Thanks to everyone who participated in last months prompts - some great poems came from that. Different perspectives from everyone as well as one would expect.
For this months homework I have a challenge which might require you to do a bit of research - but we learn from doing that and it adds another level of knowledge to our aging brains as well, and anything that keeps them sharp has to be a good thing.
The challenge is to write a poem about the 3 Marys. Either a poem that capsulates the 3 ladies or a poem about any one in particular. Who are the 3 Marys I hear you ask? they were 3 of a limited number if Australia's only known women bushrangers. Two are Aboriginal women: Mary Cockerill (‘Black Mary’) and Mary Ann Bugg (‘Mrs Thunderbolt’), and the third was believed to have been the convict Mary Winter (née Herd)...who married the man to whom she was indentured -Robert Winter.
Mary Cockerell's story is particularly interesting - I have just finished reading a book about her. Known as Black Mary, she was a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman most likely of the Mouheneener people of Nipalunaa (Hobart). All records related to Mary only provide her English name, given to her by the colonial Cockerill family with whom she lived and worked as a young teenager.
Mary Anne Bugg was a Worimi woman and the daughter of an English convict, Mary Ann Bugg was born in 1834, the eldest of eight children. At an early age she was sent 250kms from the family home in Gloucester by her father to the Parramatta Orphan School in Sydney to prepare for life as a domestic servant.
Well I hope I have whetted your appetites - away you go my lovelies and work your magic
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