by Elizabeth Lhuede

Another in our series of posts on authors with works published in 1924.

Queensland poet Annie Elizabeth Powis Dunn was born in 1863 in Bristol, England, the second daughter of Sarah Elizabeth and Henry Jordan, a parliamentarian and public servant. Both Dunn’s grandfathers were religious, her father’s father was a Wesleyan minister, her mother’s a missionary to New Zealand. This Christian heritage is reflected in her work.

In April 1893 Annie married Hedley Allen Dunn, second son of the Hon. John Dunn, MLC, of Adelaide. In the 1880s, before her marriage, she published a novella, True till Death, and a collection of poems, Autumn Leaves. In 1915 her poem “Your Country’s Call” was widely syndicated, appearing under the pen-name, “An Australian Mother”. In 1925, she published another collection, Summer Fruit, with Brisbane publishers Watson and Ferguson. She died in her mid sixties in 1936.

What we know of her life comes from an obituary printed in The telegraph (Brisbane) in April 1936, which also gives us a sense of her – mostly traditional – work.

Annie Powis Dunn…was born in England in 1863 during the time her father, the Iate Henry Jordan,was Agent-General for Queensland.

Brought out to Queensland when a little child, she spent her early life on the Logan, where Mr. Jordan had a sugar plantation (worked entirely by white labour). Through her father and mother (Elizabeth Turner) she imbibed a passionate love for poetry and good literature. She said herself that she secretly wrote many verses, which were her intimate diary. She was prevailed upon to “expose herself” in print, and in 1888 her first volume, “Autumn Leaves,” was published and was soon out of print.

Mr. H. A. Kellow, in “Queensland Poets,” pays eloquent tribute to her delicate and brave genius. After years of troubled times she published in 1925 another small volume to which Sir Matthew Nathan, wrote a preface. One of her poems, written in 1915, “Your Country’s Call.” was printed first in the New York “Independent.” and the quotation from it, “Tradition calls him, and his country’s woe,” were carried on a banner through many recruiting efforts.

To an agonising mother she says:

“With all those hopes that help to make his worth.
Crowned with your highest self, he must go forth.
Where? Why? Don’t ask. Just smother up the pain.
Give him up quickly for his country’s gain.”

Love of Nature

Her intimate and enduring love of nature is expressed in many verses. Of Sherwood, where she lived with her father for many years at Shirley, she writes: —

“The Sherwood lane!
Familiar hedge of Deccan thorn
With yellow berries. From the path adown
Glint of the river and two punts that drift,
Torn night-clouds and a light aslant the rift.”

She sang of love and hope and the concealed future of a baby’s life, always courageously, with deep faith. Sir Matthew sums up her poems of 1925 thus:

“This is a little book of few poems, but in them are great thoughts and much melody. They are of Queensland, but also of the world and the spaces beyond it. . . They breathe rare moods, but teach that the path of contentment and blessing is found among common place things. They tell of prayer and of the voices of children, of courage and of sacrifice, of friendship and of love, of the reality of what might have been and of the lastingness of what has been. They are good to read.”

Mrs. Dunn leaves two sons — Cedric Dunn, married, with two children, and Noel H. Dunn. One of her brothers, Mr. Tom Jordan, survives her.

The poem below, “Bird’s Song (For My Baby Child)”, was published in 1924, and is very different in tone from the traditional poems published in Autumn Leaves, the collection from her youth. Given the subtitle and the fact that Dunn herself was over fifty when it appeared, I’m guessing it could be a memorial poem to a child of hers who died in infancy, and with whom she hopes to be reunited in heaven. Whatever inspired it, I think it’s worth remembering.

The Bird’s Song
(For My Baby Child.)

A little bird sat on a tree,
A-singing to his mate and me.
Wind came on and drenching rain,
But little birdie sang again.

But as he piped, so sweet and long,
A weary pain grew in his song.
His mate had flown, his throat felt sore.
When night came down he sang no more.

At morning time I went to see.
He’d tumbled down under the tree,
Was fast asleep, poor tired thing.
His wee head tucked beneath his wing.

I covered him most tenderly,
He’s still asleep. It seems to me,
Some other day, when there’s no pain,
That little bird will sing again.

— A. A. Morrison, ‘Jordan, Henry (1818–1890)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/jordan-henry-3871/text6163, published first in hard copy 1972, accessed online 4 August 2024.
— Dunn, Annie Powis, “The Bird’s Song”, Brisbane Courier, 19 June 1924: 12.
— “Social Notes”, The Australasian, 15 Apr 1893: 37.
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Elizabeth Lhuede has a PhD in Australian Poetry from Macquarie University. In 2012, she instigated the Australian Women Writers Challenge as a contribution to overcoming gender bias in the reviewing of works by Australian women. More recently she has focused on bringing to light the life and works of forgotten Australian women writers.