[MANUSCRIPT] Unpublished poem about a bushfire suicide, composed by an amateur Brisbane poet. Dated December 1861.

A$950 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Manuscript in ink on blue paper (245 x 195 mm), an untitled poem of 7 quatrains (4-line stanzas), with an extensive explanatory footnote; signed and dated at bottom margin in the same hand Brisbane, December 2nd 1861 / Samuel Gill Mee ; verso with newspaper cuttings from 1861, suggesting that the sheet was removed from a commonplace book at some point; well preserved and legible. The author of this unpublished manuscript poem which is of an exceptionally early date for Brisbane or, indeed, Queensland was Samuel Gill Mee, a compositor who from the late 1850s until his death in 1909 worked on the first three incarnations of Brisbane s most famous newpspaper: the Moreton Bay Courier , The Courier , and the Brisbane Courier . The opening quatrain reads: In a fierce flaming desert wild-laughing, and leaping / Into its hell with demoniac groans; / And his murderer sleeping while wild dogs are keeping / Carnival over his body and bones! Mee s footnote, referring to these opening lines, reads: This is no imagination! Not a great distance from whence these lines are dated, a poor victim of delirium tremens leapt into a bush fire, and perished. He was the father of a family and its mother came looking for him! This case was known to the author, but (scarily like many others) was never chronicled! Bush taverns are rare friends to the native dogs! They save the Registrar of Deaths many a page; and deserts like dead men tell no tales . The poem was written prior to Mee s marriage to Cathe

• Binding: Hardcover

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