Ojibwe of the key trade languages of the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains. The popularity of the epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha", written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855, publicized the Ojibwe culture. The epic contains many toponyms that originate from Ojibwe words. According to Ojibwe oral history and from recordings in birch bark scrolls, the Ojibwe originated from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on the Atlantic coast of what is now Quebec. They traded widely across the continent for thousands of years as they migrated, and knew of the canoe routes to move north, west
The Great South Land : An Epic Poem noted: "To say that a poem stirs the mind and heart is to give it high praise. To be able to say that it gives a new and truer significance to a subject means that it has the greatness of creative writing. This is my judgment of "The Great South Land", which is Rex Ingamells' major work and a notable achievement in Australian poetry. The greatness of it is first of all in the vision, and its special interest to us is that it is an epic—an epic for Australia." "The Age" reviewer found that the book's subject was history,