William Henry Ogilvie

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

William Henry Ogilvie (1869–1963) was a Scottish-Australian poet and a skilled horseman. People called him Will Ogilvie. He wrote under pen names like Glenrowan and Swingle-Bar, and his initials WHO were also familiar to readers. He was part of the famous group of Australian bush poets with Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. His book Fair girls and gray horses (1896) was highly praised and many consider it second only to Paterson’s best work. By 1914 a reader’s ballot made him one of Australia's twelve favourite poets.

Ogilvie was born near Kelso, Scotland, the son of George Ogilvie and Agnes Christie. He grew up with seven siblings and was the only one of his brothers and sisters to marry. He left Scotland at age 20, arriving in Australia in 1889. There he spent eleven years working on sheep stations, learning to ride and break horses, and building his famous bush-life stories. He wrote more than 1,100 poems, many about the Outback, horses, dogs, drought, and the lives of stockmen. His work often appeared in newspapers under the Glenrowan and Swingle-Bar signatures before being collected in books.

Ogilvie returned to Britain in 1901, then taught agricultural journalism at Iowa State College in the United States from 1905 to 1908. He went back to Scotland in 1908, married Katharine Margaret “Madge” Scott Anderson, and they had two children. Despite living in Scotland, he kept a strong connection to Australia and continued to be known as a great border and bush poet.

During World War I he stayed in Britain and helped prepare Canadian horses for service. In World War II he served as an air-raid warden in Selkirkshire. He lived at the Kirklea manse near Ashkirk, where he died in 1963 at the age of 93. His wife Madge died in 1965, and their ashes were scattered on a hill road in Scotland, with Australian wattle leaves carried with them.

Ogilvie’s poetry celebrates the Australian bush, horses, and the border country between Scotland and Australia. He inspired other writers and artists, and is remembered with cairns, memorials, and a dedicated Will H. Ogilvie Memorial Trust. A number of his poems were set to music, and his legacy lives on in schools and literary groups that keep his bush ballads alive.