Tuggeranong Suburbs - GILMORE Traditional Cache
Tuggeranong Suburbs - GILMORE
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Welcome to the 1st cache in a series dedicated to those people the suburbs of Tuggeranong are named after.
The suburb of Gilmore is named after the poet and journalist, Dame Mary Gilmore. It was gazetted on 5 August 1975 and the Streets are named after Journalists, especially female journalists.
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Dame Mary Jean Gilmore DBE (16 August 1865 – 3 December 1962) was a prominent Australian socialist poet and journalist.
Gilmore's father purchased land and built his own house at Brucedale on the Junee Road, near Wagga Wagga. She attended Colin Pentland's private Academy at North Wagga and, when the school closed, transferred to Wagga Public School for two years.
After completing her teaching exams in 1882, Gilmore accepted a position as a teacher at Wagga Public School where she worked until December 1885. After a short teaching spell at Illabo, she took up a position at Silverton near Broken Hill.
There Gilmore developed her socialist views and began writing poetry. In 1890, Gilmore moved to Sydney, where she became part of the "Bulletin School" of radical writers. Although the greatest influence on her work was Henry Lawson, it was A. G. Stephens, literary editor of The Bulletin, who published her verse and established her reputation as a fiery radical poet, champion of the workers and the oppressed.
Gilmore followed William Lane and other socialist idealists to Paraguay in 1896, where they had established a communal settlement called "New Australia" two years earlier. There she married William Gilmore in 1897.
By 1902 the socialist experiment had clearly failed and the Gilmores returned to Australia, where they took up farming near Casterton in the Western District of Victoria.
Gilmore's first volume of poetry was published in 1910, and for the ensuing half-century she was regarded as one of Australia's most popular and widely read poets, although advanced literary opinion held much of her verse to be doggerel and propaganda.
In 1908 Gilmore became women's editor of The Worker, the newspaper of Australia's largest and most powerful trade union, the Australian Workers Union (AWU). She was the Union's first woman member. The Worker gave her a platform for her journalism, in which she campaigned for better working conditions for working women, for children's welfare and for a better deal for the Indigenous Australians.
By 1931 Gilmore's views had become too radical for the AWU, but she soon found other outlets for her writing. She later wrote a regular column for the Communist Party's newspaper Tribune, although she was never a party member herself.
In spite of her somewhat controversial politics, Gilmore accepted appointment as a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1937, becoming Dame Mary Gilmore DBE. During World War II she wrote stirring patriotic verse such as No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest.
In her later years, Gilmore, separated from her husband, moved to Sydney, and enjoyed her growing status as a national literary icon. Just prior to 1940, Gilmore published six volumes of verse and three editions of prose.
After the war Gilmore published volumes of memoirs and Reminiscences of colonial Australia and the literary giants of 1890s Sydney, thus contributing much material to the mythologising of that period.
Dame Mary Gilmore died aged 97, and was accorded a state funeral.
Gilmore's image appears on the Australian $10 note, and in 1973 she was honoured on a postage stamp bearing her portrait issued by Australia Post.
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*******FTF - BigON*******
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
[While standing and facing the front of the] ohvyqvat, obggbz yrsg fvqr, whfg nebhaq gur pbeare. Tebhaq yriry.