Historical information

This book was produced with a grant from the Victorian Government Dept of State and Regional Development.
Grace Elizabeth Jennings Carmichael (1867-1904), poet and nurse, was born on 24 February 1867 at Ballarat, Victoria, daughter of Archibald Carmichael, a miner from Perthshire, Scotland, and his wife Margaret Jennings, née Clark, from Cornwall, England. . About 1880 the family moved to Gippsland where Henderson managed a station near Orbost. Grace learned to love the Gippsland forest. She began to express in verse her understanding of the sights, scents and sounds of the bush, often writing in some remote clearing, her manuscripts stored for privacy in a hollow trunk. The Bairnsdale Advertiser published her first story, and the Weekly Times an early poem; then on 28 November 1885 her poem 'The Old Maid' was published in the Australasian under her pen name Jennings Carmichael. Encouraged by its editor, David Watterston, Grace sent nearly all her subsequent verse to that newspaper. (Read more by Lindsay Gardiner in Australian Dictionary of Biography.)

Significance

This is a useful collection of the poetry of Jennings Carmichael, a leading Australian poet who spent much of her childhood in Orbost.

Physical description

A thin, stapled, yellow covered paperback book. It is titled "Grace Elizabeth Jennings Carmichael" and is a limited edition print of Carmichael's poetry. Print is black.