Australian Poetry
Our Mother, Stella Bell, along with our Father and our family lived for 22 years in the Australian bush and in that time she wrote some amazing Australian poetry and stories.
Our Mother died in 2007 and in the last few weeks of her life asked us if we would take all her poetry and stories and do something with them. It wasn't untill we got the large box (that was filled with her writings) home that we discovered some years before she had actually turned down an offer from an English publisher to have some of her writings published. Why she refused this offer we will never know, but we decided then to do it ourselves and as we love Australia and our Mother we decided to combine the two in this website.
Our Mother loved a lot of different styles of poetry and some of her favourite and our favourite poems are by famous Australian
poets and are very well known to most Australians.
She loved "My Country" by Dorothea Mackellar and "The Last of His Tribe" by Henry Kendall as well as numerous poems by A.B. (Banjo) Paterson, including "The Man from Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow". Our Mothers love of poetry was not restricted to Australian poetry, she loved many writings including "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", as well as many others, she could recite from beginning to end and she could still do so in her later years - a wonderful memory which showed her great love of verse. I can remember sitting at her feet on the floor in our lounge and listening to her read or recite many wonderful poems to us some of which were her own compositions. Just click on the links below to go to the different poems our Mother wrote and we hope you enjoy them. Our Mother wrote some absolutely inspiring and amazing poetry and this Earth Poem called "in the beginning" (in my opinion) is one of the most wonderful pieces of poetry ever written. Our Mother loved to sit and watch the ants at work building their nests and carrying food to and fro. Her Ant Poem is all about the busy ants. In the bush dust gets into everything. The Dust Bowl Poem is about the nightmare that is dust and the never ending battle to keep the house clean. The Pub Poem is all about the Family Hotel in Tibooburra, the publican at the time Mother wrote this poem was a man named Barney. Our Mother always had great admiration for Indigenous Australians and it shows in this wonderful Australian poem called "Man of this Land". In a lot of ways our Mother was a woman ahead of her time, as shown in her Prejudice Poem. She could never understand why people always seemed to look at their differences instead of their similarities. Return from Australian Poetry to home page
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