Bernard O`DowdPrint Page

The relief portrait and tablet commemorates the poet Bernard O`Dowd who was educated in Ballarat.

O`Dowd was a poet, radical and parliamentary draughtsman.  On 2 October 1897, O`Dowd and two colleagues published the first number of a radical weekly, the Tocsin, associated with the United Labor Party. In this paper he wrote a regular column as `Gavah the Blacksmith`. At the time of Federation he posed the question, `Does Australia have a soul?`

His 1902 Tocsin pamphlet, Conscience and Democracy, was at once opposed to the South African War and expressive of a fear of mob rule, an anxiety which always played a part in his `Young Democracy`. In 1912 he denounced the White Australia policy as `unbrotherly, undemocratic and unscientific`. In 1913 O`Dowd was president of the Victorian Rationalist Association.

During his latter years, although he had virtually ceased writing poetry, O`Dowd was very much the visible poet, addressing meetings, writing verses for public occasions . In 1952 he broke a long poetic silence by producing two poems for the centenary of Australian Unitarianism. One of them included the hope `That we shall see our dream of Oneness realized`.

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