Grace CarmichaelPrint Page

The relief portrait commemorates Grace Carmichael, poet, who was born in Ballarat in 1868. At 20 she left home to earn her own living, first as a lady`s companion and then as a trainee nurse at the Hospital for Sick Children in Melbourne.

Her book, Hospital Children, a distilled, sympathetic account of her experiences there, was published in 1891. In 1890 Grace worked as a private nurse near Geelong, and her writing was published as Poems in Melbourne and London in 1895. In the early 1890s she was a member of the Austral Salon, and in September 1895 gave a well-publicized lecture on `The Spirit of the Bush`, with Alfred Deakin in the chair.

After her marriage she moved to England and continued sending verse to the Australasian. She and her husband lived in poverty and she died in a workhouse in 1904. Her three surviving sons lived in the Northampton workhouse until a group of her admirers in Victoria discovered their whereabouts; an appeal was launched, and in 1910 they were brought to Victoria, and reared in private homes, taking the name Carmichael. That year a small selection of her poems was published in Melbourne.

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