Life
Pitt's maiden name was McKeown. She was born in the gold-mining town of Bullumwaal in Gippsland region of the Australian state of Victoria, north of the town of Bairnsdale. Her early childhood was mostly spent in Wy Yung, a tiny settlement near Bairnsdale, where she laboured on her parents' "selection" or small farm. After failing to qualify as a teacher she found work in Bairnsdale as a photographic retoucher in 1887, and married the Tasmanian farmer and miner William Pitt in 1893 with whom she lived in Tasmania, the Western Australian goldfields, Bairnsdale again and finally Melbourne where she joined the Victorian Socialist Party and became editor of its journal The Socialist. In 1900 the prestigious Bulletin accepted one of her poems. Her first volume of poetry was published in 1911. William Pitt died in 1912 of a miners' disease. Marie and William Pitt had four children together, three of whom survived them.
After William Pitt's death Pitt worked at various white-collar jobs and pursued her writing, as well as her work with the Victorian Socialist Party. She lived with Bernard O'Dowd as her partner from 1920 until her death. She shared with him support for the Victorian Socialist Party, and for Unitarianism. Her political views were not identical with his, however; notably, and unlike O'Dowd, Marie Pitt took a strong pacifist line. Another matter on which they differed was the endemic racism of the Australian labour movement; Marie Pitt, in a word, supported it and spoke of the "woman's instinct for racial purity". O'Dowd took an anti-racist view.
Pitt won the Australian Broadcasting Commission national song writing competition in 1944 with her entry Ave, Australia.
Read more about this topic: Marie Pitt
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.”
—Dorothy Day (1897–1980)
“Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn’t have the cast-iron grid of a priori coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)