The directory «Plots»

Gilmore Mary
(1865—1962)

Dame Mary Gilmore was born Mary Jean Cameron at Cotta Walla near Goulburn in NSW and, after a somewhat erratic formal education, managed to become a teacher's aid, working in the Cootamundra, Wagga Wagga and Albury areas of the state in order to further her education. She later taught at Silverton near Broken Hill, and at Neutral Bay and Stanmore in Sydney from 1890 - 95. In 1897 she met and married a Victorian Shearer William Gilmore.
In 1912 she moved to Sydney with her son when her husband took up farming in Queensland. She was editor of the Worker from 1908 - 1931. Mary Gilmore published six volumes of poetry and three volumes of prose in the twenty years between 1920 -1940 and wrote numerous works for children.
With the advance of the Japanese during the second world war, her most famous poem, 'No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest' raised the national spirit in those most uncertain times. On her death she was given a ceremonial state funeral.

It was in 1940 that Mary composed her most famous patriotic poem, ‘No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest’. Her diary of June 16th contains the first draft of a poem which she proposed to call ‘The Men from Riverina’.
Two days of revision led to a change in title to ‘Song of the Cattle Men’ and substantial variations to the first verse. She took it to Leslie Haylen of the Australian Women’s Weekly who declared immediately that he would feature it, that is, give it a dramatic and full presentation. Haylen was as good as his word. On a full page of the Weekly (dated 29th June 1940, but on the streets on 25th June), bordered by pictures of Australian rural life and a scene from the landing at Gallipoli, was Mary’s poem, now titled ‘No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest’. It has become part of Australian legend.
The Weekly’s boards announced as the leading feature of that week’s edition, ‘Dame Mary Gilmore’s War Poem’. The Weekly’s wide appeal as a family magazine meant that Mary’s poem went into a great many homes, there to be read and discussed by the whole family group. Many, especially the children, came to know it by heart. Always ready to depreciate her own talent she considered ‘No Foe’ ‘not great verse but it just hit the moment’.
That it certainly caught, after the trauma of Dunkirk, the national mood of defiance, can be gauged by the intense public reaction to it. It was displayed in shop windows in cities and towns and was read at regular intervals, during the days that followed, over 2GB. Mary, and the Women’s Weekly, received scores of appreciative letters.

Australia, 1973, Mary Gilmore