Henry Kendall's Vital Association with the Grafton Area, particularly 1862-'63

Abstract

This survey is largely biographical and accumulative, focusing on the as yet not widely known early literary and still verifiable personal activities of Henry Kendall in the Grafton region in the highly productive and catalysing period of 1862 to 1863. The purpose is to clarify the details of an important time of Kendall's early literary career and to note the complex and interwoven pattern of mutually supportive friendships, writing and newspaper publication in the period, which was a seed time for almost all of his later poetry: to unravel the several strands of poetic career, employment, and cultural association for the young Kendall. For it is not merely a matter for local pride on the North Coast of New South Wales that Kendall was a resident at both Grafton and, later, Camden Haven, but it is, without any doubt, the Grafton region which made him the type of poet he was, even as the circumstances of his association with that region continued to inspire so much of his later writing. The earlier background of Kendall will not now be discussed, nor in any detail his time in Sydney (1857-1861) prior to moving to Grafton. However, there must be brief reference to his parents' sojourn in the Clarence region from 1845 to '52, if only because of the almost certain impact of the up-river pastoral settings on the young boy.