Cirrus@Austlit

'This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (1813–68) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of colonial culture from the 1830s to the 1860s in a newly focused way. Harpur’s two-way correspondence with poet Henry Kendall, and with poet and future premier of NSW Henry Parkes, is especially impressive.

'The letters selected for this edition document Harpur’s life in a previously unavailable way. They reveal the intriguing struggle of a high-minded young man to pursue a serious vocation as a poet amidst the unpromising contours of colonial New South Wales society. Despite bearing the taint of a convict family background, Harpur took his vocation with utmost seriousness and had much to endure before he would find recognition as a poet, mainly in colonial newspapers where his poems made over 900 appearances.

'This edition captures the process in detail, as well as the production in 1883 of his Poems in book form. Even though editorially mangled, Poems confirmed his reputation and led to his presence in dozens of anthologies down to the present day.' (Publication summary)

'William Martin Leggett was scarcely more than a boy when his verse began appearing in New Brunswick newspapers, and in his early twenties in 1833 when his celebrated collection The Forest Wreath was published. He was hailed as a prodigy, but when he left for England in 1845 to pursue a career in letters he may as well have sailed off the edge of the earth. From that point, as one Canadian source puts it, “his life and career are shrouded in mystery”. This paper unravels the mystery, using contemporary newspapers, official records and Leggett’s own correspondence. It reveals that, once in England, he invented a new identity, enlisted in the Army and was shipped out to New South Wales. There this gifted and eccentric man would remarry, raise a second family, lead a precarious, semi-nomadic existence as poet, reporter, teacher, gold digger, sheep station manager, soup kitchen attendant, police spy and free selector, and go to his grave claiming that he was the son of the king of England.'

*Source: Author's abstract.

'In the year 1832 there appeared in an obscure and short-lived Sydney newspaper the first published account of the legend of Fisher's Ghost, a tale that still exerts a powerful grip on the imagination of Australians. It was presented in an anonymous thirty-stanza poem, "The Sprite of the Creek!" Ever since the poem's significance was recognised by Elizabeth Webby and Cecil Hadgraft in 1968 its authorship has been a puzzle. This paper, which draws on material on the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers website, traces the author of the "Sprite" through a series of pseudonymous identities over the thirty years 1830 to 1860 and, with the help of library manuscripts and official records, reveals a likely candidate: James Riley (ca.1795-1860), Irish-born ex-convict, "bush tutor" and associate of the Hume family, early explorers and settlers of the southern districts of New South Wales.'

Source: Article abstract.