Henry Kendall’s Recovery at Brisbane Water

When the thirty-four-year-old Henry Kendall arrived in Gosford in late 1873 his life was in ruins. In 1869 he had given up his job in the state government office in Sydney and moved to Melbourne where he hoped to live by his writing. He wrote for a range of papers and magazines but his earnings were never enough to support himself, his wife and their child. He sank into poverty, plunged into alcoholism. His one-year-old daughter, Araluen, died in February 1870.[1] In October he returned to Sydney, his son Frederick was born, and he and his wife separated. Arrested for forging a cheque for £1, he escaped jail only by being deemed insane. Set at liberty, six months later he was committed to Gladesville asylum. The admission sheet recorded, “His habits are intemperate and he frequently takes opium and sedatives in large quantities … He is said to have been violent and to have threatened suicide during the present attack.” He was there for three weeks from July 5 to 29, 1871. In 1873 he was committed again, this time staying for two months, and discharged on July 7.[2]

Friends now arranged employment for Kendall away from Sydney. His first biographer, Alexander Sutherland, records:

Kendall received the appointment of a newspaper at Grafton, a town where he was well known and valued. The steamer he sailed in called for a few hours at Newcastle by the way. Kendall was one of the passengers who went ashore, but not one of those who returned on board.[3]

Having drunk away what funds he had, he is then said to have begun to walk back to Sydney. There are no known surviving records of this episode. It would have been a considerable walk, and it may be that Kendall disembarked in Gosford, where in October or November 1873 he met Charles Fagan in Campbell’s Hotel.[4]

Charles Fagan, aged forty-one, was the eldest of the seven sons of Peter Fagan. Peter had been transported from Ireland in 1820, aged twenty-seven. After the expiration of his sentence, he took up land in Brisbane Water and eventually developed the family timber business. According to Bishop Reed, Kendall was befriended by Peter’s sons William and Joseph, taken into the Fagan household and nursed back to recovery.[5] The Fagans’ cottage, minus some of its outbuildings, still stands and is preserved as the Henry Kendall Cottage and Historical Museum at 25 Henry Kendall Street, West Gosford.[6] In 1840 the Red Cow Inn had been established there but, perhaps fortunately, it was no longer licensed by the time Kendall arrived. In The Fagans, the Cottage, and Kendall Joan Fenton notes: “in the little room which the poet Henry Kendall occupied may be seen the colonial sofa on which he slept and on which he carved his initials”.[7]

Joseph Fagan recalled in 1931: “He used to write down there in the glen, always in the early morning and after sunset. At other times he gave us a hand on the farm, and—well, he was just like one of us boys in the family.”[8] Joseph recalled further:

After tea in the evenings when Kendall would light his pipe it was a treat and an education to listen to him. There did not seem to be a subject under the sun of which he was not master. It made one think of the words of Oliver Goldsmith, “And still the wonder grew that one small head could carry all he knew.” In the days when Kendall knew the glen it was a beautiful spot, but later the woodcutter found it and came and laid it waste. Immense trees were cut down, blocking the pretty water-course and it made him sad to see the havoc wrought by careless vandalism.[9] 

It seems that Peter Fagan senior knew of Henry as a writer, which might explain how the family readily took him in. Joseph recalled:

Chance had introduced them. Kendall was writing in Melbourne, not having too good a time … My father had spoken to me of him. Later we got him up here to live with us … My father used to do a bit of writing too.

Peter is unlikely to have seen the Melbourne papers, but he could have known of Kendall from the Freeman’s Journal, the Sydney Roman Catholic weekly modelled on the Irish magazine of the same name, which had a strongly Irish flavour.[10] Peter Fagan was born in Ireland, Kendall’s mother was of Irish descent. Kendall had begun contributing to the Freeman’s Journal in September 1871 with an eleven-part series about Irish writers, “The Harp of Erin”. He contributed to it regularly until April 1872, after which he sank into what he called “the shadow of 1872”. Tradition has it that when the house was cleared, stacks of the Freeman’s Journal lined the walls.[11]

In Melbourne Kendall had been a friend of the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon, who shot himself in 1870, unable to pay the printer for his last book of poems. Kendall’s first biographer, Alexander Sutherland, claimed that Kendall “had no pleasure in horses, and loathed what he considered the idiotic frenzy of the race-course. He and Lindsay Gordon could never grow intimate by reason of a community of taste.”[12] But the Fagans were as heavily into horses as the champion steeplechase rider Gordon. As the plaque on the wall of their cottage records, “The Fagans were keen racing men and bred champion horses, one being the bay mare ‘Mabel’, winner of the Lord Mayor’s Cup at Randwick, Sydney, 1879.”[13]

It would be nice to say that the Fagans changed Kendall’s attitude to horses—but it is unlikely that Kendall could have spent much time with Gordon, whose life from his schooldays had been involved with horses, if he had been as dismissive as Sutherland claims. And the year before he arrived in Gosford Kendall had written an enthusiastic account of a horse race in Marcus Clarke’s novel Long Odds, remarking “That bit about the finish is capital.”[14]

But undoubtedly Kendall was restored to physical health while with the Fagans and undoubtedly he spent a fair amount of time on horseback, something he could not have afforded to do in Melbourne. In the Illustrated Sydney News, October 25, 1890, A.G. Wise gives Charles Fagan’s recollections:

Book in hand, said Mr Fagan, he wandered for hours here and in the gullies. He was an unskilful rider, being, like Carlyle, too often absorbed in reveries, and preferred walking. He was not, as a biographer has stated, employed to carry the mails between Gosford and Kincumber. My brother had the mail contract, and sometimes, for the sake of a change, Kendall used to jump on a horse and ride to Kincumber, about nine miles away. The road is very pretty to Green Point, and thence across country to Broadwater Lagoon. He wrote his poems on any scrap of paper or old note-book, jotting down odd lines and words, to write the poem as a whole with scarcely an alteration. He always wrote with his left hand, owing to an accident in his youth, forming each letter separately.[15]

Joseph Fagan had the mail run, a two-day trip into Sydney and back. He recalled:

Harry sometimes would come along part of the way, always up the mountain to his favourite spot at the head of the glen, and there would often spend the whole day by the waterfalls or in the darkened fern-grown recesses, coming back to the farm when night fell, while I went on my way.[16]

He was more positive than Charles about Kendall’s horsemanship, writing to Kendall’s eldest son Frederick: “He could ride a horse well and would be up with the best of us when yarding a fractious mob of cattle, and was a good judge of a horse, and knew the pedigree of every horse racing at Randwick.”[17] It was presumably in this context that Kendall wrote his popular racing poems “Kingsborough” and “How the Melbourne Cup was Won”.[18]

Kendall’s twin brother Basil died in Sydney of tuberculosis on January 21, 1874. As far as the rest of Kendall’s family were concerned—his wife, his mother, his sisters—he had disappeared and he kept his whereabouts secret. But he was in touch with his literary contacts. The poet P.J. Holdsworth, visiting relatives at Brisbane Water around the middle of 1874, encountered Kendall and they began to correspond. Kendall was determined to distance his Bohemian past. He wrote to Holdsworth on September 4, 1874: “I haven’t a scrap left of my Bohemian writings.”[19]

The writer and journalist J. Sheridan Moore, who had helped Kendall publish his first book, Poems and Songs, in 1862, also resumed correspondence. On October 23, 1874, Kendall wrote to him: “I have taken nothing stronger than tea for the last twelve months.” He then crossed out twelve and wrote eleven and continued: “Nothing shall tempt me to write for money again; and the life I have chosen precludes me from writing for pleasure.”[20]

He repeated this rejection of literature frequently in his letters at this time.[21] But it was with literary friends that he resumed correspondence in mid-1874. His detailed critique of a poem Holdsworth had sent him pulled no punches. “If I did not know you, I should take you to be an intellectual eunuch,” he told him on June 19, 1874. “If I don’t suit you, why—hang it—get another butcher.”[22] The lengthy appraisal and suggested revisions he offered indicate his serious involvement in the business of poetry.

This was something he nonetheless denied. On November 19, 1874, he wrote to Moore:

You are mistaken when you say that my resolution not to enter the domain of letters again is an offshoot of the “egotism of despair”. It is no such thing; but is, most probably, the issue of laziness. The fact is I hate the sight of a pen. I may, from time to time scribble off a squib or prose trifle; but, as to more serious work—bah! I had quite enough of it during the weary years between 1869 and 74. Still, I will always sympathize with movements on behalf of Australian Literature—with your efforts, especially … Why should I bother and work out my brains for a shadow? Did Harpur acquire a reputation by his writings? Did Michael and Gordon, with all their belief in themselves? If they failed what right have I to expect success? And what, after all, is success of the kind worth? Nothing. Give me the bovine life and let the Gods go hang![23]

And he similarly wrote to Thomas Butler, the editor of the Freeman’s Journal, on March 20, 1875: “I would rather turn bullock driver than go back to the ragged old Bohemian life.”[24]

He was also in touch with Margaretta Stenhouse, the widow of Nicol Stenhouse, the Balmain lawyer and bibliophile and one-time friend of Thomas De Quincey, to whose literary circle Sheridan Moore had introduced Kendall.[25] At her request in August 1874 he wrote an “In Memoriam” for her daughter Alice, sending a revised version incorporating some of her suggestions on September 9. It was published in the Town and Country Journal on September 12. Mrs Stenhouse gave him a Bible. Kendall wrote to Moore on November 19:

Mrs Stenhouse has just presented me with a Bible. Poor lady—she wants me to swallow the dogma asserting its plenary inspiration. I cannot see it. Setting aside the grand poetry of the “prophets”, the magnificent myth of Elijah, the fine oriental wisdom of the Proverbs, and the sublime code of ethics laid down in the Gospels, it is about the most disappointing book I have ever read.

Nonetheless he seems to have read it carefully; annotated by Kendall, it is preserved in the National Library of Australia (NLA MS 2189).[26] Possibly he was provoking Moore, who for a while had been a Benedictine monk and headmaster of Lyndhurst College in Glebe, leaving the order in 1856 and marrying in 1857.

Kendall’s repeated protestations that he was finished with the literary life were not true. He had begun writing again—indeed, he may never have stopped. Michael Ackland suggests that Kendall was contributing prose paragraphs to the “Sydney Town Talk” feature of the Town and Country Journal through 1873 and 1874, and offers some tentative identifications of these anonymous pieces.[27] Kendall’s first known poem to appear in the Journal, on April 25, 1874, was “Rover”, a long and gentle tribute to “one-eyed Rover. A grave old dog, with tattered ears”. The setting is unspecific, but it is certainly not urban; he has left that world. It could well be the Fagans’ household, with its guns, dogs, horses, cat and kittens, cattle and forest prowlers. It is probably the first of his poems written there, six months after his arrival in Gosford.[28]

“The Song of the Shingle Splitters” followed in the Journal on May 2:

In the dark wild woods, where the lone owl broods

And the dingoes nightly yell—

Where the curlew’s cry goes floating by,

We splitters of shingles dwell.

Significantly it shows Kendall drawing on the materials of his current life in the Fagans’ timber business. The Fagans’ cottage is still roofed with shingles, and some of the original shingles are still in place. The poem is a mark of respect for the world of hard, manual labour, so different from the upper-middle-class milieu of Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and the Yorick Club that he had known in Melbourne.[29]

He went on to write other tributes to manual workers—“Bill the Bullock Driver” published in the Town and Country Journal on January 1, 1876, and “Jim the Splitter” in the Freeman’s Journal on February 21, 1880, which he collected in his last book, Songs from the Mountains (1880) together with two further bush portraits, “Bob” and “Billy Vickers”. These have a more sardonic view of bush characters in all their contradictions, perhaps as a result of dealing with them later every day at the Fagans’ Camden Haven branch. As he wrote to N. Walter Swan on October 16, 1880, “My duty is to look after from 100 to 150 sawyers and splitters—great roughs with huge faithless faces, in whose eyes I am a rogue and blank dog, as all employers are”.[30] “The Song of the Shingle-Splitters” was not collected in Songs from the Mountains.

The isolation of the splitters in the dark woods has an obvious parallel with Kendall’s own emotional and psychological situation. Their distance from urban temptations is something he now shares with them: “away from din, and sorrow and sin / Where troubles but rarely come.”

And Kendall’s assertion—“Our food is rough, but we have enough; / Our drink is better than wine”—may indicate a new attempt at programming abstemiousness. Something that was not yet present in “Rover” where, the poet recorded, “I sip my nightly grog.”

On July 4, 1874, he published “The Voice in the Wild Oak” in the Town and Country Journal. The title is annotated, “Written in the shadow of 1872”, the year of homelessness and alcoholism before he came to Gosford. It begins with regrets for “twelve wasted years”:

But I, who am that perished soul

Have wasted so these powers of mine

That I can never write that whole,

Pure, perfect speech of thine.

The song of the wild oak “when high thunder smites the hill / And hunts the wild dog to his den” is a song that Kendall celebrates:

Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill

And shriek from glen to glen,

As if a frightful memory whipped

Thy soul for some infernal crime.

The admission report for Kendall at Gladesville asylum noted: “He imagines that he was accused of murdering a child.”[31] The death of his daughter Araluen in Melbourne in 1870 haunted him with feelings of guilty responsibility. He wrote to Holdsworth on July 14, 1874: “As regards the tone of the Native Oak, I cannot help it. You know something of my personal history … As to my complaints about the waning of power, I have good reason to make them. The old Passion is past kindling now.”[32] The poem provoked a couple of poetic responses in the Journal from Charlton Park and Sheridan Moore.[33]

The sadness and guilt and despair his poems expressed were deep-seated. But the physical environment began to work a healing process. “Arcadia at our Gates”, a two-part prose article published in the Town and Country Journal on February 27 and March 6, 1875, was an enthusiastic, glowing account of the beauties of the Gosford region, unknown to most people:

About six miles to the west or southwest of Narrara lies the darkly magnificent valley of Mooni Mooni. Shut in by immense beetling hills from half the morning, hiding an April in the hottest days of December, and cooling the eye with a blessing of brooks when the tops of the ridges are dead for want of rain, this beautiful Goshen is still left to those primitive types, the sawyer and shingle-splitter—and to a few of these only.

And he goes on to celebrate “the bold promontory of Barrenjoey … the magnificent opening of Pittwater … the gleaming crescent of sand known as Ettalong beach … the quiet hill-folded waters of Woy Woy, from whose margins the ridges run back in magnificent buttresses towards the ‘lone home of the echoes’, Mooni Creek …”

It is an account not without its horror. The massacre of the original indigenous inhabitants is not glossed over:

the military displayed great barbarity. In the middle of the night, camp after camp was surprised, and the occupants, men, women and children, shot down, like native dogs. The poor friendly blacks fare no better than the others; and the whole affair was a horrible satire upon our civilization.[34]

He seems to have found peace in this Central Coast Arcadia. And he was anxious not to have it disturbed. On May 19, 1875, he wrote to Sheridan Moore:

I write to you chiefly to beg that you will not divulge my whereabouts to any one of my relatives. I don’t want to have anything to do with either the Rutter or the Kendall mob. I am as tired of one family as I am of the other.

I have to thank you for your kind effort to obtain literary work for me; and to say that such kindness is only natural to you. But I do not need employment of the kind—I can do without it. Literature has been so long my crutch that I don’t think I shall ever use it as a walking stick. If my relatives leave me alone, things will run smoothly enough.

When I saw you last, I had for the first time during the last nineteen months taken a glass or two too much. Since then I have not touched anything stronger than water.[35]

Other poems evoking Kendall’s Central Coast environment in 1874-75 were not published until after he had left the district. Possibly they were written after Kendall went to work as accountant and paymaster for the new branch of the Fagans’ timber business in Camden Haven in July 1875. “Mooni”, published in the Town and Country Journal on December 11, 1875, opens with a cheerful note, recalling Robert Browning’s “Oh, to be in England now that April’s there”, from “Home Thoughts From Abroad”. But it carries the superscription, “written in the shadow of 1872”, and soon turns to a dark menace:

Ah, to be by Mooni now!

          Where the great dark hills of wonder,

          Scarred with storm and cleft asunder

          By the strong sword of the thunder,

          Make a night on morning’s brow!

The shadow of 1872 is there in the regrets he expresses for the past when “the life of inspiration / Like a god’s transfiguration, / Was the shining change in me”, the time before his creative energies had been wasted away. It is, as A.C.W. Mitchell writes, “his lament for lost innocence, his nostalgia for the days when he was ‘the shining sharer / Of that larger life, and rarer / Beauty’.”[36] But Mooni offers hope and regeneration:

Still to be by Mooni cool—

          Where the water-blossoms glister …

 

          Just to rest beyond the burning

          Outer world—its sneers and spurning—

          Ah! my heart—my heart is yearning

          Still to be by Mooni cool.

One of the most famous of Kendall’s poems relating to his Gosford period, “Names upon a Stone” appeared in the Town and Country Journal on March 2, 1878, “inscribed to G.L. Fagan Esq.”

          I see the river of my dream

          Four wasted years ago.

 

          Narrara of the waterfalls,

          The darling of the hills,

          Whose home is under mountain walls

          By many-luted rills!

          Her bright green nooks and channels cool

          I never more may see;

          But, ah! the Past was beautiful—

                   The sights that used to be.

On Christmas Day 1874 the Fagan brothers had walked with Kendall up the valley and sat by “the rock pool in the glen”. Before leaving they chipped their initials on the stone. The carved initials are still visible to this day.[37] Joseph Fagan recalled the episode in 1931 on the occasion of the unveiling of the stone pillar beside the old Pacific Highway (now the Central Coast Highway) on which a verse of the poem is inscribed:

There was a rock-pool in a glen

          Beyond Narrara’s sands;

          The mountains shut it in from men

          In flowerful fairy lands;

          But once we found its dwelling place—

          The lovely and the lone—

          And, in a dream, I stooped to trace

          Our names upon a stone.

It is one of his most successful poems. As A.D. Hope remarked of it, “Kendall should receive due credit, I think, for having won his way through to this refreshing simplicity, from the lush, rather gushing romantic baroque lyric style with which he started.”[38]

The celebration of natural beauty, the waterfall, the rock-pool, the moss evoke a light, delicate scene. But beneath it is the sadder note, the lament for Peter Fagan senior, who had died in 1876:

A beauty like the light of song

          Is in my dreams, that show

          The grand old man who lived so long

          As spotless as the snow.

          A fitting garland for the dead

          I cannot compass yet;

          But many things he did and said

          I never will forget.

A month after publishing “Names upon a Stone”, Kendall drew on his memories of the Central Coast again for a prose account of a trip “Overland from Gosford to Sydney” published in the Town and Country Journal under the pseudonym “Tiresias” on April 28, 1878.[39] Suitably prepared with “prime Jamaica” rum, the anonymous narrator sets out “contented—ay, even happy. Those rugged Mooni Hills lying back there to the south and west of the Gosford waters never echoed more jolly songs than mine were on that eventful night.” But having drained his flask, he finds “the ‘mere dip in the hills’” transformed into “what appeared to be a yawning Gehenna … Into the abyss I went, down, down, a ‘thousand fathoms down’ … At last we reached the bottom, and went, headfirst, into a great creek …”

At this point he encounters a certain Billy Burton, and they drain the bottle of rum the narrator was entrusted to deliver to Bloffins. “I went along singing gaily—a very king of the forest … and hence we threaded the long Mooni ravine without tumbling into its dumb, deep waters. At last we came to the ford facing the wall of hill known as ‘Dublin Jack’s’” where he “slithered” off the horse’s back.

How the dreary thirteen miles between Dublin Jack and Peat’s Ferry were got over, it is beyond my power to tell. Towards morning the moon arose on a landscape cloaked in wet gleaming mist—a deep decided vapour which every now and then, I took to be the Hawkesbury … I staggered along the stony peninsula which divides the fine gloom of the deep-seated Mooni waters from the bright liberal lustre shed out by the parent stream.

And then he bumps in Bloffins who “quickly led me to his comfortable little home, and seated me in front of a two gallon keg. What more could a reasonable man desire? I stayed a week in that beautifully-situated cottage back there by the junction of the Mooni and the Hawkesbury …”

It is a comic piece and the events may or may not be true. But in it Kendall pays tribute to the district he had lived in and recovered in. “I cannot help mentioning the magnificent scenery of the Hawkesbury Islands and that of the Mooni Valley. The latter has all the effects produced by contrast and combination—it is at once one of the grandest and most beautiful spectacles in Australia.” And he concludes with a blatant plea on behalf of the Fagans’ mail run—under threat by the proposal to carry the mails by sea.

The celebration of alcoholic excess in this piece is in contradiction to his frequent insistence in his letters on his sobriety while recovering at Gosford. But restored to health and reunited with his family at Camden Haven (which was renamed Kendall in 1891), he had the occasional drink. In Henry Kendall: His Later Years Frederick Kendall recalled this period:

I remember the wine shop, conducted by a Mrs Logan and her two daughters, where from a stock of “Colonial wines” they catered for the undiscriminating palates of local rustics. When my father in one of his darker moods would adjourn to this resort it was only after the remonstrances and pleadings of his wife had failed to restrain him … Such spasms were, however, not frequent. They would be followed by perhaps excited talk, then sleep and an ashamed awakening.

A small room of the Logans’ wine shop was used as a post office between 1876 and 1881. The post office was closed on January 1, 1881, after a request from Henry Kendall, who objected to the wine shanty being part of the building from which it operated. The 2012 Kendall Community Centre brochure Kendall records that Henry “used his penmanship to write to the Post Master General lending support to the villagers’ request for a post office”. The post office then found a home in the Fagans’ new general store, with Michael Fagan as postmaster. Fagan received £5 per annum as postmaster and £79 per annum for operating the mail pick-up and delivery service for the Camden Haven area. Kendall’s intervention probably has more to do with helping the Fagans to get the mail contract than with any abstemious objection to the post office being in the wine shop. On the day the post office left the wine shop, Kendall himself moved to Cundletown to prepare to take up the position of Inspector of State Forests, arranged for him by Henry Parkes, a position for which his work in the Fagans’ timber business had qualified him.[40]

Kendall’s drinking was not something of which the Fagans were unaware. A.G. Stephens recorded in his Bulletin diary on May 20, 1896:

Holdsworth told several Kendall anecdotes: Once Holdsworth called to see Kendall at house of P.F. Fagan in Sydney (whose name appears in inscription to Kendall’s collected poems, George Robertson & Co., 1886). Found him in charge of servant—practical prisoner. Kendall wanted 1/–. Holdsworth gave him 2/6. Kendall eluded servant, Holdsworth followed him to three pubs—a drink in each—brought him home “absolutely flaccid”.

Again, at Camden Haven, N.S.W.—riding party. Kendall went forward on some errand—two or three miles further on Fagan stopped party (which included Mrs Kendall): “I’ll go forward and shift that log out of the way.” The log was Kendall, who had imbibed freely of roadside rum.[41]

The month after “Overland from Gosford to Sydney” appeared, Kendall published “Narrara Creek” in Sydney Once a Week on May 18, 1878. It was a creek he had known well. Joseph Fagan wrote to Frederick Kendall in the 1920s: “He would not wait for two minutes for the boat that was on the opposite side of Narrara Creek, Gosford, when he wanted to cross. You would hear a dive in and the boat would soon be over. He was a good swimmer.”[42]

Narrara! grand son of the haughty hill torrent,

          Too late in my day have I looked at thy current—

          Too late in my life to discern and inherit

          The soul of thy beauty, the joy of thy spirit!

The poem expresses his regrets at the way his life has turned out:

What life the gods gave me—what largess I tasted—

          The youth thrown away, and the faculties wasted,

          I might, as thou seest, have stood in high places,

          Instead of in pits where the brand of disgrace is,

          A byword for scoffers …

The force and splendour of the rushing water, the energy and drive serve as a huge contrast with Kendall’s own depleted energies:

But the face of thy river—the torrented power

          That smites at the rock while it fosters the flower—

          Shall gleam in my dreams with the summer-look splendid,

          And the beauty of woodlands and waterfalls blended;

          And often I’ll think of far-forested noises,

          And the emphasis deep of grand sea-going voices,

          And turn to Narrara the eyes of a lover,

                  When the sorrowful days of my singing are over.

There is some suggestion that the poem may have been written in 1874.[43] Certainly the despair at his wasted opportunities and the prediction of the end of his singing days would fit in with his mood during that period.

But there was always an undercurrent of despair and sadness in Kendall’s poetry. It is particularly apparent in “Cooranbean”, published in the Town and Country Journal on January 11, 1879.[44] It is a bleak, dark poem:

          The brand of black devil is there—an evil wind mooneth around—

                   There is doom, there is death in the air: a curse groweth up from the ground!

Cooranbean was the name Peter Fagan gave to his cottage. The poem evokes the 1865 tragedy when Peter Fagan accidentally poisoned his wife, his wife’s sister and his daughter with strychnine, given in mistake for quinine.[45]

A furlong of fetid, black fen, with gelid green patches of pond,

          Lies dumb by the horns of the glen—at the gates of the horror beyond.

There is no doubt that the time at Gosford enabled Kendall to recover from the urban torments of Melbourne and Sydney. In Henry Kendall: His Later Years Kendall’s son Frederick quotes Henry’s tribute to the Fagans: “these gentlemen, who worked so hard on my behalf, put up with so much for my sake, and endured so patiently my peculiarities, can never be compensated—never be forgotten.”[46] On October 21, 1880, he wrote a note of introduction to Marcus Clarke for Michael Fagan, who ran the Camden Haven branch of the family timber business, and was visiting Melbourne: “I want you to know the bearer. He is the man who led me out of Gethsemane and set me in the sunshine.” But Clarke was too ill to see him.[47] When the poems written at and after his stay at Gosford were collected in Songs from the Mountains in 1880 he inscribed a copy: “I give this book to Peter Fagan, one of three noble brothers who led me out of Gethsemane. Henry Kendall. 4th May 1881.”[48]

Kendall always recalled his eighteen months at Gosford positively, happy with the friendship of the Fagans, and happy at his own recovery of responsibility in his life.[49] A.G. Wise records in “Round and About Gosford” that Charles Fagan wrote to Kendall with a request on June 29, 1875:

to frame petitions for a road from Gosford to Narara Ferry, and for an annual grant for the repairs required on the Gosford to Possum Creek Road. Kendall endorsed the note as follows: This is from Mr Fagan, the magistrate with whom I lived at Gosford. The Joe and William he mentions are his brothers. They are all noble fellows. It was I who brought about the establishment of a post office here [Gosford]. I also wrote the petitions which led to the deepening of Brisbane Water, and two annual grants for the roads. Before I left Gosford the inhabitants presented me with a watch, etc. I only mention these facts to show that I must have been behaving myself properly while I was in the specified district.[50]

Kendall’s arrival in Gosford is one of the most significant events of his life. Indeed, it saved his life, restoring him to health, providing him with paid employment, and inspiring him to resume writing poetry, which he continued to do for a further nine productive years. And George Fagan was there at the end.[51] Frederick Kendall recounts how Kendall’s position as Inspector of State Forests turned out to be gruelling:

The work was really too much for him and he fell ill and had to fall back on Sydney in April, 1882. My mother rushed down from Cundle to nurse him, but he pluckily recovered and faced another winter journey, this time accompanied by George Fagan, an old friend, for whose expenses my mother arranged. This gentleman left him at Waroo, on the Lachlan, in May, apparently in fair health, but my father, through travelling in wet clothes, contracted a severe chill and returned to Wagga on the 5th of June. He collapsed there and sent a wire to Sydney for help. George Fagan found him and brought him to Sydney, where, on the 14th of June, he entered St Vincent’s hospital. Here my mother, hastily summoned from her family at Cundle, tended him and shared his private ward for five weeks.

Kendall was then taken to the Fagans’ house at 137 Bourke Street, Redfern, where he died on August 1, 1882.[52] [53]

Michael Wilding is the author of Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall: A Documentary (2014). His most recent books are the novel In the Valley of the Weed and the memoir Growing Wild, both published last year by Arcadia.