Charles Harpur - Australia’s First Native-Born Poet

Charles Harpur was the first Australian born poet of consequence. He is lauded as having been as important a poet as his contemporaries Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon.

A 1962 biography suggests ‘he died knowing that he had not been acclaimed widely, but confident that in the future Australians would value the work of their first poet.

Once more a melancholy procession formed and toiled its way up to the lonely grave on the hill. It had been re-opened and now the wearied body of the poet was laid to rest beside that of his son, both of them safe… Once more the grave would have to be opened, to receive the body of the wife and mother – but that time was a long way ahead, thirty years!...

For Charles it was altogether fitting that his admiring and ever faithful friend, Henry Kendall, should write the requiem. It was published in the “Herald” and reflects the love, admiration, and sympathy of the writer for the Australian poet at whose feet he was content to sit.

So let him sleep! The rugged hymns
And broken lights of wood above him!
And let me sing how sorrow dims
The eyes of those who used to love him…
But now he sleeps, the tired bard,
The deepest sleep; and lo, I proffer
These tender leaves of my regard
With hands that falter as they offer.’

Briefly, Charles Harpur’s story is this: He was born at Windsor in 1813 to two emancipated convicts. His father became a government schoolmaster and parish clerk who was given patronage by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, John Macarthur and Samuel Marsden that ultimately enabled Charles to receive a rudimentary, but better-than-usual education.

As the Australian Dictionary of Biography records, ‘he had early seen his calling as that of Australia’s first poet and thenceforth his lack of interest in the mundane matter of making a living is matched by our lack of knowledge of how he lived: various jobs till 1836, letter-sorter from 1836 to 1839, possibly some newspaper work till he returned to the Hunter about 1841, first to Singleton and then to Jerry’s Plains. For the next ten years he had no regular job…In Jerry’s Plains in 1843 he met Mary Doyle, eldest daughter of a prosperous farmer, who on 2 July 1850 became his wife. The courtship was long because her family was opposed to a match with one who had no prospects of gaining and apparently no desire to seek material advancement.’

In 1859 John Robertson, the Minister of Lands, appointed Harpur an assistant gold commissioner on the southern goldfields. He held this position until being retrenched in 1866, at which time he, optimistically, wrote ‘This day I’ve lost my office, and am again a free man/With the wide world for mine oyster which I’ll open if I can.’

In March 1867 his 13-year-old son, Charlie, was killed when a rifle he was carrying accidentally discharged. This proved a devastating blow to Charles, one from which he never recovered. His health then rapidly declined. He caught tuberculosis is the harsh winter of 1867 and died at his property in Eurobodalla on 10th June 1868. It is recorded that he left his wife, Mary, with a property that was unencumbered and with no debts, so therefore she was reasonably well-off.

Knowing he was dying, he wrote his own, perhaps bitter, epitaph: ‘Here lies Charles Harpur, who at 50 years of age came to the conclusion that he was living in a sham age, under a sham government, and amongst sham friends…and having come to this conclusion, he did his dying and now lies here with one of his sons.’

From 1833 local newspapers were publishing Harpur’s poems. In 1845 ‘Thoughts: A Series of Sonnets’ was published. These describe his up-and-down relationship with Mary Doyle and the book became the first sonnet sequence published in Australia. In 1853, the only substantial book of his work, 'The Bushrangers: A Play in Five Acts, and Other Poems', was published. The play was the first from an Australian-born writer to be performed and also published (an earlier play, 'The Tragedy of Donohue', was banned because it ‘might cause the riff-raff to riot’). The forty poems (the best-known of which is probably ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ that describes the deaths of an Aboriginal and three settlers in a nighttime attack on their camp) were received both favourably and unfavourably.

Because Harpur was an Australian and not formally educated, his work was ignored in England. In Australia, the prevailing attitude during his lifetime was that native Australians had little to contribute and, additionally, poetry and the other arts were not highly valued. So, as his biographer suggests, Harpur’s work attracted few readers in Australia.

His poems remain little read today and, although he was the first Australian poet who did not write of Australia with a traditional European outlook, his works are generally lowly rated when compared to those of other Australian writers in the nineteenth century. In many respects, his life story attracts more interest than his poetry!

Harpur considered himself an Australian patriot. A century later, Prime Minister Paul Keating suggested he should be honoured as Australia’s first republican and thought he should be honoured as such – for his sentiments such as:
Not for Old World kings and queens,
Villain Slavery’s outworn things!
Shall we sing of Loyalty
In this new and genial Land?
Yea – but let the paean be
Of loyalty to Love’s command,
To Thought, to Beauty and to all
The glorious Arts that yet
In golden Australasia shall
Like chrysolites be set.

Charles Harpur’s grave is at the top of a very steep hill alongside a cutting on Eurobodalla Road near the junction with Nerrigundah Mountain Road, Eurobodalla. It is marked with a now-illegible, steel plaque which once read ‘Sacred to the Memory of CHARLES HARPUR, POET, Died June 10th 1868’. His son, Charlie, is remembered with a simpler, also now-illegible, steel plaque. Both plaques deserve to be restored. There is, regrettably, no memorial to acknowledge that Mary is also buried there.

Sources: Australian Dictionary of Biography; biography.yourdictionary.com; Wikipedia; Australian Poetry Library; monumentaustralia.org.au; Eurobodalla Historic Cemeteries Conservation Management Study Volume 2, Pip Giovanelli, August 2019; Journal of the Moruya & District Historical Society March 1996, June 1996, September 1996, and September 2005; Charles Harpur by J. Normington-Rawling, 1962; plus valuable assistance from Wendy Simes and Leslie Murphy.