Charles Tompson, poet and public servant, was born in Sydney, the son of a convict. His father, Charles Tompson, had been convicted in Warwick, England in 1802 and arrived in Sydney in 1804. Around 1819 he bought a farm near Windsor. Tompson was educated at Rev. Henry Fulton's school at Castlereagh, one of the best in the colony, and at the age of eleven wrote an 'Ode to Spring'. In 1824 Tompson celebrated the anniversary of the foundation of the colony with 'A Song, for January 26, 1824' and wrote an elegy on the death of the former Governor, Lachlan Macquarie. Australia: A Translation of a Latin Prize Poem of S. Smith, a Student of Hyde Abbey School, Winchester appeared in the Sydney Gazette in 1829 and was soon published as a two-page pamphlet. In recognition of his efforts Governor Brisbane granted Tompson one hundred acres, gazetted in 1832.
After trying farming, Tompson entered the New South Wales public service. He married Hannah Morris in 1830. In 1826 he published his chief work, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel, the first volume of verse written by a native-born poet to be published in Australia. H. M. Green (112) comments that the verses are 'so polished and urbane that their appearance in such a place and time is something of a marvel; they represent the eighteenth century in its Popeian aspect ... his verses are almost perfect in craftsmanship; on the other hand they show no imagination, but merely a tasteful echoing of commponplace Popeian conventions; they show no reaction to the Australian scene.' He wrote some verse and much prose in later life, none of which has been collected in a published volume. E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature from its beginnings to 1935 (1940): 21 concurs with Green, commenting: 'In versification, Tompson showed greater skill and variety than Wentworth, but he lacked the latter's impressive personality and affluence; generally his poems are tame and conventional.'
Tompson was an early conservationist, criticising the impact of progress on nature and the Aboriginal people. He owned a 700 acre farm near Windsor and was clerk of petty sessions at Penrith in 1836 and then at Camden. When he retired from the New South Wales public service in 1869 Tompson was Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. He died in Sydney in 1883.
(Source: 'Tompson, Charles (1807 - 1883)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 2, MUP, (1967) 533); H. M. Green A History of Australian Literature : Pure and Applied (1961): 112).
Australian Poetry Library Author Entry