Parkes' influence,
appointed to a clerkship in the Surveyor-General's Department at one
hundred and fifty pounds a year, and three years later was transferred
to the Colonial Secretary's Office at two hundred pounds a year. During
this period he read extensively, and wrote much verse. By 1867 he had so
far overcome his natural shyness that he undertook to deliver a series
of lectures at the Sydney School of Arts. One of these, on "Love,
Courtship and Marriage", precipitated him into experience of all three;
for he walked home after the lecture with Miss Charlotte Rutter,
daughter of a Government medical officer, straightway fell in love, and,
after a brief courtship, they were married in the following year.

The year 1868 was a memorable one for Kendall in other ways. In April,
James Lionel Michael was found dead in the Clarence River, and in June
Charles Harpur died at Euroma. Kendall had a great admiration for
Harpur's poems and wrote to him in the spirit of a disciple. They
corresponded for some years, but did not meet until a few months before
the elder poet's death. Kendall describes Harpur as then "a noble
ruin--scorched and wasted by the fire of sorrow."

In 1868, also, a prize was offered in Melbourne for the best Australian
poem, the judge being Richard Hengist Horne, author of 'Orion'. Kendall
sent in three poems and Horne awarded the prize to "A Death in the
Bush". In an article printed in Melbourne and Sydney newspapers he
declared that the author was a true poet, and that had there been three
prizes, the second and third would have gone to Kendall's other
poems--"The Glen of Arrawatta" and "Dungog".

The result of winning this prize was that Kendall decided to abandon
routine work and try to earn his living as a writer. He resigned his
position in the Colonial Secretary's Office on the 31st March, 1869, and
shortly afterwards left for Melbourne, where his wife and daughter soon
joined him. Melbourne was then a centre of greater literary activity
than Sydney. Neither then, however, nor for a long time to come, was
any number of people in Australia sufficiently interested in local
literature (apart from journalism) to warrant the most gifted writer in
depending upon his pen for support. Still, Kendall managed to persuade
Mr. George Robertson, the principal Australian bookseller of those days,
to undertake the risk of his second book of poems--'Leaves from
Australian Forests'--which was published tow