Brief Biography

Henry Kendall was born in 1839 near Milton on the NSW coast. He lived in the coastal regions of Illawarra in the south of NSW and Clarence River in the north before spending two years aboard a whaling vessel. He returned to live in Sydney and published his first volume of poetry, Poems and Songs in 1862. He moved to Melbourne in 1868 after his marriage and published his second volume, Leaves from Australian Forests in 1869. His lack of success, however, along with the death of his daughter Araluen drove him to alcohol and he was to spend various periods in a Sydney asylum for his addiction. He was finally cured, reunited with his wife and achieved some level of success with his final volume of poetry, Songs from the Mountains, in 1880. He died in 1882.

Bibliography

Poetry Collections
Poems and Songs 1866
Leaves from Australian Forests 1869
Songs from the Mountains 1880
The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall 1966, compiled by T.T. Reed

Biographies
Henry Kendall: A Critical Appreciation 1960, by T.T. Reed
Henry Kendall 1976, by W.H. Wilde
Henry Kendall: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1987, Ian F. McLaren
Henry Kendall: The Muse of Australia 1992, edited by Russell McDougall
Henry Kendall: Poetry, Prose and Selected Correspondence 1993, edited by Michael Ackland
Henry Kendall: The Man and the Myth 1995, by Michael Ackland

Biographic Material
In the early 1930s the Herald newspaper of Melbourne published a series of articles about the "Founders of Our Liteature". The Henry Kendall piece in this series was published, uncredited, on 26 May 1934, on the editorial page. The style, to modern eyes at least, is over-blown and rather adolescent, but it does supply some interesting biographical facts behind the melodramatic tone.

Selected Poetry

You can read the full text of the following Kendall poems:

The bulk of the Kendall poems transcibed can be found under the: The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall page.

This page and its contents are copyright ©2001-03 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: October 19, 2003.