Born: 1796, Ireland
Died: 20 June 1880
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Eliza Hamilton

This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Angela Byrne. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.

Hamilton Dunlop, Eliza Matilda (née Hamilton; ‘E. H. D.’; ‘Evelina’; ‘Evelina Matilda’; ‘Eliza Matilda’; other married name Law) (c. 1796–1880), poet, was born c. 1796 in Co. Down (some sources suggest she was born in Co. Armagh). She was the only daughter and youngest of three children of Solomon Hamilton (1753–1820), barrister, and Martha Hamilton (née Costly, d. c. 1796). Her siblings were Augustus Frederick Hamilton, attorney, (c. 1788–1871) and George Bedford Washington Hamilton, attorney (c. 1795–1857).

Early life
Hamilton Dunlop’s mother died shortly after her birth and she was raised by her paternal grandmother, Mary Hamilton (née Speer). Her father acquired significant landholdings in Ulster in the 1790s, including Fort Hamilton at Killowen, Co. Down, overlooking Carlingford Lough. It was here that young Eliza – left behind when her father moved with her brothers to Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, on his appointment as advocate of the supreme court – lived in the care of her grandmother until the latter’s death in 1807/8. She later described her early years as a time of ‘perfect happiness. I was loved, my genius was extolled and I was taught to expect a Father’s return who would love me too’ (de Salis, 16).

Eliza thrived in the cultured, literary world that the wider Hamilton family inhabited; it is possible that she met Maria Edgeworth during the latter’s visit to Fort Hamilton in 1807. Self-described as having possessed an ‘early spirit of research’, she showed early intellectual and literary promise (de Salis, 15). Her father’s library provided a refuge from her grandmother’s insistence that she focus on bible study and needlework. By the age of twelve she had read the enlightenment giants Voltaire and Rousseau, the accounts of James Cook and comte de Lapérouse’s expeditions and, likely, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her juvenile notebook contains a translation – probably her own – of Montesquieu’s The temple of Gnide (1724). She composed original topographical, historical and patriotic poems from at least 1810, signing herself in her notebooks as ‘Evelina’, ‘Evelina Matilda’ or ‘Eliza Matilda’. (Anna Johnston suggests this was in homage to Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), a character with whom Eliza may have identified for the shared lack of a consistent parent/guardian presence in early life.) By 1820 she had published – either pseudonymously or under initials – in magazines including the Dublin Penny Journal, Belfast Magazine and Bengal Hurkura. In 1814 a collection of historical poems titled ‘Ultonia’ was advertised as in press under her name, but it seems to have never been published. On 28 April 1818 a verse prologue she composed was read at a benefit concert organised by the Belfast Anacreontic Society for the then-elderly harper Patrick Carolan. Later, some of her songs were published in her cousin William Hamilton Maxwell’s novel The dark lady of Doona (1833/4); she maintained a lifelong correspondence with him.

Her precocity (and the apparent absence of any dedicated guardian following her grandmother’s death) led her into the arms, at the age of just fourteen, of the astronomer and poet James Silvius (or Sylvus) Law. He was author of The Irish catholic: a patriotic poem (1813) and The wrongs of Ireland historically reviewed (1831). It is unclear how they met; he may have been her tutor. They were married by 1812, despite her father’s disapproval, and had two children: James Sylvius Law and Mary Sophia Georgina Law (d. 1879). Law left for New York by 1816, abandoning Eliza and their young children.

Having expressed concern for his daughter’s ‘unprotected state’ in 1815 (de Salis, 17), Solomon Hamilton finally arranged for her to travel to India in early 1820. She left her daughter Georgina in the care of family; the whereabouts of her son, James, at the time are unknown. Departing Liverpool on 18 March 1820 aboard the Lady Nugent, Hamilton Dunlop arrived in Calcutta in August to find that her father had died on 21 March, leaving her a ninth share of his estate, and that she had two Anglo-Indian half-sisters that her father had kept secret and her brothers refused to acknowledge: Charlotte (Hamilton) Bennett Cohen (c. 1801–25) and Mary (Hamilton) Barlow (born c. 1804). It is possible that this experience influenced Hamilton Dunlop’s later anti-racism and identification with Australian Aboriginal people; she was fond of her stepsisters and invited one of them to live with her in Ireland. Some impressions of India are conveyed in her poem ‘Morning on Rostrevor mountains’ (1835).

Second marriage and emigration
Returning to Ireland in 1821, two years later Hamilton Dunlop married her friend, the Co. Antrim-born bookbinder David Dunlop (1794–1863) in Portpatrick, Scotland, where local laws permitted remarriage for deserted women. They had five children: David Henry Dunlop (1824–74), later postmaster and clerk of petty sessions in New South Wales; Augusta Eliza (‘Bessie’) (Dunlop) Raine (c. 1825–98), later postmistress in Wollombi, New South Wales; Jane Wilson Dunlop (c. 1827–35); Wilhelmina Hamilton Maxwell (Dunlop) Kirk (c. 1828–1915); and Rachel Rhoda Nevin (Dunlop) Milson (c. 1829–1908), who married into a major landholding family in New South Wales.

The Dunlops’ relationship was founded on shared literary and politically progressive ideas. David’s father, Captain William Dunlop, was hanged as a rebel in 1798; Hamilton Dunlop memorialised the family history in her elegy, ‘The two graves’ (1865). The couple settled in Coleraine, where Dunlop ran a bookbinding and bookselling business and was active in The Honourable The Irish Society. They were both active in local political campaigns, including repeal of the window tax and opposing absentee landlordism.

In financial difficulty, possibly due to the decline in the Irish book trade after the act of union, the Dunlops decided to emigrate. Having sold their business, the Dunlops and their four surviving children arrived at Port Jackson, New South Wales, on 25 February 1838 after a five-month voyage aboard the Superb. Hamilton Dunlop’s daughter Georgina Law joined them later; she never married and went on to become headmistress of the first Anglican girls’ school in Australia. David Dunlop had a letter of introduction to the new governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, who had arrived in the colony just days earlier. Gipps proved a valuable contact, first appointing Dunlop police magistrate at Penrith in June 1838 and making him police magistrate and protector of Aborigines at Wollombi in November 1839. There, over 80 miles north of Sydney, the family’s substantial sandstone house, Mulla Villa, was built by a crew of convict labourers in 1841.

A poet of the dispossessed
Hamilton Dunlop’s life in Australia got off to an inauspicious start: she had the care of five children and financial worries that continued even after her husband’s appointment as police magistrate. These concerns, together with her horror at the effects of colonialism on the lives of Indigenous Australians, motivated her to continue writing and publishing. Her first publication after emigration was ‘The dream’, the first in a series of ten ‘Songs of exile’ published in The Australian between November 1838 and October 1840. These works attracted little attention, however, and she must have felt her geographical isolation keenly. She described herself in a letter to the composer Isaac Nathan in late 1841 as ‘in the Forest far from human habitation of civilized beings’ (de Salis, 101).

Wollombi offered the opportunity of close contact with Aboriginal Australians, however, and Hamilton Dunlop was curious about their languages and cultures from the start. Prompted, perhaps, by loneliness and a sense of shared dispossession, she forged good relationships with the Darkinyung, Awabakal and Wonnarua people and gained the confidence of the Aboriginal chief Boni. It was rumoured that she secretly sheltered Aboriginal women fleeing violence in her home. Acquiring a knowledge of Indigenous Australian languages, she used Aboriginal words in her poems, compiled a wordlist and collected and published songs. The first poet in Australia to transcribe and translate Indigenous Australian songs, she was one of the few people of the age to appreciate the literary value of their songs and poetry. After 1850 most of her work was on Aboriginal themes, demonstrating her immersion in Aboriginal Australian cultures.

Her sympathy for the suffering of Aboriginal people under colonialism quickly found voice: on 13 December 1838 her poem ‘The Aboriginal mother’ was published in The Australian. The piece was a visceral response to the Myall Creek massacre of 10 June 1838, in which at least twenty-eight (and possibly up to thirty-three) Wirrayaraay people (including several children, the youngest three years of age) were murdered by a group of twelve White stockmen. The poem was published just five days before seven of the perpetrators were to be hanged for their roles in the atrocity – the sentencing was hugely controversial and is believed to be the only occasion in colonial Australian history on which White people received capital sentences for the murder of Aboriginal people. Hamilton Dunlop was horrified by evidence given during the trial of decapitated bodies and children’s burnt skeletal remains, and was moved to write ‘The Aboriginal mother’ after reading about a surviving woman and baby (although the woman was not, in fact, the baby’s mother). Despite its controversial subject matter, the poem received little attention at the time of first publication.

This changed in 1841 when ‘The Aboriginal mother’ was set to music by the English composer Isaac Nathan (1792–1864), who had come to Australia at Gipps’s invitation. Hamilton Dunlop reached out to Nathan on Gipps’ recommendation, pleading: ‘My publications at home were confined to the magazines, but altered circumstances in this country where my husband had only £250 as police magistrate, induces my attempt to make my pen an aid for my numerous family. But more than this it would aid my way to future favor with the public’ (de Salis, 102). The composer responded positively and their collaboration began. Of Nathan’s seven ‘Australian and Aboriginal melodies’ published in 1842–3, Hamilton Dunlop provided the lyrics for five. The most famous of these was ‘The Aboriginal mother’, which was performed in Sydney in October 1841 and divided public opinion. Some praised the lyrics and their evocation of ‘one of the most horrible transactions that ever stained the annals of any community’ (Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser, 29 Oct. 1841). The conservative Sydney Herald, however – whose editor had defended the Myall Creek murderers – launched a campaign against Hamilton Dunlop. The poet’s published reply stated that she had hoped to ‘awaken the sympathies of the English nation for a people rendered desperate and revengeful by continued acts of outrage’ (Sydney Herald, 29 Nov. 1841).

The Sydney Herald continued its campaign against Hamilton Dunlop until August 1842, publishing hypercritical reviews of her and Nathan’s subsequent collaborations, ‘The eagle chief’, performed in Sydney in January 1842, and ‘The star of the south’. Her response to the paper’s review of ‘The star of the south’ appeared in the Sydney Herald on 30 August 1842, in which she asserted her own abilities and the understanding she had gained through her contact with Aboriginal Australians. The Sydney Herald’s attacks on Hamilton Dunlop were fuelled by colonial politics. David Dunlop’s role – ‘protector of the Aborigines’ – was established after an 1835 select committee found evidence of shocking atrocities in the colonies. This role and his association with the reformist Gipps contributed to his unpopularity with landholders and pastoralists. Furthermore, Hamilton Dunlop was a newly arrived woman in a heavily male-dominated colony who dared raise her voice in opposition to prevailing racism and abuses. A public perception that she influenced her husband’s career left both of them open to public ridicule; one letter published in the Australian Chronicle said he was ‘ruled by his wife’ (Johnston and Webby, 2021, 11). The Sydney Herald came under new ownership in 1841 and was renamed Sydney Morning Herald in 1842. It shifted thereafter to a more moderate tone and Hamilton Dunlop’s most famous transliteration – Wullati’s ‘Our home is the gibber-gunyah’ – was published by the paper on 11 October 1848; the tribe from which she had gathered the verse was extinct by 1859.

Death and legacy
David Dunlop died at Mulla Villa on 24 March 1863 (his gravestone incorrectly gives the date 1864). Hamilton Dunlop continued to live at Wollombi thereafter, weighed down by the many losses she experienced. Many of her compositions were elegies, most notably the unpublished ‘She was’ in memory of her daughter Jane, who died at the age of eight. She wrote to a friend in 1865, ‘I write with extreme difficulty not alone from my weak sight but from rheumatism in my arms and consequent tremor of my fingers’ (Johnston, ‘The poetry of the archive’, 46). Despite this, she continued to write and publish for at least another eight years. Hamilton Dunlop died at home in Mulla Villa on 20 June 1880 and was buried in the Church of England cemetery in Wollombi.

Hamilton Dunlop published a total of around sixty poems in Australian newspapers and magazines; her last, ‘Faith’, appeared in 1873. She collected seventy of her published and unpublished poems in a manuscript titled ‘The vase’, but this was never published for financial reasons. Her poem ‘The Irish mother’ was anthologised, albeit uncredited, in Charles Gavan Duffy’s hugely popular The ballad poetry of Ireland (first published in 1845 and running to forty editions). Despite her not inconsiderable output and its political relevance, Hamilton Dunlop was quickly forgotten after her death, probably because no collected volume of her work was published in her lifetime. The Australian literary critic Elizabeth Webby (1942–2023) recovered Hamilton Dunlop’s work in the 1960s and collected her poems for the first time in 1981. Hamilton Dunlop was a person of deep conscience and humanistic outlook – fostered in the republican milieu in which she spent her childhood and young adulthood – who drew on her knowledge and personal experiences of empire and emigration to elucidate the abuses and violence inherent in imperialism worldwide. Her work challenged negative stereotypes of Aboriginal people and she is remembered by twenty-first century literary critics as ‘the possessor of an uncommon degree of moral courage, one of a handful of women willing to confront the bigotry of her age’ (Wu, 2014, 888).

Hamilton Dunlop’s papers (including drafts of poems, juvenile notebooks and an Aboriginal wordlist) are among the Milson family papers in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), ML MSS 7683, 7948, 9409; book-length manuscripts are in the same repository at A1688. An undated portrait (oil) is held at Wollombi Endeavour Museum, New South Wales, Australia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hidden women of history: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop — the Irish Australian poet who shone a light on colonial violence

Anna Johnston, The University of Queensland

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s poem The Aboriginal Mother was published in The Australian on December 13, 1838, five days before seven men were hanged for their part in the Myall Creek massacre.

About 28 Wirrayaraay people died in the massacre near Inverell in northern New South Wales. Dunlop had arrived in Sydney in February, and the Irish writer was horrified by the violence she read about in the newspapers.

Moved by evidence in court about an Indigenous woman and baby who survived the massacre, Dunlop crafted a poem condemning settlers who professed Christianity but murdered and conspired to cover up their crime. It read, in part:

Now, hush thee—or the pale-faced men
Will hear thy piercing wail,
And what would then thy mother’s tears
Or feeble strength avail!

Oh, could’st thy little bosom
That mother’s torture feel,

Or could’st thou know thy father lies
Struck down by English steel

The poem closed evoking the body of “my slaughter’d boy … To tell—to tell of the gloomy ridge; and the stockmen’s human fire”.

The graphic content depicting settler violence and First Nations’ suffering made Dunlop’s poem locally notorious. She didn’t shrink from the criticism she received in Australia’s colonial press, declaring she hoped the poem would awake the sympathies of the English nation for a people who were “rendered desperate and revengeful by continued acts of outrage”.

An early life as a reader

Dunlop, the youngest of three children, was born Eliza Matilda Hamilton in 1796. Her father, Solomon Hamilton, was an attorney practising in Ireland, England and India. Her mother died soon after Dunlop’s birth, and she was brought up by her paternal grandmother.

Part of a privileged Protestant family with an excellent library, Dunlop grew up reading writers from the French Revolution and social reformers such as Mary Wollstonecraft.

In her teens, Dunlop published poems in local magazines. An unpublished volume of her original poetry, translations and illustrations written between 1808 and 1813 reveals her fascination with Irish mythology and European literature. She was deeply interested in the Irish language and in political campaigns to extend suffrage and education to Catholics.

In 1820, she travelled to India to visit her father and two brothers. The journey inspired poems about colonial locations — from the Cape Colony (now South Africa) to the Ganges River — that explored the reach and impact of the British Empire.

In Scotland in 1823, she married book binder and seller David Dunlop. David’s family history inspired poems such as her dual eulogy, The Two Graves (1865), about the bloody suppression of Protestant radicals in the 1798 Rebellion, during which David’s father Captain William Dunlop had been hanged.

The Dunlops had five children in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, where they were engaged in political activity seeking to unseat absentee English landlords, before leaving Ireland in 1837.

Settler poetry and politics

When The Aboriginal Mother was published as sheet music in 1842, set to music by the composer Isaac Nathan, he declared “it ought to be on the pianoforte of every lady in the colony”.

Dunlop often wrote about the Irish diaspora in poems which were alternatively nostalgic and political. But she also brought her knowledge of the violence and divisiveness of colonisation, religion and ethnicity to her writing on Australia.

Her optimistic vision for Australian poetry encouraged colonial readers to be attentive to their environment and to recognise Indigenous culture. This reputation for sympathising with Indigenous people — and her husband’s arguments with settlers in Penrith about the treatment of Catholic convicts — were widely criticised in the press.

This affected David’s career as police magistrate and Aboriginal Protector: he was soon moved to a remote location. There, too, local landholders campaigned against his appointment and undermined his authority.

Indigenous languages

When David was posted to Wollombi in the Upper Hunter Valley, Dunlop sought to expand her knowledge of Indigenous culture, engaging with Darkinyung, Awabakal and Wonnarua people who lived in the area.

She attempted to learn various languages of the region, transcribing word lists, songs and poems, and acknowledging the Indigenous people who shared their knowledge with her.

She wrote a suite of Indigenous-themed poems in the 1840s, publishing poems in newspapers such as The Eagle Chief (1843) or Native Poetry/Nung-ngnun (1848). These poems were criticised by anonymous letter writers, questioning her poetic ability, her knowledge and her choice of subject.

Some critics were frankly racist, refusing to accept the human emotions expressed by Dunlop’s Indigenous narrators.

The Sydney Herald had railed against the death sentences of the men responsible for the Myall Creek massacre, and Dunlop condemned the attitude of the paper and its correspondents. She hoped “the time was past, when the public press would lend its countenance to debase the native character, or support an attempt to shade with ridicule”.

Dunlop would publish with one outlet before shifting to another, finding different editors in the volatile colonial press who would support her.

Poetry of protest

Dunlop wrote in a sentimental form of poetry popular at the time, addressing exile, history and memory. She published around 60 poems in Australian newspapers and magazines between 1838 and 1873, but appears to have written nothing more on Indigenous themes after 1850. This popular writing also contributed to poetry of political protest, galvanising readers around causes such as transatlantic anti-slavery.

The plight of Indigenous people under British colonialism inspired many writers, including “crying mother” poems that harnessed the universal appeal of motherhood.

Dunlop’s poems The Aboriginal Mother and The Irish Mother are linked to this literary trend, but her experience of colonialism lent her poetry more authority than writers who sourced information about “exotic” cultures from imperial travel writing and voyage accounts.

In the early 1870s, Dunlop collated a selection of poetry, The Vase, but she was never able to publish. Family demands and financial constraints precluded it.

Dunlop died in 1880. Like many women of the time, her writing was neglected and forgotten, until it was rediscovered by the literary critic and editor Elizabeth Webby in the 1960s.

Webby identified Dunlop as the first Australian poet to transcribe and translate Indigenous songs, and as among the earliest to try to increase white readers’ awareness of Indigenous culture. Webby published the first collection of Dunlop’s poems in 1981.

Today, communities and linguists regularly use Dunlop’s transcripts for language reclamation projects in the Upper Hunter Valley.

Last year, 140 years after Dunlop’s death, Wanarruwa Beginner’s Guide — an introduction to one language of the Hunter River area — was published.

At the launch, language consultant Sharon Edgar-Jones (Wonnarua and Gringai) movingly recited one of the songs Dunlop transcribed: revitalising the words of the Indigenous women and men to whom Dunlop listened, when so few white Australians were listening at all.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop Writing from the Colonial Frontier, edited by Anna Johnston and Elizabeth Webby, is out now through Sydney University Press.

Anna Johnston, Associate Professor of English Literature, The University of Queensland