Vonda Stanley's collection of early Australian bush poems

Henry Kendall

 

Born on 18th April 1839 at Kirmington on the south coast of N.S.W., Henry

Kendall was the son of a small farmer who moved north with his family to the

Clarence River district. He was thirteen when his father died in 1851 and

his mother took her children back to the south coast to live near

Woolongong.

In 1855 as a cabin boy, he went to the South Seas on a whaling

brig owned by an uncle. Two years later he was breadwinner for the family in

Sydney: an errand boy, shop assistant, solicitor's clerk (at Grafton),

public servant.

He married in 1868, and went to Melbourne in 1869, hoping to make a

living by writing; but here he failed, as he did when he returned to Sydney

in 1870, a victim of povery and drink.

He was in desperate straits in 1873 when the timber merchants, George and Michael Fagan, took charge of him and cared for him until he was well enough to be employed as a storekeeper in their timber business at Camden Havan, near Port Macquarie (N.S.W.).

His wife and two sons (they had been living apart) rejoined him here in 1876 and another son and a daughter were born.

When Kendall was appointed Inspector of Forests, at Cundletown on the Manning River, the travelling this involved proved too much for him and he died of tuberculosis on 1st August 1882.

While acknowledging his faults, T.Inglis Moore said of him: "He had a gift

of song and remains one of the sweetest of our singers." (p. 301,302)

 

Bibliography: The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse, chosen by

Beatrice Davis, 1984, Nelson.

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