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Biography of Bernard O'Dowd
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Bernard O'Dowd was born in Beaufort, Victoria, Australia in 1866. He was a child prodigy that read Milton's, "Paradise Lost", at age 8. He was employed as a head teacher at a Catholic School in Ballarat, but was dismissed for heresy. He opened up his own school in Beaufort. In 1886, at age 20, he moved to Melbourne where he found employment in 1887 as an Assistant - Librarian in the Supreme Court Library, working for the Victorian colonial and State government until 1935, retiring as Chief Parliamentary Draughtsman.
He joined the Melbourne Lyceum, the educational and social arm of the Australian Secular Society in 1886. In 1888, a number of anarchists associated with the A.S.A, who were members of the Melbourne Anarchist club (Australia's first anarchist group formed in 1886) were expelled from the A.S.A. O'Dowd joined the progressive Lyceum, which was made up of the anarchists Monty Miller, Upham, Brookhouse and Nicholls, as well as other radical members who had been expelled from the Melbourne Lyceum. He had become the editor of the Tetor in 1888 just before the split.
His poem "Hoist the Flag" Lyceum published in the Lyceum Tutor in 1888, outlined ideas that were very similar to anarchism. O'Dowd had become a friend of the Melbourne anarcho-communist Jack Andrews, and in 1897, O'Dowd and two others set up the radical paper Tocsin. In 1898, he was co-editor of Tocsin with Jack Andrews. He continued to be an editor, contributor and financial supporter of Tocsin until Andrews died of tuberculosis in 1903. During these six years, he published numerous radical poems, and used the pages of the Tocsin to express his opposition to Federation and The Boer War. In 1902, he issued a pamphlet "Conscience and Democracy" which opposed the Boer War.
Like Chummy Fleming who protested the opening of the first parliament in 1901, O'Dowd saw grave problems in Federation and wrote a clause by clause critique of the draft Federal Bill. He saw StateFederal rivalry as a future danger to working people. He warned of the unspecified powers given to the Governor General, which were ultimately used by Sir John Kerr, the CIA's 'Our Man in Australia', in dismissing the Whitlam Labor Government in 1975.
Between 1903 to 1921, O'Dowd turned his attention to poetry and published six poetry books. Dawnward (1903), The Silent Land (1906), Dominion of the Boundary (1907), The Seven Deadly Sins (1909), The Bush (1912) and Alma Venus (1921). His most well known pamphlet "a plea for purpose in poetry", Poetry Militant, was published in 1909. In it he asks, "Why should poetry be militant nowadays? I hear some ask Because This is an Age of Revolt and Reconstruction, because the Poet is the father and mother of wise rebellion and because he, being in touch with the Infinite, the Permanent is most potent and far-reaching stimulator of Reconstruction".
O'Dowd was married and had five sons. In 1920, he left his wife and moved in with Marie Pitt, the editor of the Victorian Socialist and also a poet. He lived with her until her death in 1948. He and Pitt became members of the Unitarian church, denied the trinity and saw the historical Jesus Christ as an anarchist.
Although O'Dowd grappled constantly with the conflict between his work for the government and his radical politics, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) "His optimism about human destiny never failed", and a few months before his death at 87, "he affirmed his almost religious belief in anarchist communism.
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Popular Poems
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Love's Substitute
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This love, that dares not warm before its flame
Our yearning hands, or from its tempting tree
Yield fruit we may consume, or let us claim
In Hymen's scroll of happy heraldry
The twining glyphs of perfect you and me --
May kindle social fires whence curls no blame,
Find gardens where no fruits forbidden be,
And mottoes weave, unsullied by a shame.
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