'The blurb for Adrian Mitchell’s Where Shadows Have Fallen promises a sensational account of the prominent colonial poet Henry Kendall (1839–1881). Yet despite the claim on the back cover that Kendall ‘had every reason to dread it being made public’, the broad contours of his short but complex life are no secret. At the same time as writing three collections of poetry—Poems and Songs (1862), Leaves from Australian Forests (1869), and Songs from the Mountains (1880)—and numerous prize-winning poems for public occasions, he also struggled with alcohol addiction and experienced a prolonged mental health crisis following the death of his first child in infancy from ‘a combination of fever brought on by bad teeth, and malnutrition’ (133). In telling this grim story, Mitchell follows in the wake of Michael Ackland’s definitive biography, Henry Kendall: The Man and the Myths (The Miegunyah Press, 1995). While Mitchell disputes Ackland’s emphasis on Kendall’s Calvinistic family heritage, he primarily positions his account in response to a series of much older works by Agnes Hamilton-Grey—who Mitchell describes as ‘more a hagiographer than a biographer’—written in the 1920s (12). What distinguishes Mitchell’s account from those of all his predecessors, however, is the minimal attention that it pays to Kendall’s writing.' (Introduction)
