by
Clement Semmler
William
Henry (Will) Ogilvie (1869-1963), poet and journalist, was born on 21 August
1869 near Kelso, Roxburghshire, Scotland, second of eight children of George
Ogilvie and his wife Agnes Campbell, née Christie. His father's family had
managed estates in the Scottish Border country for 300 years—recently as
chamberlains to the Dukes of Buccleuch. George Ogilvie had laid out the
beautiful grounds of the family home, Holefield. William was sent as a boarder
to Kelso High School, riding his pony home and back at weekends, then went to
Fettes College, Edinburgh, where he excelled as athlete and scholar, winning
the major prize for Latin verse. In 1888 he returned to Holefield and his
father's farm.
His
love of horses and the ballads of Adam Lindsay Gordon turned his eyes to
Australia. His father agreed that 'colonial experience' would benefit him. So
in 1889 Will came to Australia with an introduction to William Scott of Belalie
station, north of Bourke, whither Ogilvie travelled from Sydney by Cobb & Co.
coach.
He
was wholly captivated by the outback and for twelve years roamed from the
Channel country of Queensland to the Coorong of South Australia.
Horse-breaking, droving, mustering and camping out on the vast plains became
the salt of life to him. As he wrote in My Life in the Open (London, 1910) the
Australian bush 'has a peculiar witchery of its own … that spell that brings
the drover and traveller back again and again to worship at the shrine of its
silent beauty; that charm that chains the true bushman to his love though half
the world lies between'.
This
love of the outback he translated almost immediately into verses and ballads
that appeared first in the Bulletin, for which he wrote most of his many
hundreds of poems, though some also were published in the Sydney Mail, the
Parkes Independent, the Australasian and the Melbourne Weekly Times.
His
verses covered every facet of bush life and every part of the outback he knew.
In his memoirs Ogilvie tells how, scribbled on the backs of letters and envelopes,
one of his ballads was written under a gum-tree between Forbes and Bogan Gate
in the intervals of flinging sticks and stones at refractory ewes; another was
written on the lignum plains of Gippsland; another at a station near Mount
Gambier. He wrote as he rode: his rhythmic lines seem to keep time to the beat
of horse-hooves, the crack of the stockwhip and the clink of snaffle-bars.
Among
his best-known poems are the often-anthologized ballad, 'The Death of Ben Hall,
'The Riding of the Rebel' and 'Fair Girls and Gray Horses', the title-piece of
his first collection (Sydney, 1898). One of his poems, 'On Morant' ('He should
have been one of the Cavaliers/Who fought in King Charles's cause') was written
for Harry 'The Breaker' Morant whom he had met in the early 1890s and with whom
he had become firm friends, each admiring the other's horsemanship.
In
1901 Ogilvie returned to Scotland where he settled back for the rest of his
life into a countryman's life, riding and hunting but continuing to write. He sent
back verses to the Bulletin certainly until 1905. Further collections of his
Australian poems were published in Sydney, Hearts of Gold and Other Verses
(1903) and The Australian and Other Verses (1916). He wrote much verse and
prose for London Punch, the Scotsman, Country Life, Spectator and the Sunday
Graphic (to which he contributed topical verses throughout World War I,
including his popularization of a British officer's comment that the Australian
soldier was 'the bravest thing God ever made'). He published eighteen books of
Scottish verse and prose including The Collected Sporting Verse of W. H.
Ogilvie (London, 1932) and The Border Poems (London, 1959).
In
1905-07 he visited Iowa State College, United States of America, as instructor
in agricultural journalism. On his return to Scotland he married on 24 June
1908, in the parish church at Jedburgh, Katherine Margaret Scott Anderson, two
of whose uncles owned a station near Broken Hill. Ogilvie enlisted in World War
I but, too old for active service, was given charge of remount depots. Survived
by his wife and a son and daughter, he died on 30 January 1963 at Ashkirk,
Selkirk, Scotland, and was cremated.
Ogilvie
is recognized as a bush balladist comparable with Gordon and 'Banjo' Paterson,
particularly with regard to horses and horsemanship. As Vance Palmer noted, he
struck a 'more lyrical note than was usually sounded by the bush poets of the
Bulletin', and H. M. Green considered that Ogilvie was a far better craftsman
than any other balladist except C. H. Souter: 'he was a poet as least as much
as a balladist'.
Ogilvie's
writing derived from the Scottish Border ballads and from them he infused a
glow of romanticism into the Australian bush. His contemporaries saw the
harsher colours, he the softer and mellower ones. There is lovemaking and
tenderness in his ballads as well as outback adventures and deeds of equestrian
derring-do: if there was drought and dust and deserts of dry bones there were,
too, pretty girls at the far-off stations and in the remote townships, and
music and dancing now and then in the woolsheds and barns. And if sentiment
sometimes overlapped his poems, it was more than compensated for by his
lyricism and sensitivity:
I
loved the wide gold glitter of the plains
Spread
out before us like a silent sea,
The
lazy lapping of the loose-held reins,
The
sense of motion and of mystery …
Select
Bibliography
W. H. Ogilvie, Saddle for a Throne, T. E. Williams compiler
(Adel, 1952)
D. Stewart, Introduction to W. H. Ogilvie, Fair Girls and
Gray Horses (Syd, 1958)
Bulletin, 4 Feb 1963
Mrs K. M. Ogilvie, biographical notes (manuscript, privately
held).
Sources:
Pages:
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