Bruce Dawe

Bruce Dawe, an Australian poet and academic who lived from 15 February 1930 to 1 April 2020, is regarded by some critics as among the most significant poets the country has produced. Over his career, he won numerous Australian poetry awards and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia. He spent more than thirty years teaching literature at universities. His poetry collection *Sometimes Gladness* went through several printings and sold over 100,000 copies.

Dawe was born in Fitzroy, Victoria, in 1930. His father’s family originally came from Wyke Regis in Dorset, England, and had moved to Australia in the mid-1800s. His mother, of Lowland Scottish descent, often recited Scottish poems she remembered from childhood. Both parents came from farming families in Victoria. Dawe was the only member of his family to finish primary school, though his parents and four siblings encouraged his poetry writing; his youngest sister also wrote verse. He attended six different schools as a child. At sixteen, he left Northcote High School in Melbourne without earning his Leaving Certificate. He then held a variety of jobs: clerk, labourer, sales assistant, office boy at an advertising agency, and copy boy for *The Truth* and *The Sun News-Pictorial*. He also worked as a labourer for the Public Works Department, as a tailer-out in Melbourne sawmills, and as a farm-hand in the Cann River valley.

In 1953, Dawe completed his adult matriculation through part-time study. The following year, he began at Melbourne University on a teaching scholarship, but by the end of 1954 he had moved to Sydney, where he worked as a labourer in a glass factory and later in a battery factory. Also in 1954, he converted to Catholicism. He returned to Melbourne in 1956, working as a postman for two years and then as a self-employed gardener. In 1959, he joined the Royal Australian Air Force, initially training as a telegraphist before remustering as an education assistant. After recruit training at RAAF Base Rathmines, he was posted to Ballarat, Victoria. As an education assistant, he served at RAAF Base Wagga, Victoria Barracks Melbourne, and Toowoomba, Queensland. In 1966, he was posted to Malaysia for six months, where he wrote the lyrics for the school song of the RAAF School on Penang; the song remained in use until the school closed in 1988. After Malaysia, he returned to Melbourne.

Dawe left the RAAF in 1968 and began teaching at Downlands College, a Catholic boys school in Toowoomba, Queensland. After two and a half years teaching English and history at the secondary level, he became a tertiary lecturer in English literature at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (DDIAE) in Toowoomba. He was appointed a lecturer there in 1971, a senior lecturer in 1980, and in 1988 received the inaugural DDIAE Award for Excellence in Teaching. When DDIAE became the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in 1992, Dawe was made an associate professor. He retired from full-time teaching in 1993 and was named USQ’s first honorary professor, later teaching University of the Third Age classes. He earned four university degrees—BA, MLitt, MA, and PhD—all through part-time study. In 1999, he established the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, an annual $2,500 award for Australian poets, held in trust by USQ and administered by its Faculty of Arts, with judging by the English Literature staff.

Dawe’s poetry focused on ordinary Australians and their interests in cars, novels, films, and other popular culture, as well as on subjects like abortion, environmental damage, and the treatment of Aboriginal communities. Critic John Kinsella noted that behind Dawe’s playful tone was a commitment to sympathy and connection with the less powerful, the disenfranchised, and the exploited.

Dawe married Gloria Desley Blain on 27 January 1964. Between December 1964 and July 1969, they had four children: Brian, twins Jamie and Katrina, and Melissa. Gloria died in 1997. Dawe died in Caloundra, Queensland, on 1 April 2020, at age 90.

His awards include the Myer Poetry Prize (1965, 1968), the Ampol Arts Award for Creative Literature (1967), the Dame Mary Gilmore Medal (1973), the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry (1978), the Braille Book of the Year (1979), the Patrick White Literary Award (1980), the Christopher Brennan Award (1984), the Paul Harris Fellowship of Rotary International (1990), the Officer of the Order of Australia (1992), the Alumni Award from the University of New England (1996), the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal (1997), the Australian Council for the Arts Emeritus Writers Award (2000), and the Centenary Medal for distinguished service to the arts through poetry (2001).

His poetry collections include *No Fixed Address* (1962), *A Need of Similar Name* (1965), *An Eye for a Tooth* (1968), *Beyond the Subdivisions* (1969), *Heat-Wave* (1970), *Condolences of the Season* (1971), *Just a Dugong at Twilight* (1975), *Sometimes Gladness* (multiple editions: 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993), *Selected Poems* (1984), *Towards Sunrise* (1986), *This Side of Silence* (1990), and *Mortal Instruments* (1995).