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Memories of a Mentor: Bruce Dawe

Phil Brown April 09

In the late 1970s, Phil Brown found himself studying at Toowoomba under the tutelage of Bruce Dawe, one of Australia’s best-loved and most respected poets. During the following year and a half, he found himself gradually drawn out of his undergraduate reluctance and into exciting and at times baffling the world of Thomas, Plath, Hughes and Lawrence. In the March edition of Meanjin, Brown writes on the lasting effects of this mentorship, and what it was likely to be taught by one of the true Australian greats. A brief extract is below and you can read the full essay on our editions page.

As a student, attending lectures was never my strong suit. After nights of revelry and Bacchanalian excess nobody could reasonably have expected me to be in any shape to actually turn up at the tertiary education facility where I was temporarily imprisoned. The Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education: it doesn’t sound very enticing, does it? Nowadays it’s the University of Southern Queensland or USQ, which rolls off the tongue a little easier, located on the unattractive periphery of the leafy, conservative, provincial Queensland city of Toowoomba, which straddles an eastern rim of the Great Dividing Range. Not exactly the hub of the universe but a place that was home for a time when I was enrolled at DDIAE.

In an attempt to address my general non-attendance, which was being noted in some quarters, I wrote a notice and taped it to the wall of the bedroom I shared with a science fiction–mad pothead known only as Brunt. It read: ‘Don’t Forget to Wake Up!’ On reflection, there was something vaguely existential about that.

Of course morning after morning I slept on, oblivious, flouting my own directive. At one stage, in another desperate attempt to have myself roused, I gave a slightly sadistic housemate permission to throw water in my face should I fail to appear in the kitchen for breakfast by an appointed hour. He did so, willingly.

The only tutorials at DDIAE that I was ever even slightly keen to get to were history and literature. Our history lecturer was a slightly shambolic, polo-neck-sweater-wearing, lank-haired Marxist named Ron Fraser. He was so much more interesting and inspiring than my journalism lecturers, which was my elected major but it was dull, dull, dull. I still find it somewhat surprising that I have now worked as a journalist for almost thirty years.

However, the main attraction was literature, entirely due to the fact that my lecturer was the poet Bruce Dawe, a major literary figure even back then, in 1976.

He and Les Murray were then considered to be among our greatest living poets and Dawe was particularly popular due in no small part to the urgency and accessibility of much of his work. Poems such as his Vietnam protest ‘Homecoming’ and his exquisitely bittersweet indictment of the hanging of Ronald Ryan, ‘A Victorian Hangman Tells His Love’, were already legendary. For young literary aspirants such as me and my new pal, Rod Warrener, each tutorial of Dawe’s was like a visit to an ashram where we could sit at the feet of our guru and be initiated in the mysteries of life and verse. Despite my general laxness I always managed to make Dawe’s classes, afraid I might miss some life-changing revelation if I was absent.

He fanned a flickering flame, my burgeoning interest in poetry, spawned in a most unlikely pond: Queensland’s garish Gold Coast. There I had spent my teenage years at Miami State High School, which had a reputation for producing surfers, dope smokers and eventually, a premier (Anna Bligh is a former student).


 

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