Kendall
Visual representation of poem by Ian MacNeill evoking the last period of Australian colonial poet Henry Kendall’s life when he was working as a forester in his beloved northern New South Wales bush. After overcoming alcoholism, Kendall was helped to find a job as a forester by Sir Henry Parkes, the man who effected the joining of the Australian colonies into one nation. Kendall overcame alcoholism but never recovered from the drowning of one of his daughters, Araluen, named after a rural village near where Kendall grew up. Australia’s colonial poets all struggled to found their work in the country they knew but were torn by the belief that ‘real’ culture resided elsewhere, in England.