Whose Birthday Is It? August 16, 2018

Dame Mary Gilmore (1865)

Gilmore was a prominent Australian socialist poet and journalist who gained a reputation as a champion of the working class and the oppressed. In the late 1890s, she moved to the New Australia utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay, but she returned to Australia following its failure. In 1908, she became an editor of the Australian Workers’ Union newspaper, and she published her first volume of poems two years later. On what denomination of Australian currency does her image and poetry appear? More…