Selected Poems Mary Gilmore
Imprint Classics ISBN 1 875892 15 X
160pp AU$19.95

The comprehensive selection of the best of the work of Dame Mary Gilmore, one of those rare personalities who became legendary figures in their own lifetime. Includes selections from The Passionate Heart, Under the Wilgas, Battlefields and Fourteen Men.

As Robert Fitzgerald wrote in the foreword to the first edition, 'In her work she has expressed so much of Australia, its outlook, its atmosphere, the under-currents of its history, its wildlife, its landscape and its peoples'.

Dame Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) was born at Cotta Walla near Goulburn in NSW. For several years, as a young woman, she taught at Broken Hill, where she developed her passionate interest in the labour movement, becoming involved in the radicalism of the maritime and shearers' strikes of the early 1890s. She had a close friendship with Henry Lawson, and with A. G. Stephens, the Bulletin editor. It was in the Red Page that her poetry was first published. She worked as an editor and journalist for many decades. At the end of her life she had become a powerful and highly respected figure; there was a ceremonial state funeral through the streets of Sydney when Mary Gilmore died in 1962.