Thomas Bracken
Thomas Bracken ( ~ the thirtieth December 1841 in Clonee , County Meath , Ireland ; † 16th February 1898 in Dunedin ) was a native of Ireland New Zealand poet , journalist and politician , who appeared with the 1876 poem God Defend New Zealand the text of the alongside God Save the Queen equal national anthem of New Zealand wrote. He was later a member of the House of Representatives between 1881 and 1884 and from 1886 to 1887 .
Life
Origin, emigration to Australia and beginning of the literary career
Bracken was the son of postmaster Thomas Bracken and his wife Margaret Kiernan. After his mother died in 1846 and his father died in 1852, he was orphaned at the age of eleven and was raised by an aunt for a year before he was sent to Australia in 1853 at the age of twelve to help his uncle John Kiernan, a farmer in Moonee Ponds near Melbourne . There he worked for a year and then took up a job with a pharmacist in Bendigo , Victoria .
After 18 months he moved to a farm in Colbinabbin , northeast of Bendigo, in 1856 , where he became an experienced rider and sheep shearer over the next ten years. At this time he began his writing career and published in 1867 with The Haunted Vale , his first volume of poetry.
Emigration to New Zealand, journalist and other volumes of poetry
After more than 15 years in Australia, Bracken emigrated to New Zealand in early 1869 and settled in Dunedin . There he worked briefly as a guard in the city prison, but soon became a journalist for the Otago Guardian . After his arrival in Dunedin, he continued his poetic activity, which he had begun in Victoria, and published works throughout his life in New Zealand and Australia as well as temporarily in England . The title of his first anthology, Behind the Tomb (1871), published in New Zealand, referred to his authorship of the poems that were awarded the Otago Caledonian Society Prize in 1869 and 1871. He used both the pseudonym "Paddy Murphy" and his own name and quickly gained wide fame, which was confirmed by his next collection of poems, Flowers of Free Lands (1877).
In the 1870s he founded the weekly newspaper The Saturday Advertiser with John Bathgate and Alexander Bathgate and later the weekly newspaper Time-Table and the cultural magazine The New Zealand Literary Miscellany , the first edition of which appeared on July 17, 1875. Under his editor-in-chief, the magazine quickly became successful and had a circulation of 7,000 copies. The magazine was aimed at subscribers and stimulated discussions on political, literary and social topics. It was published as a weekly supplement to the Morning Herald in 1879 and renamed The New Zealand Public Opinion, Sportsman and Saturday Advertiser in 1880 .
Under the pseudonym "Didymus" he also published Pulpit Pictures in 1876 , a book with essay excerpts by clergymen from Dunedin.
Author of God Defend New Zealand and the road to national anthem
His greatest literary achievement, however, was the poem God Defend New Zealand . On July 1, 1876, the New Zealand Saturday Advertiser published the five stanzas under the title National Hymn and announced a competition to compose a melody for the poem for a prize of 10 guineas . The twelve proposals were evaluated by three German musicians in Melbourne, who unanimously decided in favor of the draft composed by John Joseph Woods , a teacher from Lawrence , under the pseudonym "Orpheus" . The first performance was probably through an arrangement for the Dunedin Royal Artillery Band at a parade in December 1876. The first presentation of the poem with the music was at a Christmas concert in 1876 at the Queen's Theater with the troupe of Lydia Howarde .
On September 18, 1877, Bracken transferred the copyright to the poem to Woods, who undertook to publish and promote an edition of the work. This was printed in London in 1878 while a translation into Maori (Te Reo Māori) by George Edward Gray was given to Woods by TH Smith, a retired judge on the Native Land Court . Bracken had previously included the text of the poem in his collection Flowers of the free Lands .
God Defend New Zealand quickly gained public, if unofficial, recognition. At the request of Woods, the future Prime Minister Richard Seddon gave a copy to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her golden jubilee in 1887. At the outbreak of the First World War Woods transferred the copyright to the publishing house Charles Begg and Company . In the 1930s, the urging of James McDermott, chief engineer for the Department of Posts and Telecommunications, was paramount to getting the work officially recognized. The National Centennial Council recommended in December 1938 that the government adopt God Defend New Zealand as the national anthem. On May 1, 1940, some 100 years after the Waitangi Treaty, Home Secretary William Edward Parry announced the government's intention to acquire the copyrights to Bracken's lyrics and Woods' music. However, it was not until 1977 that the work was given the status of an equal national anthem alongside God Save The Queen .
Catholic, free thinker and freemason
Although Bracken came from a devout Catholic Irish family, he was exposed to religious doubts and was a free thinker and supporter of Freemasonry for many years . He stood in opposition to the introduction of religious education in state schools and, on the other hand, saw the Catholic opposition to secular education as being wrongly advised.
Nonetheless, his sympathetic connection with the Catholic Church returned in 1874 when Robert Andrew Loughnan , one of the founding directors of the Catholic weekly The New Zealand Tablet , hired him to direct share purchases in the newspaper. However, the composition of the poem "Not understood", written in 1879, later contributed to the fact that his application as editor of The New Zealand Tablet to Patrick Francis Moran , Archbishop of Sydney , was unsuccessful.
Unsuccessful candidacy and member of the House of Representatives
In 1879 Bracken ran unsuccessfully in the City of Dunedin constituency for a seat in the House of Representatives . His entry into politics came through his support for then Prime Minister George Edward Gray and his acquaintance with Robert Stout and his concern for the disadvantaged.
In 1881 he was elected a member of the House of Representatives in the Dunedin Central constituency, to which he was a member until 1884. His first speech, delivered on May 26, 1882, was a powerful criticism of the Secretary for the Native Americans, John Bryce , and the West Coast Peace Preservation Bill . He attacked the government's dealings with the Māori settlement of Parihaka , the arrest of chiefs Te Whiti and Tohu Kakahi and what he considered to be a dishonorable breach of the agreements in the Waitangi Treaty . During the legislature, he also participated in debates on local issues, speaking on the penal system, education and Catholic schools, land reforms, the eight-hour day , gambling and lottery , among others .
Marriage and election defeat
On February 1, 1883, Bracken married Helen Hester Copley, the daughter of a barrister, in St John's Church in Roslyn, a borough of Dunedin . From this marriage, the son Charles Copley Bracken was born on August 17, 1885.
In the mid-1880s he finished his work at the Advertiser and his editorial collaboration with the Morning Herald , which had begun in the early 1880s , after the newspaper attacked the then Prime Minister Robert Stout. In 1885, however, he and John Bathgate became shareholders of the newspaper, which was now called the Evening Herald . He kept this economic share until the newspaper was sold in September 1890.
In late 1883, Bracken traveled to Samoa with John Lundon, local representative of the Auckland South Sea Island Produce Company , and became an advocate of New Zealand's policy of annexation . In the parliamentary elections in 1884 he lost despite his support of the union of Otago (Otago Trades and Labor Council) and the constitutional reform movement (Constitutional Reform Movement) his deputy's mandate with only three votes to James Benn Bradshaw .
He also won the support of the Presbyterian clergyman and social reformer Rutherford Waddell , who introduced Bracken's 1884 poetry collection Lays of the Land of the Maori and Moa .
Re-election and renewed membership in the House of Representatives
After Bradshaw's death, he was re-elected to the House of Representatives in a by-election in the Dunedin Central constituency in 1886 . Committed to Irish nationalism , he delivered a passionate speech calling for support for the opposition of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to the House of Commons' draft penal law , which contained paragraphs that referred to Bracken as "a coercion of government in Ireland" ('Government coercion in Ireland'). He also spoke briefly against former Prime Minister Julius Vogel's draft law for women's suffrage (Women's Suffrage Bill) . After a session of less than seven weeks, he resigned from the House of Representatives in 1887, having previously refused to run again.
Concentration on his writing work
Then he concentrated on his writing work. His former political supporter Robert Stout penned a long historical summary to complement the short foreword to Brackens Musings in Maoriland (1890) written by George Edward Gray . A prolific poet and editor, with this book he contributed to the popular desire to have native literature of some value on the 50th anniversary of the Waitangi Treaty. Stout described him as “one whose country is Australasia, for he had lived in Victoria and New Zealand. He helps, and has helped to establish a national literature. ”('One whose country is Australasia, for he has been reared in Victoria and New Zealand. He is helping, and has helped to create a national literature'). The expensive luxury edition of Musings in Maoriland , however, also meant that he got into financial difficulties, as the book did not sell well in Australia and economic problems appeared due to the advertising tour there. These were reinforced by the sale of The Evening Herald at that time .
Dear Old Bendigo was published in 1892 , an autobiographical work about his life in Victoria. Bracken's last major work was a selection from previous volumes of poetry published in 1893 under the title Lays and lyrics: God's own country and other poems .
Death and literary impact
To alleviate the financial difficulties, Prime Minister Seddon offered him a post in the Ministry of Lands and Domestic Taxes, but he decided to take up a position as an employee in the House of Representatives in May 1894, which he had to give up at the end of 1895 for health reasons. With Tom Bracken's Annual in 1896 and 1897, he published two more editions with literary essays and returned to Dunedin, where he died on February 16, 1898 of complications from a goiter in the presence of his wife and twelve-year-old son. After his death, he was buried in the Dunedin Northern Cemetery .
Bracken's poetry was highly praised during his lifetime and at the beginning of the 20th century. He and Alfred Domett were the only New Zealand poets mentioned in the 1916 Cambridge history of English literature . The posthumously published collection of poems Not understood and other poems was published between 1905 and 1928 in eight new editions and, most recently, in four further editions between 1942 and 1956, with the title poem in particular achieving worldwide fame.
Although one collection, Ballads , was published in 1975, recent literary historians and publishers showed little interest in him and his works did not appear in any of the major anthologies of New Zealand poetry published in 1956, 1960 and 1985. His current poetic reputation is therefore based exclusively on God defend New Zealand . It is possible that this recognition was based less on Bracken's words than on Woods' easily recognizable melody. Nevertheless, Bracken's poem remains the only permanent poetic legacy.
Publications
- The Haunted Vale , 1867
- Behind the Tomb , 1871
- Pulpit Pictures , Essays, 1876
- Flowers of free Lands , 1877
- Lays of the Land of the Maori and Moa , 1884
- Musings in Maoriland , 1890
- Dear Old Bendigo , autobiography, 1892
- Lays and lyrics: God's own country and other poems , 1893
- Tom Bracken's Annual , 1896, 1897
- posthumous publications
- Not understood and other poems , 1905, last new edition 1956
- Ballads , 1975
Web links
- WS Broughton: Bracken, Thomas , in: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand , (updated October 30, 2012, accessed March 24, 2015)
- Biography in NZ History
- Short biography and poems in Poemhunter
- God Defend New Zealand by Thomas Bracken (English Lyrics) NZ National Anthem (1977) on YouTube
Individual evidence
- ^ God defend New Zealand in Poemhunter
- ↑ Not understood in Poemhunter
- ↑ Selma A. Newton / Ray Wilson: Not Understood. A Note on Thomas Bracken , in: THE NEW ZEALAND RAILWAYS MAGAZINE of November 1, 1938
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bracken, Thomas |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | New Zealand poet, journalist and politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | baptized December 30, 1841 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Clonee , County Meath , Ireland |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 16, 1898 |
| Place of death | Dunedin |