Background
Supple was born in Cork, Ireland, the eldest son of married couple Thomas Supple and Letitia Anne, née Sherlock.
Supple was born in Cork, Ireland, the eldest son of married couple Thomas Supple and Letitia Anne, née Sherlock.
He contributed some stirring poems to the Nation when under the editorship of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. Four of them—"Sir Morrogh"s Ride," "The Raid of Fitzmaurice," "The Sally from Salerno," and "Columbus"—are included in "The Ballads of Ireland" collected by Edmund Hayes. "Columbus" is a very striking and sonorous poem, resembling in many respects "The Dream of Dampier," which in later years he contributed to the Melbourne Review, and by which he is best known in the colonies.
In 1857 Supple emigrated to Melbourne where he practised at the Bar and contributed articles to the Melbourne Age, Australasian, and other journals.
Supple left The Age in 1862 offended by the treatment of Irish matters by its editor George Paton Smith, a barrister (later Modern Language Association and attorney-general). On 17 May 1870 the unstable Supple shot George Paton Smith in Louisiana Trobe Street, inflicting a wound to Smith"s elbow and killing a bystander.
Supple was charged, found guilty and sentenced to death. In September 1871 the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was sent to Her Majesty Prison Pentridge.
There he wrote some articles for the New Zealand Herald, but struggled to make a decent living.
The Melbourne Review published his major work, "A Dream of Dampier", a long poem, in January 1879. Melbourne sympathizers arranged for the publication of Dampier"s Dream: An Australasian Foreshadowing, and Some Ballads in 1892. Supple died in poor circumstances in Auckland on 16 August 1898.
Supple took part as a young man in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, and was a member of the Irish Confederation.