The Wind At Your Door
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''The Wind at Your Door'' (1959) is a one-poem volume by Australian poet
R. D. Fitzgerald Robert David FitzGerald III AM OBE (22 February 1902 – 24 May 1987) was an Australian poet. Biography FitzGerald was born in Hunters Hill, New South Wales, a third-generation Australian of Irish extraction, and studied science at the Univer ...
. The poem was originally published in '' The Bulletin'' on 17 December 1958, and later in this 275 copy Talkarra Press limited edition, signed by the author. It won the
Grace Leven Prize for Poetry The Grace Leven Prize for Poetry was an annual poetry award in Australia, given in the name of Grace Leven who died in 1922. It was established by William Baylebridge who "made a provision for an annual poetry prize in memory of 'my benefactress ...
in 1959.Austlit - ''The Wind at Your Door'' by R. D. Fitzgerald
/ref> The poem is based on the uprising of Irish rebel convicts at
Castle Hill, New South Wales Castle Hill is a suburb of Greater Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, located 34 kilometres north-west of the Sydney central business district and 9.5 kilometres north of Parramatta. It is within the Hills District, New South ...
in 1804. It concerns two main characters, Martin Mason surgeon, and overseer of the brutal flogging of the poet's namesake, Morris Fitzgerral.


Critical reception

''The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature'' noted that "...Fitzgerald sees the continuing problem, on both the both national and the individual level, of the Australian identity. On the general level is the problem of the nation adapting to its development from a 'jail-yard'; on the personal level is the problem of individual Australians (in this case the poet himself) adapting to both sides of their ancestry, authoritarianism and rebellion against authority."''The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature'', 2nd edition, p821


See also

* 1958 in Australian literature


Notes

The convict Morris Fitzgerral also appears in
Thomas Keneally Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and actor. He is best known for his non-fiction novel ''Schindler's Ark'', the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, wh ...
's novel ''Passenger'' (1979).


Further publications

* ''Australian Poetry 1959'' edited by Nancy Keesing (1959) * ''Australian Idiom : An Anthology of Contemporary Prose and Poetry'' edited by Harry Payne Heseltine (1963) * ''Modern Australian Verse'' edited by Douglas Stewart (1964) * ''Australian Writing Today'' edited by Charles Higham (1968) * ''The Penguin Book of Australian Verse'' edited by Harry Payne Heseltine (1972) * ''The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse'' edited by Beatrice Davis (1984) * ''Cross-Country : A Book of Australian Verse'' edited by John Barnes (1984) * ''My Country : Australian Poetry and Short Stories, Two Hundred Years'' edited by Leonie Kramer (1985) * ''The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse'' edited by Les Murray (1986) * ''Robert D. FitzGerald'' edited by Julian Croft (1987) * ''The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature'' edited by Ken L. Goodwin and Alan Lawson (1990) * ''The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse'' edited by Vincent Buckley (1991) * ''The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse'' edited by Peter Porter (1996) * ''Family Ties : Australian Poems of the Family'' edited by Jennifer Strauss (1998) * ''Australian Verse : An Oxford Anthology'' edited by John Leonard (1998) * ''The Turning Wave : Poems and Songs of Irish Australia'' edited by Colleen Burke and Vincent Woods (2001) * ''The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry'' edited by John Kinsella (2009) * ''Sixty Classic Australian Poems'' edited by Geoff Page (2009) * ''Harbour City Poems : Sydney in Verse, 1788-2008'' edited by Martin Langford (2009) * ''Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature'' edited by Nicholas Jose, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Anita Heiss, David McCooey, Peter Minter, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth Webby (2009) * ''The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry'' edited by John Leonard (2009) * ''Australian Poetry Since 1788'' edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray (2011)


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wind at Your Door, The Australian poems 1959 books 1959 poems Epic poems in English