers and radicals, and had left him with an abiding desire to take part in the political issues which then affected all Australians. He now wrote articles, letters to newspapers, political lampoons and squibs in verse and prose, as a supporter of Wentworth's campaign for responsible government and an advocate for the cessation of transportation, in opposition to the “squattocracy”. He was now, in fact, a red-hot democrat, and, unlike his contemporary William Wentworth, he was always to remain so.

His political writing was of course ephemeral, and is now little more than a curiosity; but it was often amusing and satirical, and usually much above the political writing current at the time, most of which was scurrilous and unrelieved by wit.

He remained on the Hunter for the most part of ten years until 1849. It was a time of isolation and loneliness, with few people he could talk to with any freedom. But, though his almost outcast state preyed on his mind and his pride, and his lack of companions threw him back too much upon himself, he nevertheless felt that this hard life, with its loneliness, had a reality about it that was useful to him as a poet. So, in a quaint note on Tennyson, he writes:

[He is] an old-world Towney, a dresser of parterres and a peeper into Parks. I am a man of the woods and mountains—a wielder of the axe, and mainly conversant with aboriginal nature: a man made stern and self-reliant, and thence plain and even fierce, by nearness (if I may so speak) to the incunabula mundi. Hence poetry, with him, should be nice and dainty, rather than wise and hearty: while to affect my admiration, it must be free, bold and open, even at the risk of being rude.⁴

Four years after leaving Sydney, he met at Jerry's Plains the “Rosa” of his sonnets, Mary Doyle. She was the daughter of a settler and landowner, who, naturally enough, neither trusted nor approved of this poverty-stricken young man, a democrat and firebrand, and the son of convict parents. The Doyles were much opposed to the match, but Mary continued to cling to her thoughts of marrying this impossible young poet.

It was seven years before the Doyles finally gave way; and the sonnets give a hint that they had almost succeeded in forcing Mary into another match meanwhile. However, Harpur and Mary were at last married, when Harpur was thirty-seven years old. During the time since their meeting, he had written the Sonnets to Rosa, which now form the only volume of his poetry that readers can obtain, since they were edited and published in 1948 by C. W. Salier.

However, not long after his first meeting with Mary, in 1844, Charles had returned to Sydney for some time, in an attempt to mend his fortunes and become a more “suitable match” for her. This visit was a fruitful one, since now he met the young Henry Parkes, who had come to Sydney and set up as an ivory-turner, and who later paid tribute to his friendship with Harpur and with W. A. Duncan, “his chief advisers in matters of intellectual resource”.

During this time in Sydney Harpur may have had regular employment on a newspaper. Certainly Duncan published his first small book of verse, Thoughts, a volume of sonnets. Duncan himself had strong enemies; about this time he ran into trouble, as the owner and editor of the Weekly Register, which had antagonised the squatting interests by supporting Gipps's land policy.

Parkes reviewed Harpur's book for the Register and gave it exaggerated praise. The critics moved in to the attack immediately; the mark was too good to let the opportunity pass, and Duncan's unpopularity with the moneyed interests sharpened the hostility to his protégé. Sore and angry, Harpur retaliated with a satire on the refusal of Australian critics to see good in anything Australian—a satire which probably did no good to his cause, but Harpur could never submit quietly to unjust criticism.

The Register was forced to cease publication in 1845, and journalism failed to provide Harpur with a living, but when, in 1850, he married, a living had become important. He took up teaching, his father's profession, for a time; but he was untrained, and, when the school at which he was teaching came under the control of the National Board, he had to come to Sydney again to obtain his qualification.

But now the Doyles stepped in, and his father-in-law assisted him to obtain a sheep-farm, whereupon he gave up teaching (which he may not have been sorry to do). He had once written a verse to Parkes, his faithful correspondent for a time, in which he regretted his inability to make a living at his chosen work:

I sometimes wish my Muse a monthly nurse,
Or something else—or even something worse;
For here I'm still “poor Jack”, without the shiners,
And hence unwelcome to all sorts of Tiners.
While others dip their fleecy flocks, and store
Bright gold, I've only so much verse the more—
… A vagrant, and the cause still, all along,
This damn'd unconquerable love of Song.(5)

However, now that he was in fact “dipping his fleecy flocks” like other men, he could not help fretting at his isolation and the hard work which kept him from his beloved writing. He was distant from his Sydney friends—Deniehy the ill-fated poet who had helped and encouraged him, Stenhouse, Parkes, and Robertson, later Sir John Robertson, with whose cause of land reform Harpur was passionately involved. Happy as he seems to have been with Mary, he suffered from the lack of their intellectual companionship, and probably he felt that, while much was going on in Sydney, he was cut off from sharing in the new ferment.

Nevertheless, he still wrote a great deal. Wentworth, whom he had supported in earlier years in his battle for constitutional government, was now himself a member of the “squattocracy”, and advocating an Australian peerage. Harpur's reaction to this, when it was first proposed, had been characteristic:

In Sheepshanks we behold a destined peer
And Oxtail's stockmen shall “my-lord” his son!(6)

he wrote, and added a tart note on the future of Australia should it become “a bad copy of the national perditions of Europe. Wherever there are palaces, there are hovels: and this should determine us in Australia to have as few of either as possible.”

Now he continued to attack the various attempts to establish an aristocracy of property. In fact, the radical papers of the 'fifties contain a great deal of Harpur's best political writing. It has been said that he was one of John Robertson's most valued advisers, in his programme of land reform. He was that rare bird, a poet with practical foresight and ability. He seems to have been quite a successful farmer during these years, in spite of his numerous other interests; yet none fought more eagerly than he did against the encroachments of the privileged squatters, and few saw more clearly what was likely to happen to Australian land-settlement policy if that encroachment was not curbed.

How much, if anything, he had to do with the formulation of the free selection legislation is not known; but Robertson seems to have considered him worth helping. In 1859, when Robertson was Minister for Lands, he appointed Harpur assistant gold commissioner on the southern goldfields, at Araluen.

It was a good post, and for the first time in his life Harpur enjoyed a steady salary. He bought a farm at Eurobodalla, near Nerrigundah, where Mary and his five children were to live, and divided his time between his commissionership and the farm, while yet continuing to write whenever he could.

Harpur must at this time have been working at high pressure. The numerous interests which divided his attention seem to have become too much for him; he was too frequently absent from the farm to be able to manage it properly, and gradually it ate up his savings. His health began to suffer, and when, after seven years, Government retrenchment deprived him of his commissionership, he had few resources left. He applied for compensation for the loss of his position, but there were delays and excuses, and while he was fretting and waiting, disastrous floods ruined his farm.

He was already a sick man, and the long wet season, and his losses and disappointments aggravated his illness. The final blow came early in the autumn of 1867, when his beloved second son Charley, a boy of remarkable promise, was accidentally shot when out hunting.

Harpur was by now far gone in tuberculosis, and the terrible depression of the disease, added to his misfortunes, make his last few poems painful to read. He could not have helped feeling himself neglected and forgotten, a failure, when his friends Parkes and Robertson were now men of note and high in public affairs, and his own lifelong dedication to poetry and politics had left him with nothing to show.

His hopes had once been high—after his first retreat from Sydney he had written in a notebook:

At this moment I am a wanderer and a vagabond upon the face of my Native Land—after having written upon its evergreen beauty strains of feeling and imagination which, I believe, “men will not willingly let die.” But my countrymen, and the world, will yet know me better! I doubt not, indeed, but that I shall yet be held in honour both by them and by it.⁷

But he had grown old in the service of his Muse, and his poems, as he sadly wrote, had “gone a-begging as it were—and in vain—about the land of their inspiration, for publication in the form of a presentable Book.”⁸

So all his circumstances combined, now, with his disease, to kill him, not quite two years after his loss of his position, in his fifty-sixth year.

II

To assess Harpur as a poet, it is first of all necessary to look carefully at the only collection of his work that purports to represent him. It is a book published in 1883, put together after Harpur's death and from manuscripts left by him, with a brief foreword by Mary Harpur. This foreword, which has apparently been taken as a guarantee that Mary approved of the contents of the book, has perhaps, sadly enough, prevented until recently any critical examination of the book in relation to Harpur's surviving manuscripts.

But it is clear now, from recent research⁹, that the poems were, in fact, edited by a man (one, H. M. Martin), whose qualifications for the work were, to say the least, uncertain, and who took an oddly high-handed attitude, not only to Harpur's work, but to his widow's own preferences. The result has been disastrous to Harpur's reputation—since most, if not all, of these poems exist otherwise only in manuscript form or in forgotten files of newspapers, and no questions, apparently, were ever asked as to how authentic the versions published in the volume actually were.

There are, in fact, many serious excisions from the more important poems; other important poems have been omitted altogether, or have had lines or whole sections transposed by the editor without indication of the fact. Worse still, while the important poems have been cut and emasculated, the slighter and more sentimental or technically unsatisfactory poems (some of which, in all likelihood, Harpur himself would not have included) have all gone in. The result has been a book which not only does not represent Harpur's poetic work, but actually, in vital respects, misrepresents it.

For instance, among the important poems from which Martin removed sections or verses is that by which Harpur has long been best known—“The Creek of the Four Graves”. As this poem stands in the collected volume, it is a very competent narrative, with some good incidental description of landscape, and with some striking images and verses. What it lacks is what may be called “deepening”—the kind of comment that gives the reader a clue to why the poem is being written, why it seems to the poet that the subject is important.

We can still read “The Creek of the Four Graves” as an interesting, but rather dated, set-piece about a massacre by aborigines in early Australian history. If we read it perceptively, we may be momentarily interested by the emphasis on the setting—on the beauty and calm of the night in which the party of men are murdered, on the vastness of the scene in which the drama takes place. But not until a missing verse has been restored does this contrast between violence and calm make its proper balance within the poem:

For see, the bright beholding Moon, and all
The radiant Host of Heaven, evince no touch
Of sympathy with man's wild violence—
Only evince in their calm course, their part
In that original unity of Love
Which, like the soul that dwelleth in a harp,
Under God's hand, in the beginning chimed
The Sabbath concord of the Universe.(10)

This verse has its links and echoes throughout the poem—it is, in fact, a pivotal verse, important to our understanding of the meaning. Without it, the poem is devitalised.

This is not an isolated instance of ignorant and biased editing. There are plenty of others. In another descriptive poem, “A Storm in the Mountains”, there is an even more flagrant omission. As this poem stands in the 1883 volume, it is a descriptive essay, so to speak, following the storm from its inception to its end. No human figure appears, no comment is made. The description is good—at times even excellent—but the poem lacks life, for it is never referred to a human level—it, too, is apparently a set-piece, with no purpose beyond the external observation. But a key passage has again been omitted:

Strange darings seize me, witnessing this strife
Of Nature's powers, and heedless of my life
I stand exposed. And does some fatal charm
Hold me secure from elemental harm
That in the mighty riot I may find
How wide the externality of Mind? …
Soul wildly drawn abroad—a Protean force
Clothing with higher life the Tempest in its course!(11)

Quite apart from the fact that this, too, is obviously an important passage in the poem, it has remarkable interest in itself, as an extension of early Romantic thought. It goes beyond the Wordsworthian doctrines of the relationship of man and nature, and implies the whole question of the relationship, beyond this, of thoughts to things, that relationship which, in England, Coleridge had first pointed out when he undermined the whole Wordsworthian attitude to nature in his two lines:

O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live …

It is a verse that repays study; and in the poem in which it occurs, it is climactic.

There are other omissions, not less serious; but these two instances give us a clue to what has been the motive behind the excisions. The clue is reinforced by a letter from Martin to Mary Harpur, quoted by C. W. Salier in an article¹², regarding “The Creek of the Four Graves”.

Martin writes: “We had intended to publish extracts … but not to print it in its entirety … It is very undesirable to have any lines printed which may serve as a handle for carping criticism … The descriptive parts of the Poem have always excited our warm admiration.”

The effect Harpur's editor aimed at, in fact, was to present him as a tame nature-poet, and to prune away all that could make him a centre of controversy—all, in fact, that makes Harpur important and interesting as a poet. No wonder he has been so tragically neglected by criticism and ignored by the poets and writers who followed him.

I think that I have said enough to make it clear that all estimates of Harpur which have been based on the 1883 volume alone, without reference to the manuscripts, are unsoundly based and ought, in fairness to the critics as well as to Harpur, to be blotted from the record. The poet we have to deal with is an unknown, because a censored, figure.

Why was this censorship imposed? And why has it never been lifted? The answer, I think, reflects no credit on Australia. It seems that the original dismissal of his work—that which began in his own lifetime—had its source in two facts: his convict origin and his radical opinions. It was, of course, reinforced by the fact that during the period when Harpur was writing actively, there was little, if any, national feeling for, or encouragement of, Australian writing. This only began to emerge when Kendall was fighting for recognition, and it came too late to save Kendall himself from his fate.

But it is stranger—and more deplorable—that our ignorant dismissal of Harpur should have continued up to the present day, and that Harpur's lone and difficult fight for poetry and for his radical opinions should have been so far forgotten that he has even been referred to recently¹³ as “a middle-class” writer! This is the kind of irony that would have made even Harpur incredulous at the blows of fate.

Having said all this, it is time to look at Harpur as he really was. To begin with, he was, above all, a poet conscious of his responsibilities. He not only read all that he could get hold of in English poetry; he attempted to train his critical faculties with notes and brief essays on the poets he read, and to train his sense of language and rhythm with various poetic exercises. He wrote, as I have said, a number of “Rhymed Criticisms”, in which he used the particular style and versification of a poet to express his own verdict on the poet's work.

On Dryden, for instance:

Not much I love him, yet perforce admire
The vigorous rage of his material fire!
Though prodigal of verse, and coarse of phrase,
Built durably are all his better Lays.
His lines, like pleasant brooks, now warbling go,
And now, like mountain floods, they thunder as they flow …(14)

And throughout his life he seems to have revised and reworked his earlier poems, though not always with good effect. His manuscript books, therefore, often contain several versions of a single poem, apparently written at different dates, and it is not easy to decide which version is definitive, until more work is done on the dating and collating of the manuscripts.

Not only did Harpur feel his responsibilities as an artist; he expressly declared his own dedication to poetry, notably in the poem “The Dream by the Fountain”, which he may well have written during his first retreat from Sydney to the Hunter Valley between 1839 and 1844. In “The Dream”, he makes his Muse address him—not the Muse of the old world, nor even the Muse of Wordsworth, his mentor, who was Nature herself—but “the Muse of the Evergreen Forest”, of the Australian bush.

The term “evergreen forest” is significant. No one would refer to the Bush nowadays in such a fashion; it is almost English in its implications, just as the paintings, say, of Martens and Buvelot, those early Australian artists, are almost English in their vision of the landscape. But the difference is there—this new element, this strangeness of the forest that does not lose its leaves. The transition has begun.

Just so it began in those early paintings, where the detail of the strange trees is blurred and lost in a kind of generalisation, so that they are almost—but not quite—English trees. Yet it is not the likeness that seems important, when we study such paintings; it is the difference, which, momentous yet gradual, deepens and widens with the years until the vision of Australia emerges through the memories of England.

It is the same process that is at work in Harpur—the movement out of the past and into an unknown future. Harpur was conscious of this movement, and of its necessity; it makes him everywhere emphasise the future, not the past:

Listen, rejoined one, [says his Muse], I promise thee glory
Such as shall rise like the daystar apart,
To brighten the source of Australia's broad story,
But for this thou must give to the Future thy heart.
Be then the Bard of thy Country! O rather
Should such be thy choice than a monarchy wide!
Lo, 'tis the land of the grave of thy father;
'Tis the cradle of Liberty! Think, and decide.(15)

There is a new note here; and for its sake we can disregard the language which may sound to our ears (though we must not forget that it did not so sound in Harpur's time) stale and rhetorical. Listening without prejudice, we can hear the noble naivety of a large nature, behind the language of a now-tarnished political vision. What remains important is not the vision (which was to be betrayed), but the dedication and the hope.

If we begin by taking Harpur purely at the value set on him by the editor of the 1883 volume—as a descriptive poet—we will not get a fair view of his poetry, but we will at least be able to judge the accuracy of his eye and the truth of his transcription. Using only passages from the 1883 volume, it is easy enough to discover what most moved him in nature; significantly, it is to mountains, clouds and the play of light that he most often recurs. This emphasis on the features of his landscape that were most generalised, and therefore easiest to translate from the terms of English vision into his new country, also allowed him to bring into his landscape poetry something new, and especially Australian—the sense of enormous space, space which seems to dwarf even the mountains, and light which floods and changes everything below it.

One passage has already been quoted from “The Creek of the Four Graves” which illustrates this. Here is another from the same poem; where the mountains are seen

Against the twilight heaven—a cloudless depth
Yet luminous with sunset's fading glow;
And thus awhile in the lit dusk they seemed
To hang like mighty pictures of themselves
In the still chambers of some vaster world.

In “A Storm in the Mountains”, the hills are seen at noon:

… in the breeze that o'er
Their rough enormous backs deep-fleeced with wood
Came whispering down, the wide upslanting sea
Of fanning leaves in the descending rays
Danced interdazzlingly, as if the trees
That bore them were all thrilling—tingling all
Down to the roots, for very happiness:
So prompted from within, so sentient seemed
The bright quick motion.

And it is worth pointing out that this passage contains remarkable instances of Harpur's powers of observation and description. Anyone who has seen the movement of the leaves of a forest of gum-trees in wind and sunlight will agree on the aptness of the adverb, “interdazzlingly”—the leaves being set in a vertical, not a horizontal plane, reflect light sideways from one leaf to another, not upwards as in a forest where the leaves are held horizontally—and this sight Harpur saw and perhaps described for the first time, with care and love.

In “A Storm in the Mountains” he describes, too, the movement of moonlight over the hills:

… And now the moon arose
Above the hill, when lo! the giant cone
Erewhile so dark, seemed inwardly aglow
With her instilled irradiance …
Then her full light in silvery sequence still
Cascading forth from ridgy slope to slope,
Chased mass by mass the broken darkness down
Into the dense-brushed valleys …

This last passage is one which Martin mutilated. I quote it as it appears in the published volume, for convenience in checking; but the passage is even more impressive in manuscript.

These are the enduring images of Harpur's poetry—light, mountains, great forests, and a vision of space that seems unlimited. The descriptions may seem to us impersonal and lacking in detail—Harpur wrote no poems to “lesser celandines” or their equivalent in the terms of Australian wildflowers; but perhaps the picture he leaves with us is the truer for that. A wide, almost undifferentiated landscape—a flood of light—a height of sky; that must have been the first and most lasting vision of Australia to her first settlers.

And that Harpur was, in fact, a close and delighted observer of the events and inhabitants of his world of forests, he gives plenty of proof. Take the account of the changes in the sky as the storm rises:

… Now with a slow gradual pace
A solemn trance creams northward o'er its face [the sky's]
Yon clouds that late were labouring past the sun,
Reached by its sure arrest, one after one,
Come to a heavy halt, the airs that played
About the rugged mountains all are laid;
While drawing nearer far-off heights appear,
As in a dream's wild prospect, strangely near.

or of the advance of a bushfire:

… down the flickering glades
Ghastfully glaring, huge dry-mouldered gums
Stood 'mid their living kin as banked throughout
With eating fire expelling arrowy jets
Of blue-tipped, intermitting, gaseous flame,
Boles, branches, all! like vivid ghosts of trees.

(“The Bushfire”)

And he has a brief but precise description of the flight of the squirrel-glider:

Startlingly near and phantom-like to see
The sharp-voiced bidawong streams from the tree.

(“Lost in the Bush”—manuscript)¹⁶

and of the dingo's voice:

… the lank dingo's long and weary cry
Comes wildly wailing from some covert nigh.

(“Lost in the Bush”—ms.)

In “The Kangaroo-Hunt”, too, though it is youthfully ambitious and introduces too many worn poetic tricks, peopling the Bush with eighteenth-century abstractions such as Love, Hope and the rest, the glimpses of that now vanished forest that Harpur knew remain enchanting.

In “The Kangaroo Hunt”, which occupies a complete manuscript book, Harpur tried a method of versification that shows how conscious he was of the necessity for a new approach to technique, in this new country. He explains in his preface to the poem: “When composing it, I conceived that such an unconfined, many-metred structure of verse as might be varied and paragraphically moulded (after the manner of a musical movement) to the peculiar demands of every occasion, and appear therefore to result spontaneously from the very nature of the things depicted, would be most conducive to … effective treatment.”

The attempt was, on the whole, unsuccessful. It was too difficult a task, at that stage of the Colony's history, to write epic narrative verse about an event like a kangaroo-hunt—which might have seemed merely curious and ludicrous to an overseas reader, but would certainly seem no more than foolish inflation of a common event to Harpur's fellow-countrymen. But Harpur's notion of “a paragraphically moulded verse (after the manner of a musical movement)” interestingly anticipates a good deal of experiment which we think of as purely twentieth-century; and though the poem is unsuccessful, it is evidence of his originality that he made the attempt at all.

Purely as narrative verse, “The Kangaroo-Hunt” is also unsatisfactory; the story is tenuous and forms only a peg on which to hang descriptions and dissertations, in the manner of an inferior poem by Wordsworth. But Harpur's narrative poetry was to improve. “The Creek of the Four Graves” has much more tension and a strong underlying structure; description is better balanced with narration; and at times the telling of the story reaches a climax where the verse is excitingly counterpointed with the events, in a strenuously dramatic shape. For instance, where the leader of the exploring party hears the stealthy approach of the natives to attack the camp:

… With a strange horror gathering to his heart
As if his blood were charged with insect-life
And writhed along in clots, he stilled himself
And listened heedfully, till his held breath
Became a pang. Nought heard he; silence there
Had recomposed her ruffled wings …

The gasping of the h-sounds and the hissing sibilants in the first sentence, and the placing of the caesuras, show that Harpur was a much better technician than his early critics thought him.

The long poem, “The Tower of the Dream”, which his editor has placed at the beginning of the 1883 volume, was separately published during Harpur's lifetime, in 1865. We have no date for its composition, nor do I know whether Harpur had read Browning's “Childe Roland” before it was written. It would be thought a tiresomely symbolic invention nowadays, with its lake and tower, and the maiden and monster that inhabit the tower; its inner well and Gothically alarming gates and staircases; and the poem is a great deal too long to sustain the atmosphere which Harpur evokes so well in the opening passages.

The subject, however, is one that any twentieth-century poet might dare to use, if we forget the Freudian overtones that the cast and scenery have acquired since Harpur's day. The poem is about the division of conscious life from the unconscious powers that can so vividly image and enact in our dreams scenes of extraordinary and compelling grandeur; and about the attempt of the poet to overcome that division and free his soul to cross the boundaries of sleep, and conquer its mystery. The maiden is a kind of Psyche, a messenger of light to the poet; together they are to defy the law that holds mortal men back from discovering the mysteries of Sleep. But when the winged horse is already saddled for the journey, the nameless monster of the tower snatches away the lady, and an airy chorus sings that the attempt is doomed:

The gulf we are crossing may never be crossed
By a mortal, ah, never!
The doom holds forever …

The poem is, in fact, about the division within the life of the poet, and of man, between conscious knowledge and unconscious forces—a theme which is strangely modern, though treated in a nineteenth-century style, and one which shows once more that Harpur was preoccupied with problems that are still significant for us—that he was, in fact, a thinking, rather than a lyrical, poet.

His two longest and most remarkable poems are both printed in mangled and foreshortened forms, in the 1883 volume. “The Witch of Hebron”, which contains much of Harpur's best blank verse, has lost well over 400 lines, and many passages essential to an understanding of the poem's meaning have gone. “Genius Lost”, a poem-series on the death of Chatterton, is treated even more summarily—of its 2,300 lines only a few chosen lyrics and choruses are included, and the verses with which the editor chose to end the poem are in fact not part of the original poem at all, but imported from another poem-series, “Autumnal Leaves”. Moreover, there is no indication that the poem's subject is Chatterton, so that a good deal of the point even of what has been included is lost.

In the manuscripts, the poem is a series of monologues, and Harpur explains that the plan was to make the book (for it is in fact a book, though never published) “a psychological step-by-step development of the lonely conceptions and peculiar sufferings that are … leading (the poet) to a disastrous self-inflicted end: while the Choruses annexed to them are spiritual cognitions of these peculiar moods and sufferings.”¹⁷

“Genius Lost” is one of the most ambitious and largely-conceived poems of Australian literature. Though built of separate lyrics and choruses, it is structurally sound and the links between the separate passages are subtle and firm. In it, though it was written in his youth, Harpur solved problems of construction which are far beyond Kendall's powers, and triumphantly showed that the task he undertook was not beyond him.

His strength as a poet probably lay rather in construction than in the lyric forms which, even in his own day, were more popular than long poems and narratives. This is a measure of the particular kind of mental power that he possessed; he could be banal and awkward, and there are long passages of fustian in his worse poems, but his thought had depth and enterprise, and he attacked his special poetic problems (of which he had many) with forethought and intelligence. The pity is that not one long poem has survived intact in the 1883 volume (except “The Tower of the Dream”—and this no doubt only because Martin was not quite sure what Harpur was talking about) so that it is not possible for the student to discover for himself where Harpur succeeds and where he fails.

Harpur is, in fact, a far more interesting, because a more thoughtful and controversial, poet than that volume implies. Consider the ambition of an obscure colonial poet who could embark on a long blank-verse dissertation on “The World and the Soul”, from a point of view which combines Darwinian theory with an unorthodox—almost an Oriental—religious view of the universe and its purpose. The subject itself was forbidding, and Harpur's treatment of it was unconventional enough to have alarmed even a more enterprising nineteenth-century editor than Martin, who, in fact, omits it from his edition altogether.

The poem is in blank verse; it begins before the appearance of man on earth, and traces the events which lead up to the first appearance of the Soul, or consciousness (the two seem, in Harpur's treatment, interchangeable), the spirit for which the earth's evolution was preparing.

Yea, thus for countless centuries, beneath
The sun and moon and stars, did all the bare
And shapeless hills show ghastly in their light,
And the dull waters gleam, although as yet
Through all those patient periods immature,
No soul intelligent, save God alone,
Might know them, as their maker …(18)

But man is only earth's present king; he is destined to yield before “new successions in the scheme of life”, “progressive changes in the sum / And increment of that divine Idea / Whereof the Earth's so solid-seeming bulk / Is, with its fleshly populations whole / The vesture.”

So far, Harpur's picture of the universe seems a strange anticipation of the Nietzschean notion of the superman. But the difference is soon apparent; to Harpur the “intelligent soul” is not, as for Nietzsche, a law to itself, but is subject to and forms part of a larger whole, and bears the responsibility of its own immortality, in God. The soul, Harpur says:

… complete
In her sole being, evermore aspires,
An ultimate of all that went before,
A spirit of Thought, and thence a child of that
In which the world began and hath its end …
… Thus, ancestrally a spark
From God's internal brightness, goes she forth
To die not, but to clothe for evermore
Her mighty life and wondrous faculties
In robes of beauty and of use …

And further, Harpur visualised the soul as travelling on by transmigration through

… those
Innumerable other worlds, that strew
The neighbouring heavens with seats of being, such
As host on host, yet farther forth, enrich
Infinite spaces, populous alike
With kindred glories, that exist in Him;
As being but the million-featured modes
Of his star-seeing Thoughts—each several thought
A shining link in one eternal chain
Of progress—to Perfection. Here we rest.

This notion of the soul as part of the all-consciousness of the universe, as it were a mode of the thought of God, allows Harpur to set the emphasis on the progression of consciousness, “the increment of that divine Idea”, rather than on the advancement of man as a species. It is an attempt to respiritualise the world which, after Darwin, could be seen less and less as creative in itself, and in fact was seen more and more as a machine for physical evolution.

Moreover, it is a step beyond the thought of Wordsworth, for whom Nature is herself a spiritual manifestation of the force that “rolls through all things”, a teacher, guide and nurse to man. Harpur sets the emphasis on the intelligence of the soul—on its capacity for conscious use of nature, as material for the enrichment of the soul—as “robes of beauty and of use”.

It is just at this point that Harpur can make the transition between poetry and politics. As a poet, his notion of man is not of a political animal, but of the vehicle of an immortal soul, which is both the expression of “a divine Idea” and itself part of that idea, and whose task is the divinization, as it were, of the external world. Only after this is understood can we see Harpur's occupation with politics for what it was—not a mere antagonism of “have-not” versus “have”, but a reasoned, passionate and even religious conviction based on a world-view that allowed equality to all men, not as a material right, but as a spiritual duty.

This poem, with a few others, gives us an illuminating elevation from which to see Harpur's life and work. While he is seen only as the author of the poems in the 1883 volume, it is not possible to understand either his enlightened radicalism, or his total dedication to poetry. If we realise that both these aspects of his nature stem from a spiritual, not an economic, conviction of the importance of human thought and action, he steps into place as one of our most interesting and most misjudged poets. We can understand, and begin at last to believe in, his own assertion of his importance to Australia's future generations; and we can see his deliberate choice of “the future” as against his own immediate advantage as the great gesture it really was. It is his vision of the soul as “a spark from God” that gives his radicalism its obstinate passion, and his devotion to poetry its enthusiasm.

But many men have been devoted to poetry, without leaving any permanent memorial in the form of good poems behind them; and also, though perhaps less often, good poems have been written by men who cared little for the future of the human race. What we need to know about a poet is not what he thought, but what he wrote. What kind of poetry can we best remember Harpur by?

The two or three poems by which he is, in fact, usually represented—“A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest”, “A Basket of Sun-Fruit”, “The Creek of the Four Graves” (in its emasculated and edited form)—are chosen for their descriptive qualities. But Harpur was a more interesting, because a more thoughtful, poet than this choice implies. His longer poems, even if they were available to the reader, would be too long to quote; but reading Harpur in even the 1883 volume, his qualities are seen to be sterner and more durable than his editors would have us believe. The besetting fault of sobriety and earnestness is pedestrianism (Wordsworth's own fault), and Harpur does not always avoid it; but certainly his most characteristic poetry is that of his middle period, and we miss his special idiosyncratic flavour if we represent him only by the few poems we know.

One of the few complete poems in the 1883 volume which does illustrate him at his strongest is the threnody for his father. It is too long to quote in full; but the extracts given at least indicate the general shape and strength of the poem:

I stand in thought beside my father's grave,
The grave of one who, in his old age, died
Too late perhaps, since he endured so much
Of corporal anguish, sweating bloody sweat,
But not an hour too soon—no, not an hour!
… For his bruised heart
And wounded goodwill, wounded through its once
Samsonian vigour and too credulous trust
In that great Delilah, the harlot world,
Had done with fortune …
Nor was there, in the lives of those he loved,
Even had he been susceptible of cheer,
Enough of fortune to warm into peace
A little longer ere he passed away,
The remnant of his chilled humanity.
… Not less must death the great inductor be
To much that far transcends time's highest lore,
Must be at worst a grimly grateful thing,
If only through deliverance from doubt,
The clinging curse of mortals.
… But the dead
Have this immunity at least; a lot
Final and fixed, as evermore within
The gates of the Eternal. For the past
Is wholly God's, and therefore, like himself,
Knows no reverse, no change—but lies forever
Stretched in the sabbath of its vast repose.

This poem—as stern and solid as a granite monument—contains much of the essential Charles Harpur. Unlike most of his contemporaries, in England as in Australia, he does not allow himself sentimentalism or self-pity, unless in the form of protest; he looks on facts clear-eyed and his verse is as plain and firm as his feeling. To have written this poem, and a few more, is enough to prove his quality as a poet and as a man.

What of Harpur's place in Australian literature? To all appearance, he was robbed of his proper due and influence by almost total neglect, in his lifetime and after it; and it would not be unexpected if he seemed quite outside the general current of later writing. In fact, it is surprising to find in Harpur's work the fountainhead from which first issue the two opposing and mingling themes and preoccupations of most of our later writers—the twin themes of exile, of the European consciousness faced with the distasteful necessity of change and readaptation; and of hope, the Utopian but recurrent hope of human brotherhood at last become possible at the far end of the world from Europe. Australia Deserta, Voss's land of self-discovery, was sung first of all by Harpur in his fashion:

My country, though rude yet and wild be thy nature,
This alone our proud love should beget and command.
There's room in thy broad breast for Manhood's full stature …

(“Never Mind”)¹⁹

As for the theme of exile from European culture, even though from his circumstances Harpur had little enough respect for traditions and laws that had driven his parents from their own country, he felt bitterly enough the lack of appreciation and intelligent friendship in the harsh materially-minded community of early Australia. His ponderously named “Sonnet on the Fate of Poetic Genius in a Sordid Community”²⁰ is a lament for his isolation:

Hapless is he who meditates the Nine
Where Greed is rampant, with intent to build
Enduring verse; for there none deem divine
His eloquent art, however he be skilled …
To Misery wedded then, as to a wife,
And bearing that worst load, a loving heart
Unloved, adown the narrow ways of life,
What hath he gained by his harmonious art? …

But he did not fall into the trap of cultivating either theme to the exclusion of the other; he balances his sense of isolation as a poet, of exile from a tradition, against his hope for Australia as the land of the future, where men may learn to live as fully developed human beings in harmony with each other. There is a note in his unpublished “Discourse on Poetry” which is relevant:

Yet it is terribly true that Poetry is not bread … I know all this as well as the prosiest mortal alive. But since a very man—a man spherical and so far godlike in the build of his mind … cannot live by bread alone … all sordid objections to the value of Poetry are forever invalid.²¹

“Spherical and so far godlike in the build of his mind”—it is a sweeping idea, and it implies in the man who could voice it a personal aim far beyond that of the politician, even beyond that of the poet. It stems from Harpur's faith that the soul of man is “a divine spark”, “a child of that in which the world began and hath its end”. It was this notion that he struggled to realize in himself; and when he contemns the “clod-like” minds of those he lived among, and longs for Pope's satirical mastery to denounce the stupidities and injustices of his society, it is not only a personal disappointment that drives him, but a more disinterested emotion on behalf of the visioned enlargement of man's capacities that he never ceased to hope for.

So Harpur is not so much a landscape poet as a poet of humanity. Kendall saw this, when in his obituary poem he says of Harpur,

No soul was he to sit on heights
And live with rocks apart and scornful.
Delights of men were his delights
And common troubles made him mournful.(22)

The human figure is always present in his landscapes to act as a point of final reference; his semi-humorous “Lost in the Bush” and “Ned Connor” are lively pictures of the life and people he knew, and the fiery sincerity of much of his political satire and lampooning still carries across the years.

How important is Harpur's part in our literary inheritance? In spite of our blank ignorance of what he was and did, he remains the most significant, because the most many-sided and thoughtful, of our nineteenth-century poets, until Brennan began writing at the end of the century. Our ignorance of him is our loss. Poetry is not just a matter of what is being written here and now; it is a living and interconnected body that draws its nourishment from the past as much as the present. We cannot ignore our poetic roots, if we are to write poetry that is fully aware of its surrounding influences.

I have spoken of Harpur's understanding of the necessity to adapt the English tradition in poetry, to toughen its delicacies and subtleties, to make it “free, bold and open, even at the risk of being rude”, in order to express the new kind of life being lived by the generation who had, like himself, been born far from the gentilities of English civilization. It was the first step towards an expression of the meaning of the new continent, and perhaps the most important. It was obviously not possible for Harpur to reject that tradition; we did not, after all, come here with wholly empty pockets, and what we brought was precious and relevant to our own existence and our future.

But Harpur was more than a mere translator of English poetic techniques and attitudes into new terms. He was the first to assert the independence, the special-ness, of the Australian—the new man, the first white generation in an unknown country. Not only in his radical political verse, or in his attempts to describe the country and its life, but in the man himself, those qualities are asserted. No poet has been more independent in thought and feeling (it was just this quality of independence and lack of convention which his editor so deplored in him that it scarcely appears at all in the 1883 volume). In the best of his poetry one finds, not only an adaptation of what was best and most durable in the English tradition, but a freshness and strength of thought and feeling, and an ardency of vision, that perhaps could only be found in a generation suddenly presented with a new country and the possibility of making a new life within it.

Harpur's tragedy was that the narrow-mindedness and neglect that darkened his life spread their shadow also over his work, and so effectively that even today we know very little of what he really thought and wrote. He himself almost lost faith, in the end, that future generations would in fact accept him as a poet; but at the end of his life the young Kendall generously acknowledged and praised his work, hailing him as a master.

Yet if he could have guessed what would in fact happen to his life-work after his death, the epitaph he once wrote for himself would have had a wry sound for him:

But fame he sought not through a gainful hand
(This of my being let the future tell)
Nor through the arts of popular command;
But in retirement, where the Muses dwell,
That his life's legacy might be a well
Pierian, in a wide and thirsty land.(23)

Notes

1. Manuscript book in Mitchell Library numbered C383.

2. “To the Lyre of Australia”, Ms. book numbered A87.

3. Rhymed Criticisms with Prose Notes, Ms. book No. C376.

4. Ms. book A90.

5. “To Henry Parkes”, Ms. book A87.

6. “The New Land Orders”, Ms. book, 1847-48.

7. Ms. book, 1847-48.

8. Ms. book A89. (This book is dated at Euroma, 1863.)

9. Southerly No. 1, 1951. Article by C. W. Salier.

10. Ms. book A87.

11. Ms. book A89.

12. See Note (⁹).

13. The Australian Legend, Russel Ward, p. 57. (O.U.P., 1958.)

14. See Note (³).

15. Poems, by Charles Harpur. Published by George Robertson, Melbourne Street, Adelaide, 1883.

16. Ms. book A89.

17. Do.

18. Do.

19. Ms. book A90.

20. Do.

21. Ms. book A87.

22. Kendall's poem “Charles Harpur”, published in Leaves from Australian Forests.

23. “To James Norton, Esq.”, Ms. book A90.

Bibliography

The manuscript books referred to are in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and I am indebted to the Librarian for permission to examine them.

For information on the facts and dates of Harpur's life, I warmly thank his biographer, Mr. Normington-Rawling, whose book on Harpur's life has recently been published by Angus & Robertson Ltd.

Other authorities: P. B. Cox, whose address to the Royal Australian Historical Society was published in the society's journal, 1939; H. M. Green, Fourteen Minutes (Angus & Robertson), pp. 6-11; C. W. Salier, article in Southerly No. 1, 1951, and ensuing correspondence.