Australia's Best Unknown Stories by Jim Haynes

Author:Jim Haynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

THE DAWN AND DUSK DREAMER

Most Australians have never heard of him, or read one line of his verse, but Victor Daley was described by Bulletin magazine owner and editor J.F. Archibald as ‘the rising poet of this country’.

Archibald included more of Daley’s verse in Bulletin anthologies than that of Henry Lawson or Banjo Paterson, or any other poet for that matter.

Victor James William Patrick Daley was born in 1858 at Navan, County Armagh, Ireland. His father had been a soldier in the Indian army. Young Victor’s grandfather told him the old Celtic tales and legends, and Daley always claimed that many of his relations were Fenian rebels and, as a child, he helped to make lead bullets for the rebels.

He was educated by the Christian Brothers but spent much of his childhood visiting ancient sites from Celtic history and daydreaming about the old legends and heroes.

After his father’s death, Victor’s mother remarried and the family moved to Plymouth in England, where Victor completed his education at a Catholic school and then became a clerk for the Great Western Railway Company.

Three years later, in 1878, he decided to migrate to South Australia where he had friends. He worked briefly in Sydney before taking up a position as a clerk in Adelaide where he also contributed writing to a newspaper called the Star.

Always a wanderer and bohemian, Daley had a desire to see New Caledonia and set out to travel there via Melbourne.

Evidently he lost all his money at the races in Melbourne and decided to stay there. He wrote about horseracing for the Carlton Advertiser and eventually joined the paper as a staff writer.

In 1881 Daley had enough money to commence his wandering once more and set out for New South Wales, where he worked on the Queanbeyan Times before moving on to Sydney. In the city he wrote for Sydney Punch and then the Bulletin which had commenced publication only a year previously.

Archibald loved Daley’s verse and wrote, in 1882, ‘We have not had more melodious and imaginative verses from an Australian writer.’

Daley’s verse was far more lyrical and sentimental than most of the verse appearing in the Bulletin and featured regularly in the magazine until the poet’s death in 1905.

Daley married Elizabeth Thompson while living in Sydney and they had six children in eight years. Four of the Daley children, two girls and two boys, survived childhood. The family also lived in Melbourne for about ten years and Daley attempted to live on his writing.

Although his freelance writings (short stories and articles as well as verse) were accepted by several newspapers and magazines, times were tough for the family. Victor Daley was, however, the first writer in Australia to live entirely on his income from writing.

In 1898 he returned to Sydney, where A.G. Stephens, at the Bulletin, had edited and helped to publish Daley’s first book of verse, At Dawn and Dusk. The book received very favourable reaction from critics and sold well. Articles written by his contemporaries in

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