Furnley Maurice

Frank Leslie Thomson Wilmot (6 April 1881 – 22 February 1942), who published his work under the pseudonym Furnley Maurice, was a noted Australian poet, best known for To God: From the Warring Nations (1917).

Wilmot was a son of Henry William Wilmot, an ironmonger and pioneer of the socialist movement in Victoria, and his wife, Elizabeth Mary Hind. He was born at Collingwood, a suburb of Melbourne, and was educated at the North Fitzroy State School. In 1895 he obtained employment at Cole's Book Arcade, Melbourne. He married Ida Meeking in 1910, and they had two sons. Wilmot gradually improved his position at the book arcade and, when the business was wound up by the executors of the Cole estate in 1929, held the position of manager.

Wilmot began contributing verse to , a Melbourne Labour paper, before he was 20 and also produced his own monthly magazine called Microbe.

His first separate publication, Some Verses by Frank Wilmot, appeared in 1903, and attracted little notice. Another little volume, Some More Verses, was printed in 1904 but was suppressed before publication. Some years later a few copies of this volume were discovered which found their way into collectors' hands. Finding at one stage that his work was being persistently rejected, especially by Bulletin where the editor Alfred George Stephens was known to dislike Wilmot, Wilmot adopted the pseudonym of "Furnley Maurice", and his poems thereafter were published either anonymously or under this pseudonym.

In 1913 a slim, well-printed volume, Unconditioned Songs, published anonymously, attracted some attention. His next publication, To God: from the Weary Nations, which came out in 1917, criticised conscription. Revised and with a slightly altered title "To God: from the Warring Nations" the poem was later reprinted in Eyes of Vigilance, but in the meantime an entirely different piece of work, The Bay and Padie Book: Kiddie Songs, had come out (first ed. 1917, third ed. 1926). This volume was meant especially for young children, and few writers in this medium have been so successful. In Eyes of Vigilance, which appeared in 1920, Wilmot printed some of his best work, and in Arrows of Longing, published in 1921, he gathered together most of his uncollected work up to that date. In 1925 The Gully, a poem of about 200 lines, was published in a limited edition.

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