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Poets post-1900
Australian 1993 ten-dollar note, back, bearing the image of Dame Mary Gilmore.
Mary Jean Gilmore, nee Cameron, 1865–1962, was born at Cotta Walla, a hamlet near Goulburn in the highlands of New South Wales, of Scottish descent. After working as a schoolteacher, she joined William Lane’s New Australia colony in Paraguay and married her fellow colonist William Alexander Gilmore in 1897. She returned to Australia in 1902 and edited the Woman’s Page of the Sydney Worker for twenty-three years. She was a supporter of the Australian Labour movement, and a champion of many causes. She was created a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1936 for services to Australian literature. When she died at Sydney, she was given a State funeral by the Commonwealth Government and the State of New South Wales. The 1993 (current 2007) Australian ten-dollar note bears her image on the back.
Besides essays and such books of reminiscences as Old Days: Old Ways, she published Marri’d and Other Verses (1910); The Passionate Heart (1918); The Tilted Cart (1925); The Wild Swan (1930); The Rue Tree (1931); Under the Wilgas (1932); Battlefields (1939); The Disinherited (1941); Selected Verse (1948) reprinted with additional poems, 1968; Fourteen Men (1954); Selected Poems, edited by R. D. Fitzgerald (1963).
A fully annotated variorum edition of her poetry edited by Jennifer Strauss is under way in 2007. Gilmore had more than 1,360 poems published between 1887 and 1960. Of those, over 500 had never appeared in collections. The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore Volume 1: 1887–1929 is part of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature. The Academy Editions, supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and published by the University of Queensland Press, provide a full textual apparatus including historical introductions and annotations.
http://april.edu.au/gilmore-mary/index.shtml