Cirrus@Austlit

Privately printed as a present by Henry Parkes for his daughter. Menie Parkes had presented a collection of her poems to her father for Christmas 1866. She received one of the hundred copies in October 1867 and indicated in a letter to her father (12 October 1867) that she had known since May that plans for publication were underway. See Letters from Menie : Sir Henry Parkes and His Daughter ed. A. W. Martin (1983): 63-65. E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature From Its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 243 asserted the publication date was 1866, probably because the preface by the author was dated 25 December 1866, and reproduced for the published book from the initial present to Parkes at Christmas 1866.