AustLit

Kendall had a longstanding creative connection with the Orara River, in northern New South Wales, where he spent a formative period in his youth. He wrote three different poems which had the name 'Orara' in the title: 1) 'Orara: A Tale', first published in 1865 and subsequently in a revised version as 'Orara: A Fragment'; 2) 'Orara', first published in 1879, and subsequently in Songs from the Mountains; 3) 'Orara' (a retitled and much revised version of 'The Glen of Arrawatta'), which won a Victorian Art Union prize in 1881. These are all different works, not versions of the same work. Of these three poems, the second has become the more widely known (perhaps because it appeared in Songs from the Mountains), and for most readers this would be the poem they think of as Kendall's 'Orara'.