Marion Downes was a Melbourne-based author of the colonial period. She was born to John Patrick Downes and Mary Jane Downes, nee Boles, in 1864 in Melbourne, Victoria. Her mother and father immigrated from Dublin, Ireland to Victoria in 1863 on the Vanguard and had ten children together. Downes was the third of the ten children and the first to be born in Australia. She was recognised as a Christian woman who used her talent in writing to write religious works, but she also used her faith to give back to the community, as she and another, Miss Charlotte Boes, demonstrated with their relief fund in 1916 for Russian refugee children.
Downes is best known for her writing, her involvement in the literary scene, and her involvement with the Baptist church. She was secretary to Reverend Samuel Chapman, who was the leading minister of the Baptist denomination in Victoria, before she started working as a journalist and writer. From the brief description provided by the Australian Baptist Heritage Collection it can be assumed that Downes worked as his secretary in her early years, and then became a journalist and started publishing her works in the early 1900s, after Chapman’s death. Her commitment to the Reverend and the church is reflected in her poem, 'In Memoriam', which she wrote shortly after Chapman’s death in his honour.
Marion Downes’s works are expansive. Her collection of poems, Wayside Songs, published posthumously a year after her death by a London publisher, contains at least 200 poems, and she wrote 40 other works. Downes wrote mainly for religious newspapers; however, a few of her works were published by publishers in Melbourne and London. She mainly wrote religious poetry; however, she also wrote short stories, short children’s stories, and a novel. A lot of her works centred around the Australian landscape and the young girl figure as seen in her work 'Flower O’ The Bush'. She also touched on ideas of war and young men fighting for Empire, as seen in 'The First March Past', but mainly her works focused on Christianity and religious morals, values, and lives.
Marion Downes was involved considerably in the colonial literary spheres. She was a member of Australian and London Literature Societies and had her posthumous collection accepted by Queen Mary, the wife of King George V, indicating the connections she had in both London and Australia. As well as being a part of the Australian Literature Society, her works were also frequently discussed by the society as well, indicating the value placed on her works across Australia. Despite allegedly deliberate imitations of other poets in her writings, Downes is considered to have been a popular writer of her time and her city, and her writing was valued highly amongst her circles. She published mainly in the early 1900s to the late 1910s and continued to write a few more works during the early 1920s before she died. Marion Downes died on the 20th of February in 1926, in Melbourne, Victoria.
This biography was researched and written by Jessica Devenish.
Sources:
Barke-Hall, R. J. “Samuel Chapman (1831-1899).” Australian Dictionary of Biography 3 (1969). https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chapman-samuel-3194/text4795.
Burn, Kerrie Lynn. “The Australian Baptist heritage collection: Management of a geographically distributed special collection.” University of Divinity (2007): 1-255. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.34589751.
Downes, Marion Grace, “Flower O’ The Bush.” Internet Archive. 1914. https://archive.org/details/flowerobush00down/page/n13/mode/2up.
Downes, Marion. “The First March Past,” Weekly Times (Melbourne, Vic: 1869 – 1954), 23 November, 1912. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/224035017.
Downes, Marion. “The Rev. Samuel Chapman: In Memoriam,” West Gippsland Gazette (Warragul, Vic. : 1898 – 1930), 9 October, 1900. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/68701021,
Downes, Marion. Wayside Songs. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1927.
“Homeland Visitors,” The Cairns Post (QLD. : 1909 – 1954) 19 November, 1934. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/41523680.
“John Patrick Downes.” Ancestry.com. Accessed on 29 October 2024. https://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/john-patrick-downes-24-4992jq?srsltid=AfmBOopU9vGRgs6uiDUTHVL1h7lTv_gY2R7sKag-sXH3re1ulta7X4mU.
“John Patrick DOWNES & Mary Jane BOLES.” British genealogy & Family History Forums. 16 January 2011. https://www.british-genealogy.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-65569.html.
“Marion Downes’s Poetry,” The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 – 1954), 28 January, 1928. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/204173205.
“Miss Marion Downes” The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1883 – 1930), 26 February, 1926, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/245857156.
“News of the Week,” The Prahran Telegraph (Vic. : 1889 – 1930), 3 February, 1928. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/165186843.
“Personal,” The Register (Adelaide, SA: 1901-1929), 5 November, 1927. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/54939255.
“The Social Circle: Helping Refugees,” Weekly Times (Melbourne, Vic: 1869 – 1954), 16 September, 1916. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/132713717.
Weaver, Rachel. “Downes, Marion Grace (1864 – 1926).” Colonial Australian Popular Fiction: A Digital Archive. 10 June 2015. https://www.apfa.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/biogs/E000098b.htm.
