Ian Mayelstone Mudie was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n poet and author from Adelaide

Adelaide

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...

 closely connected with the Jindyworobak Movement

Jindyworobak Movement

The Jindyworobak Movement was a nationalistic Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. They were active from the 1930s to around the 1950s...

, which he was associated with from 1939 onwards. In 1941 he moved to Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

 and became involved in Australia First

Australia First Movement

Australia First Movement was a proto-fascist movement which grew out of the Rational Association and the Victorian Socialist Party. Adela Pankhurst Walsh, of the famous suffragette family was involved in it, along with W. J. Miles, Rhodes scholar Percy Stephensen, Xavier Herbert, as well as famous...

. He was a friend of Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, known as Miles Franklin was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901...

, and attracted positive criticism from Xavier Herbert

Xavier Herbert

Xavier Herbert was an Australian writer best known for his Miles Franklin Award-winning novel Poor Fellow My Country . He is considered one of the elder statesmen of Australian literature...

.

He took an active part in various national writers' bodies in Australia.

He was a strong critic of white Australians' treatment of Indigenous people. The Australian literary historian, Brian Clunes Ross has written

"Ian Mudie in The Australian Dream (1943), revealed the delusory quality of the nationalist perception of Australia through its refusal to take into account the destruction of the natural environment and of Aboriginal culture… the Jindyworobaks… [were] often misrepresented by critics who claimed that the movement aimed to base Australian culture on Aboriginal culture. The Jindyworobaks were interested in Aborigines, and if white Australians are now able to recognise the grim impact of their civilisation on the Aboriginal inhabitants of the country, the Jindyworobaks are partly responsible…the Jindyworobaks… wanted to achieve a harmonious relationship between cuture and the environment, and realised that Aboriginal culture embodied it. This was an example from which they could learn, not by imitation, but by coming to understand and accept the conditions which the environment imposes on them." (Australian Literature and Australian Culture)

After the second World War Mudie conducted research into the paddlesteamers of the Murray-Darling river system and in 1961 published the book "Riverboats". He also wrote the story of "The Wreck of The Admella" off the south-east coast of South Australia and "The Heroic Journey of John McDouall Stuart".

He died in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 and his ashes were scattered on the Murray River

Murray River

The Murray River is Australia's longest river. At in length, the Murray rises in the Australian Alps, draining the western side of Australia's highest mountains and, for most of its length, meanders across Australia's inland plains, forming the border between New South Wales and Victoria as it...

.