Mary Gilmore

Born Aug. 16, 1865, near Goulburn, New South Wales; died Dec. 3, 1962, in Sydney. Australian poet.

Attracted by the ideas of the Utopian socialist W. Lane, Gilmore took part in the founding of the New Australia commune in Paraguay (1893-99). For 23 years she worked on the trade union newspaper The Worker. She wrote about the love of a woman and mother and about the joys and concerns of family life (the collection In the Family and Other Poems, 1910). Australia appears in Gilmore’s poetry, arrayed in its aboriginal legends and distinctive landscape; the trials and tribulations of its working people and the struggle of a courageous people for social justice are also depicted. Her collections include The Passionate Heart (1918), The Covered Wagon (1925), The Wild Swan (1930), Under the Wilgas (1932), and For the Australian Homeland (1945). In 1964 the union councils of Melbourne, Brisbane, and Newcastle established a Gilmore Prize for literature.