in the political than in the literary annals of the country.
At Hobart Town in 1827 appeared "The Van Diemen's Land Warriors,
or the Heroes of Cornwall" by "Pindar Juvenal", the first book of verse
published in Tasmania. During the next ten years various poetical effusions
were printed in the colonies, which are of bibliographical interest
but of hardly any intrinsic value. Newspapers had been established
at an early date, but until the end of this period they were little better
than news-sheets or official gazettes, giving no opportunities
for literature. The proportion of well-educated persons was small,
the majority of the free settlers being members of the working classes,
as very few representatives of British culture came willingly to this country
until after the discovery of gold.

It was not until 1845 that the first genuine, though crude,
Australian poetry appeared, in the form of a small volume of sonnets
by Charles Harpur, who was born at Windsor, N.S.W., in 1817.
He passed his best years in the lonely bush, and wrote largely
under the influence of Wordsworth and Shelley. He had some
imagination and poetic faculty of the contemplative order,
but the disadvantages of his life were many. Harpur's best work
is in his longer poems, from which extracts cannot conveniently be given here.
The year 1842 had seen the publication of Henry Parkes' "Stolen Moments",
the first of a number of volumes of verse which that statesman bravely issued,
the last being published just before his eightieth year. The career of Parkes
is coincident with a long and important period of our history,
in which he is the most striking figure. Not the least interesting
aspect of his character, which contained much of rugged greatness,
was his love of poetry and his unfailing kindness to the struggling writers
of the colony. Others who deserve remembrance for their services at this time
are Nicol D. Stenhouse and Dr. Woolley. Among the writers of the period