Charles Harpur

Charles Harpur
National Library of Australia
Born	Charles Harpur (1813-01-23)January 23, 1813 Windsor, New South Wales
Died	June 10, 1868(1868-06-10) (aged 55) Eurobodalla, New South Wales
Occupation	teacher, farmer, writer
Language	English
Nationality	Australian
Notable works	"The Creek of the Four Graves", "A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest"

Charles Harpur (23 January 1813 – 10 June 1868) was an Australian poet.

Harpur was born on 23 January 1813 at Windsor, New South Wales, the third child of Joseph Harpur — originally from Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, parish clerk and master of the Windsor district school — and Sarah, née Chidley (from Somerset; both had been transported.) Harpur received his elementary education in Windsor. This was probably largely supplemented by private study; he was an eager reader of William Shakespeare. Harpur followed various avocations in the bush and for some years in his twenties held a clerical position at the post office in Sydney.

Harpur's early poetic aspirations found an outlet in the form of numerous newspaper publications, through which his work became well known. He published his first poem The Wreck on 20 December 1833, in the Australian, at age 20. This was followed by hundreds of others over the next 35 years. He gathered cuttings of these individual works into scrapbooks and wrote them out in anthologies, which he tried to get published, but there were few publishers in Australia in the early 19th century, so his lack of success is unsurprising. In all he is credited with over 700 poems, which he continuously revised, so that in all some 2,200 versions are extant. In his verse he tried to capture the wild beauty of a country into which he had been one of the first Europeans born. Among his more striking works are The Nevers of Poetry, a series of pithy instructions on poetic craft, and The Creek of the Four Graves, describing the deaths of an aborigine and three settlers in a nighttime attack on their camp.

In Sydney, he met Henry Parkes, Daniel Deniehy, Robert Lowe and W. A. Duncan, who in 1845 published Harpur's first little volume, Thoughts, A Series of Sonnets, which has since become very rare. Harpur had left Sydney two years before and was farming with a brother on the Hunter River. In 1850, he married Mary Doyle and engaged in sheep farming for some years with varying success.

In 1858, he was appointed gold commissioner at Araluen with a good salary. He held the position for eight years and also had a farm at Eurobodalla. Harpur found, however, that his duties prevented him from supervising the work on the farm and it became a bad investment.