1. Dame Mary Jean Gilmore was an Australian writer and journalist known for her prolific contributions to Australian literature and the broader national discourse.
23 Facts About Mary Gilmore
1. 2.
Mary Gilmore involved herself with the burgeoning labour movement and the Bulletin School of radical nationalists, and she became a devotee of the utopian socialist views of William Lane.
3.
Mary Gilmore started a family there, but the colony did not live up to expectations and they returned to Australia in 1902.
4.
Mary Gilmore wrote for a variety of other publications, including The Bulletin and The Sydney Morning Herald, becoming known as a campaigner for the welfare of the disadvantaged.
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Mary Gilmore wrote on a variety of themes, although the public imagination was particularly captured by her evocative views of country life.
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Mary Gilmore's best known work is "No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest", which served as a morale booster during World War II.
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Mary Gilmore was the doyenne of the Sydney literary world, and became something of a national icon, making frequent appearances in the new media of radio and television.
8.
Mary Gilmore maintained her prodigious output into old age, publishing her last book of verse in 1954, aged 89.
9.
Mary Gilmore died at the age of 97 and was accorded a state funeral, a rare honour for a writer.
10.
Mary Gilmore has featured on the reverse of the Australian ten-dollar note since 1993.
11.
Mary Gilmore Jean Cameron was born on 16 August 1865 at the small settlement of Cotta Walla, just outside Crookwell, New South Wales.
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Mary Gilmore was then to attend, albeit briefly, Colin Pentland's private Academy at North Wagga Wagga and, when the school closed, transferred to Wagga Wagga Public School for two and a half years.
13.
Mary Gilmore had a relationship with Henry Lawson that probably began in 1890.
14.
Mary Gilmore writes of an unofficial engagement and Lawson's wish to marry her, but it was broken by his frequent absences from Sydney.
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Mary Gilmore followed William Lane and other socialist idealists to Paraguay in 1896, where they had established a communal settlement called New Australia two years earlier.
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Mary Gilmore later wrote a regular column for the Communist Party's newspaper Tribune, although she was never a party member herself.
17.
Mary Gilmore was the first person to be granted the award for services to literature.
18.
Dame Mary Gilmore died in 1962, aged 97, and was accorded the first state funeral for a writer since the death of Henry Lawson in 1922.
19.
Dobell's 1957 portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore was a finalist in that year's Archibald Prize, and can be seen in the Art Gallery of NSW.
20.
Mary Gilmore was inducted onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001.
21.
Mary Gilmore's image appears on the third series Australian $10 note, along with an illustration inspired by "No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest" and, as part of the copy-protection microprint, the text of the poem itself.
22.
Mary Gilmore was the great-great aunt of politician and later prime minister Scott Morrison, who in 2012, on the 50th anniversary of her death, delivered a tribute to her in federal parliament.
23.
The Mary Gilmore Award was established in 1956 by the Australian Council of Trade Unions as the ACTU Dame Mary Gilmore Award, and after several incarnations with prizes awarded in several different categories, has been awarded as a poetry prize since 1985, as of 2022 by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.