Chapter Seven
183 CHAPTER SEVEN SHAPING NEW WORLDS WITH OLD IMAGES When John Richardson bought John Moores store and flour mill and moved to Armidale in 1872, he brought with him his wife, twenty years younger than he, and a young family consisting of seven surviving children. His eldest son, Robert, was 22 years of age. Although other sons would choose to join their father in his retailing business, Robert turned to writing childrens books, most of which were published in London and Edinburgh where he lived through the 1880s and early 1890s. His career was blighted by a lack of talent. Nonetheless an independent income kept that harsh reality at bay. But he was not so lacking in ability that he failed to see his own limitations. By the time he wrote Ad Musam, a poem which served as his obituary in the Bulletin, he was resigned to his critics opinions and addressed the Greek muse of poetry somewhat bitterly: Yet others get the gift and win thy love; They get the gift while I but stand and wait; They enter calmly through the enchanted gate That leads unto the mystic Dellian hill . And I but linger in the valleys chill, With timid groping feet, and as I pass Gather some withering leaves of wayside grass, And hear through the hushed twilight faintly falling The voices of my happier brothers calling, And watch afar with aching, dazzled eyes, Clear peaks that climb into the lucent skies By shining paths my feet will neer surprise. Robert Richardson died of gastric catarrh in Armidale in 1901 aged fifty.
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