Harpur's early poetic aspirations found an outlet in the form of numerous newspaper publications, through which his work became well known. He published his first poem "The Wreck" on 20 December 1833, in "The Australian", at age 20. This was followed by hundreds of others over the next 35 years. He gathered cuttings of these individual works into scrapbooks and wrote them out in anthologies, which he tried to get published, but there were few publishers in Australia in the early 19th century, so his lack of success is unsurprising. In all he is credited with over 700 poems, which he continuously revised, so that in all some 2,200 versions are extant. In his verse he tried to capture the wild beauty of a country into which he had been one of the first Europeans born. Among his more striking works are "The Nevers of Poetry", a series of pithy instructions on poetic craft, and "The Creek of the Four Graves", describing the deaths of an aborigine and three settlers in a nighttime attack on their camp.