MARTIN, Arthur Patchett (1851-1902)

miscellaneous writer

son of George Martin, and his wife, Eleanor Hill, was born at Woolwich, Kent, England, on 18 February 1851. He was brought by his parents to Australia and arrived in Melbourne in December 1852. Educated at St Mark's school, Fitzroy, he entered the Victorian civil service but early began writing. He was editor of the Melbourne Review, founded in January 1876, until he went to England in 1882. He published in 1876 Sweet Girl Graduate, a novelette with a few short poems added, and in 1878 appeared Lays of To-day; Verses in Jest and Earnest. Some of the poems in this volume were included in Fernshawe; Sketches in Prose and Verse, mostly a collection of essays and verses from the Melbourne Review and other journals, published in 1882. Going to London in this year Martin led a busy journalistic life. In 1889 Australia and the Empire was published, and in 1893 his Life and Letters of Viscount Sherbrooke, a conscientious and interesting piece of work. In the same year appeared True Stories from Australasian History, and two years later The Withered Jester and Other Verses. He published nothing else of any importance and died on 15 February 1902. He married in 1886, Harriet Anne, daughter of Dr J. M. Cookesley.

Martin was a competent journalist of some influence in the early literary life of Melbourne. No other similar journal has had so long a life as the Melbourne Review, a most creditable effort considering the difficulties with which it had to contend.

11, Mennell, The Dictionary of Australasian Biography; E. Morris Miller, Australian Literature; Death notice The Times, 19 February 1902.