- Born
- 1870
Ballarat, Victoria, Australia - Died
- 1919
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia - Alternative Names
- Milky White (pseudonym)
Summary
Emerson was born at Ballarat, Victoria, the son of a first cousin to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He attended school in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton, and after failing to qualify to study chemistry he worked in a variety of bush occupations, including drover. He began a career in journalism in the early 1890s, working for Melbourne's Table Talk, and going on to edit a number of Western Australian and Queensland newspapers. In 1898 he began contributing verse to the Bulletin as 'Milky White.' He published poems and stories in papers and journals like the Lone Hand, the Worker, and the Sydney Mail, as well as a children's novel, Santa Claus and the Sun Dial (1909), which was illustrated by Percy Lindsay. His collection of stories, A Shanty Entertainment, was first published in 1904, with a new edition in 1910.