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There were five main arenas where Australian Great War Poetry was written in the period of 1914 to 1939: the Home Front, Gallipoli, The Middle East, The Western Front and England. These arenas were to form important segregations of poetic attitude and interest specific to the war mood at the time. Australian poets, just like their British counterparts, could be humorous, melancholy, angry or just longing for home. Many Australians, for example, wrote about the Australian flora, and how they missed it.
Many of these poets served in more than one campaign, while others only served in one, either joining up after Gallipoli, or being invalided back home or killed in action. A small listing of Australian Great War Poets can be seen below.
Leon Gellert, [1] Frank Westbrook, [2] Oliver Hogue, Tom Skeyhill, [3] Frederic Manning, [4] Edwin Gerard, [5] Geoffrey Wall, [6] Walter James Redfern Turner, [7] William McDonald, [8] Ion Idriess, Andrew Barton Paterson and many others.
Christine Erica Strom, [9] Alice Ross-King and Emily 'Beryl' Henson.
Archibald Strong, Arthur Henry Adams, Bernard Patrick O’Dowd, C.J. Dennis, [10] Christopher Brennan, [11] Edward Dyson, Henry Lawson, [12] John Le Gay Brereton, [13] Leonard Nelson [14] and many more.
Agnes Rose-Soley, [15] Agnes Littlejohn, [16] Alice Gore-Jones, [17] Capel Boake, Dorothea McKellar, Dorothy McCrae, [18] Ella McFadyen, [19] Esther Nea-Smith, Grace Ethel Martyr, [20] Joan Torrance, [21] Madoline 'Nina' Murdoch, [22] Margery Ruth Betts, [23] Marion Knowles, Mary Gilmore, [24] May Kidson, [25] Philadelphia N. Robertson [26] and many others.
Arthur St. John Adcock - Lance Corporal Cobber, C. Fox Smith, Edgar Wallace, Ethel Campbell, Henry Newbolt, Jessie Pope and Sylvia Hobday.
Henry Lawson [27] and William Wentworth to name only two. There are several.
Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson was an Australian writer and bush poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer".
Thomas Henry Kendall, was an Australian author and bush poet, who was particularly known for his poems and tales set in a natural environment. He appears never to have used his first name — his three volumes of verse were all published under the name of "Henry Kendall".
Christopher John Brennan was an Australian poet, scholar and literary critic.
William Henry Ogilvie was a Scottish-Australian narrative poet and horseman, jackaroo, and drover, and described as a quiet-spoken handsome Scot of medium height, with a fair moustache and red complexion. He was also known as Will Ogilvie, by the pen names including 'Glenrowan' and the lesser 'Swingle-Bar', and by his initials, WHO.
Alec Derwent Hope was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic. He was referred to in an American journal as "the 20th century's greatest 18th-century poet".
George Gordon McCrae was an Australian poet.
Kenneth Adolphe Slessor was an Australian poet, journalist and official war correspondent in World War II. He was one of Australia's leading poets, notable particularly for the absorption of modernist influences into Australian poetry. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is named after him.
Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis, better known as C. J. Dennis, was an Australian poet and journalist known for his best-selling verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915). Alongside his contemporaries and occasional collaborators Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, Dennis helped popularise Australian slang in literature, earning him the title 'the laureate of the larrikin'.
James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.
Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell Mackenzie was an Australian poet and novelist. His first and best-known novel, The Young Desire It (1937), was published under the pen name Seaforth Mackenzie.
The Glugs of Gosh is a book of satirical verse written by Australian author C. J. Dennis, published by Angus & Robertson in 1917. The book's 13 poems are vignettes of life in a fictional kingdom called Gosh, inhabited by an arboreal race known as Glugs. Dennis describes the Glugs as a "stupid race of docile folk". The illustrations, by Dennis's regular collaborator Hal Gye, depict the Glugs as short humanoids with large heads. Written in the style of children's nonsense poetry, the work attacks free trade, along with what Dennis saw as Australia's social conformity, intellectual cowardice and rampant bureaucracy. Although the book has greater literary merit than the larrikin-inspired doggerel verse for which Dennis is famed, it was a commercial failure. According to one biographer, "the veiled political and economic satirical verse was lost on the public." The book is dedicated to his wife.
Pixie O'Harris was a Welsh-born Australian artist, newspaper, magazine and book illustrator, author, broadcaster, caricaturist and cartoonist, designer of book plates, sheet music covers and stationery, and children's hospital ward fairy-style mural painter. She became patron to Sydney's Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in 1977.
The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke is a verse novel by Australian poet and journalist C. J. Dennis. Portions of the work appeared in The Bulletin between 1909 and 1915, the year the verse novel was completed and published by Angus & Robertson. Written in the rough and comical Australian slang that was Dennis' signature style, the work became immensely popular in Australia, selling over 60,000 copies in nine editions within the first year of publication.
"Flag of the Southern Cross" is a poem written in 1887 by Australian bush poet Henry Lawson. The title refers to the Eureka Flag flown at the Eureka Rebellion in Ballarat, Victoria in 1854. It was originally published in Truth, a Sydney newspaper.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1914.
The Teams is a poem by Australian writer and poet Henry Lawson. It was first published in the Australian Town and Country Journal on 21 December 1889. It was later published in the poet's poetry collection In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses in 1896.
Ella May McFadyen was an Australian poet, journalist and children's writer. For 18 years she conducted "The Children's Page" for The Sydney Mail and was known as Cinderella.
The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse (1918) is anthology of poems by Australian and New Zealand poets edited by Walter Murdoch. It was published in hardback by Oxford University Press in London in 1918.
"The Roaring Days" (1889) is a poem by Australian poet Henry Lawson.
Songs of a Campaign is a poetry collection by Australian poet and writer Leon Gellert, published by Angus and Robertson, in 1917.
AGWP Canon & Register Australian Great War poetry website