WARNING :
If you are prone to
a touch of the vapours,
suffer from fluctuating blood pressure , limp fall without warning, or have some other malady that flares up when excited , then DON’T enter the fabulous world of the Special Collections room in the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library, James Cook University.
As a result
of a recent trip
there
this writer came away
with palpitations after spotting some
rare and unusual books with inscriptions and content
of great interest. One was the above 1918 collection
of work by
that grand woman of Australian literature , socialist , poet , journalist
and
radical writer, Dame Mary Gilmore (1865-1962).
The book has a hand written inscription which suggested
it may have been a presentation copy
by her to the editor of the Australian
Workers’ Union newspaper, The Worker, Sydney . My hands
shook as I examined
the book. In 1908 , Gilmore
was made women’s
editor of The Worker and compaigned for better
working conditions for women, child welfare
and Aborigines.
It is said she became too radical
for the AWU, the nation’s most powerful
trade union, and found other outlets , including a regular column for the Communist
Party’s newspaper, Tribune , but never became a member of the party.
An adventurous person, in 1893 she
went to the ill-fated New Australia utopian settlement started by the
radical political and union activist, William Lane, in Paraguay.He wrote The Workingman's Paradise.
A schoolteacher in Sydney, one of her pupils of note became the Northern Territory journalist, editor and author , Jessie Litchfield, who co-founded the North Australian Monthly with Glenville Pike. Over the years , Gilmore corresponded with the Kiwi author and activist Jean Devanny in Townsville and also encouraged Territory author Bill Harney .
A schoolteacher in Sydney, one of her pupils of note became the Northern Territory journalist, editor and author , Jessie Litchfield, who co-founded the North Australian Monthly with Glenville Pike. Over the years , Gilmore corresponded with the Kiwi author and activist Jean Devanny in Townsville and also encouraged Territory author Bill Harney .
For film maker Sandra
Holmes , mentioned recently in the continuing biography of editor James Bowditch, Dame Mary made an LP record, The Hunter Of The Black , recalling massacres of
Aborigines in her childhood and
recitation of poems she wrote about Aborigines
.
In 1937 she was the first person made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to literature .
In 1937 she was the first person made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to literature .
A well worn 1907 book –In Australian
Tropics –by Alfred Searcy, an
early sub-Collector of Customs in the
Northern Territory , caught my eye. Compelled
to inspect anything related to the Territory, it was opened
and there was an unexpected large stamp of a long gone North Queensland Labor library book club, see below :
