Poetry
The Story of Balladeädro
George Gordon McCrae · 1867
Synopsis
Balladeädro is a young woman of an Aboriginal people of western Victoria; according to John O'Leary, the poem tells of her abduction and what follows. The narrative, drawn from a local history that the wife of a former Protector of Aborigines had noted down, dwells on the organisation of the clans, the myths of the tribes, and the prohibitions governing marriage and sorcery. The Australian Dictionary of Biography says it is based on Aboriginal legends, and O'Leary sees in the heroine an idealised young girl.
Context
Printed in Melbourne in 1867 by H. T. Dwight, in thirty-one pages, the poem appeared the same year and from the same publisher as a second verse narrative on an Aboriginal subject, presented as a childhood memory. According to the State Library of New South Wales, a copy was inscribed to the editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 February 1867. AustLit counts it among the first poems written in the country on Aboriginal themes, and says of the pieces of this kind that he left that they treat these cultures with sympathy without moving beyond the theme, common in the nineteenth century, of their disappearance. John O'Leary notes that he also drew on ethnographers, George Grey and Gideon Lang.
Who it is for
A narrative poem of some thirty pages in Victorian English, with no French translation, loaded with ethnographic detail.
Prizes and reception
An early attempt, in the eyes of AustLit, to put Aboriginal subjects into verse; J. J. Healy finds it timid in the face of what it records.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.