SOURCE: Perkins, Elizabeth. Introduction to The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur, pp. xi-xliii. London: Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Perkins details Harpur's education, family circumstances, and controversial episodes in the poet's youth. Perkins then balances an explanation of Harpur's weaknesses as a lyricist with his originality, spirit, and narrative skill.

I

Sir Henry Parkes's autobiographical Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History, published in 1892 when Parkes was seventy-seven, begins with an account of the political movement of the forties and fifties which eventually brought self-government to the eastern Australian colonies. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “in view of the marvellous progress of New South Wales during the last forty years, to overvalue the importance of that first popular movement in Australia. It formed truly a new epoch in Australian life. A people, emerging from the indistinct mists of scattered settlement in a wild country, claiming...