Forty South Publishing, Hobart, 2026
Cover image Mary Wettenhall (1809-1896) by Robert Wettenhall from the author’s collection
The Mary Poems is an affecting imagining of the life and thoughts of the poet’s ancestor, Mary Burgess Wettenhall née Bussell (1809 to 1896).
This delicate collection of eight poems details key parts of Mary’s life from the leaving of her native village of Paul in Cornwall in 1835 with her husband as emigrants to Van Diemen’s Land to the author’s own voyage to England and Scotland in 2025 in search of her ancestry.
The poems are accompanied by period photographs, and are a moving expression not only of Mary’s life and feelings as imagined by her current day relative, but also of the author’s own need to uncover her past and to consider her own mortality.
Irene has drawn on some family history material in selecting key moments in Mary’s life, but it is the sympathetic touch, the fellow feeling of one woman to another, shown in her words, that lends such power to these word pictures:
Our silver polished, the trunks were packed:
Bibles and hymn books, seeds for a garden
Wordsworth and Austen, the linen
Pressed and folded with lavender,
…
I woke up on the other side of the world.
The poet takes the words far further than simply documentary poetry, into which the works could be classified. They are clear proof of Irene’s capacity to identify with her ancestor, and with the hopes and fears of this woman as her life changed so radically in the wake of her husband’s war service.
When the Royal Navy scaled down after the Napoleonic Wars, her husband was laid off on half pay and encouraged to emigrate. At the time, the prospects looked rosy, but things turned sour as economic recession hit in the 1840s.
Irene refers us to the words of Jordie Albiston:
One must allow oneself to be moved, to feel the breath, to see the most trivial moments as moments in a life.
And this is indeed what Irene does so beautifully here. And hence, so does the reader. The book is a disciplined collection which perfectly achieves its goal.
The Mary Poems is available in Canberra at: the National Library (NLA) bookshop and the Paperchain Bookstore in Manuka.
It can also be ordered at from distributor Forty South Publishing: https://shop.fortysouth.com.au/collections/new-releases/products/the-mary-poems-by-irene-wettenhall-pb