AustLit

George Wright arrived in Melbourne as a bounty immigrant at the age of nineteen. He worked as a bricklayer, jeweller and architectural draughtsman before moving to Geelong in 1842. There he became a stock inspector for Foster Fyans and built a reputation as a notable public speaker in the 1840s before entering politics as a councillor in 1854 and alderman in 1857.

In addition to the selected work, Wattle Blossoms (1857), Wright published a poetry broadsheet Ye Melancholie Storie of Maister Timothy Brown... (1851). In the same year as this latter work, Nathaniel Lipscomb Kentish (q.v.) printed in broadsheets two commemorative anthems. Miller notes that 'if we omit the supplement of the Port Phillip Herald (1846)', either the poem by Wright, or one of the 'anthems by Kentish, is the first recorded separate publication of original verse by a Victorian author, issued in Victoria'.