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 towards the end of 1869. But though the volume
showed a great advance in quality upon its predecessor,
it was a commercial failure, and the publisher lost ninety pounds over it.
In Melbourne, Kendall wrote prose, as well as satirical and serious verse,
for most of the papers.
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