About Bernard O'Dowd
Bernard Patrick O'Dowd (11 April 1866 – 1 September 1953) was an Australian poet, activist, lawyer, and journalist. He worked for the Victorian colonial and state governments for almost 50 years, first as an assistant librarian at the Supreme Court in Melbourne, and later as a parliamentary draughtsman. == Life and work == Bernard O'Dowd was born in 1866 at Beaufort, Victoria, as the eldest son of Irish migrants, Bernard O'Dowd and Ann Dowell. He was a child prodigy who read Milton's Paradise Lost at age 8 and was a student at Grenville College, Ballarat. His first job, aged 17, was as head teacher at a Catholic School in Ballarat, but he was soon dismissed for heresy. He then opened up his own school in Beaufort. In 1886, at the age of 20, he moved to Melbourne, and in 1887 took up a position as an assistant librarian in the Supreme Court Library. In 1888 he published The Australasian Secular Association Lyceum Tutor which he had edited and it contained several of his poems. It also involved poems by Jane Fryer whose family were leading lights of the Melbourne Progressive Lyceum and in 1889 he married her daughter, Evangeline Mina Fryer. The O'Dowds and Jane and John Fry lived in the same house for three years in North Melbourne.
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