Henry Kendall

Henry (Thomas Henry) Kendall (1839-1882) was once regarded as the finest poet Australia had produced. Kendall received a limited education and worked on a whaling ship before contributing his first poems to the Month in 1859. In 1861 he commenced employment as a clerk, and by 1866 he was working in the Colonial Secretary's Office in Sydney. Over this period his reputation as a poet grew through the appearance of the volume Poems and Songs (1862) and his regular contributions to publications in Sydney and Melbourne. His siblings placed a strain on his income and reputation, and in 1869 he moved to Melbourne. The volume Leaves from Australian Forests, published that year, garnered critical praise but sold poorly; he returned to Sydney in bad physical and financial shape. At the end of 1870 he was charged with forging and uttering a cheque. Successfully defended by WB Dalley on the grounds of insanity, he lost his wife and children, and became a derelict. In due course he was committed to the Gladesville Hospital, but friends took him in, and in 1875 he was able to start work in a timber business. He regained his family and resumed his writing as the 1870s wore on, contributing to the Sydney International Exhibition and publishing Songs from the Mountains (1880), a great success. Henry Parkes intervened to secure his appointment as inspector of forests in 1881, but the following year he died of phthisis (tuberculosis). He was the first of a number of prominent Australian poets and literary figures - including Henry Lawson, Dorothea McKellar and Jules Francois Archibald - to be buried in Waverley Cemetery.