THE BREAD WE EAT.

ON MARY GILMORE

MARY GILMORE was one of the most famous Australians of her time. As people who were alive in the 1940s and 1950s may remember, in those days Gilmore was looked on as a kind of totemic figure and was held to embody all those qualities Australians liked to find in themselves. Her birthdays were regarded almost as national events, and when she died in 1962 she was given a state funeral, the first writer to be so honoured since Henry Lawson back in 1922.

Gilmore had been born in 1865, so it's quite possible her longevity contributed to her fame. So had the fact that she'd gone to Paraguay in the 1890s as a member of the New Australia Settlement and had subsequently played a significant role in the labour movement through an association with the Worker. Gilmore edited the Women's Page in that journal for over twenty years.

But Gilmore largely owed her fame to her work as a writer. Although her volumes of poetry were often published in small editions (The Disinherited, her 1941 book, had a print-run of just 100), by one means or other her poems filtered through to the public at large and seeped into the national consciousness. In her heyday, few Australians would have failed to associate the opening lines of, say, "Old Botany Bay":

 
   I'm old 
   Botany Bay; 
   Stiff in the joints 
   Little to say 

with the name and person of Mary Gilmore.

Gilmore was clearly a complex figure and cannot be reduced to an ideological stereotype. She was, it is true, a lifelong socialist who eventually became an enthusiastic fellow traveller during the Cold War, yet she was also an ardent monarchist and had no hesitationin accepting a DBE in 1937. And while in her early years she held the racial attitudes typical of people in the labour movement, her lifelong reflection on her experiences in Paraguay and Argentina led her to modify those beliefs quite dramatically, so much so that she can almost be regarded as a precursor of multiculturalism. Gilmore understood and appreciated difference.