Memories of a Mentor: Bruce Dawe

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).

My ‘aha’ poetic moment occurred in grade 11 when my English teacher, a black-bearded Rasputin look-alike named Peter Kunkel, had us study the lyrics of the Beatles’ song ‘She’s Leaving Home’ in our English class. Up until then poetry hadn’t figured much. I remember ‘Winter Westerlies’ by James Devaney and little else.

It was around this time that I had my first encounter with Bruce Dawe as a member of the somewhat unruly student body, when he came to our school to do a reading. I wrote about his visit in my 2006 memoir Any Guru Will Do (UQP):

After reading to the unresponsive and depleted student body (there was an offshore wind blowing that day and a good swell running, which signalled mass truancy), he asked if anyone had any questions, and a kid in the front row stood up and asked: Yeah, what the hell are you doing here?

There was no epiphany after that but I began to develop an interest in poetry. Soon I started scribbling doggerel at night in my bedroom, and then I bought my first book of poetry. It was, I’m rather embarrassed to confess, by Rod McKuen. I seem to have rather conveniently forgotten the title but I remember some lines from a poem entitled ‘Rome Itself’: ‘I carry / down between my legs / Rome itself, for you love Rome / and I would drive Rome into you / or drive you into Rome.’ Oh dear. The next poetic tome I purchased was a little more credible: The Spice-Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen, poems to be depressed to. This inspired a rash of morbid juvenilia, mawkish scribbling regarding unrequited love, endemic at the time.

I finished my senior year in late 1974 and took 1975 off as a gap year to get some life experience: did some travelling, a lot of surfing and I worked at a variety of menial jobs—bottle shop attendant, brickie’s labourer, gardener, powder monkey’s assistant. I continued scribbling but wasn’t getting far and I was hardly serious.

By the time I arrived at ‘The Institute’ the following year I was a raw recruit with a misconception that journalism might offer an outlet for creative writing, a notion soon dispelled by my journalism lecturers. But the barely kindled, flickering flame of literary yearning was soon being fanned by the passion of Bruce Dawe’s tutorials.

In the occasional journalism lecture I attended it all washed over me with little or no effect but with Dawe I was attentive, enlivened, engrossed. Inspired, I began to study his poems and found an attractive lyricism in many of them. Certainly, he has always had an admirable command of the vernacular and addressed issues in a potent, topical and accessible fashion but there are also many moments of memorable lyrical beauty and lines that have stayed with me in the decades since. I have always particularly loved the poem ‘happiness is the art of being broken’, which opens with the Zen-like ‘Happiness is the art of being broken / with least sound …’ ‘Clouds’ is another favourite: ‘Melbourne is like a distant war / in which I lost my life and gained some ghostly / wounds that ache when the weather’s raw.’

Dawe was something of an enigma to us and that was also appealing. For a start he didn’t look like a poet, or like a poet should look as far as we were concerned. I recall a newspaper article some years later in which he was described as looking like a salesman. Dawe was certainly no Bohemian beatnik. He was a suburban family man, a devout Catholic, a short-back-and-sides fellow who had been a knockabout bloke. He was once a postman and had even served in the RAAF for some years.

There was no high-flown rhetoric in his tutorials. He used colloquial Australian language and even had a ‘map-of-Australia profile’, a phrase he coined in the 1968 poem ‘A Week’s Grace’ and one that was eagerly adopted by the media. My colleague Rod Warrener—the other closet poet—and I were in awe of the man and of the brave new world he was introducing us to: a world elucidated by Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, D.H. Lawrence and even that strange neck-bearded bard and critic, William Empson. These poets expanded our consciousness, excited and baffled us.

I was particularly enamoured of D.H. Lawrence’s work and his poem ‘Snake’ with its compelling prose was the model for many of my early poetic failures. I went home from Dawe’s lectures and banged out poems on my old Remington typewriter. I stayed up late reworking drafts, smoking rollies and drinking cheap cask wine deep into the cool Toowoomba evenings.

I had seen a photograph of the Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars with a cigarette hanging from his lips, and another of Dylan Thomas, also with a fag in his mouth, and was convinced tobacco and the muse were synonymous. And of course wine was compulsory.

In short I wanted to be a poet. It seemed a preposterous notion but somehow Dawe made it seem possible and eventually I screwed up the courage to ask the great man if he would have a look at some of my stuff. I recall my hand trembling as I handed him the slim manila folder that contained what amounted to the contents of my soul. A friend describes the phenomenon of being ‘overwhelmed by one’s own sensitivity’ and that was me.

Dawe was immediately encouraging. My friend Rod had done the same and was similarly encouraged. Rod immediately founded a poetry movement: the Anti-Materialist Society of North-East Borneo, which had a membership of two. Oh how we suffered and wrote and soon we started to regard ourselves as bards: it was akin to being in a cult. We compared notes clandestinely and attended Dawe’s tutorials with reverence.

We organised a poetry reading in an attempt to flush out other like-minded folk and put flyers up around the campus. The reading was to be held at the rambling dilapidated old house in James Street, Toowoomba, which I shared with several other students who willingly vacated it for the evening. Nobody wanted to be inflicted with a poetry reading.

Two sensitive young women turned up to join us and that made four sensitive young people sitting around a table in a freezing kitchen, reading awful poetry to each other with Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby playing softly in the background.

Not long after that we were invited to Dawe’s home at 30 Cumming Street, Toowoomba, an ordinary house in an ordinary street. Dawe and his first wife Gloria were at home, tending to their weekend chores—Dawe in a pair of daggy shorts, doing something with a ladder; Gloria, cigarette hanging from her lower lip, attending to the veggie patch. What were we expecting? Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath?

We were treated to tea and Sao biscuits smeared with vegemite and forced to watch Australian Rules Football with the great man, a small price to pay, I suppose. (Of course some of his most popular poems explore his Victorian background and passion for that game, most notably the famous ‘Life Cycle’.)

By the end of my inglorious eighteen-month stint at ‘The Institute’ I had a folder full of verse. I had received detailed reports on many of my poems from Dawe and they now reside in my Bruce Dawe Archive, a record of his letters and criticism over the following decades. The distinctive handwriting is unmistakeable, the yellowing paper now giving the correspondence an appearance of being more ancient than it is.

I recently flipped through some of the early material and found a missive that I recall as being influential at the time. ‘Dear Phil,’ Dawe wrote, ‘As I said, I was struck by the advance in your work over the previous poems I’d seen. Here you suddenly start to use a distinctive tone, handle your lines as though you (and they) know where they were going and your ideas are forcefully dramatized.’

I can’t recall exactly how I felt upon reading that but I imagine ecstasy was the most likely emotion. Dawe had been particularly complimentary about a poem called ‘Gunfight—a Hemingway Vignette’ and was particularly enthusiastic about the last lines, as the lead-riddled loser dies in a high-noon-style shoot-out: ‘He was hot / And then he was gone.’ I guess the fact that Dawe loved old cowboy movies and was a fan of Gary Cooper helped.

A detailed breakdown of the poems followed, with suggestions on where to send them. I felt I was on my way, poetically at least. Halfway through 1977, however, I crashed and burned. After all, one can survive on limited sleep and a diet of peanut butter sandwiches, beer and cigarettes only for so long. I retreated home to the Gold Coast, the black dog snapping at my heels. I deferred my BA course and somehow, never managed to go back and finish it. I got a job with the local radio station, 4GG, where I wrote advertising copy and jingles, working in an office the size of a broom closet.

Between ads I read poetry and worked on drafts of new works that I dutifully sent off to Dawe for appraisal. My work colleagues were bemused by the fact that a depressed poet inhabited the copywriter’s office. Bear in mind that 4GG was a place where a sunny disposition was compulsory, where everyone was constantly smiling and the disc jockeys were perpetually optimistic. At one stage announcers were banned from mentioning rain, even when it was pouring down outside. Nowadays we call that ‘denial’.

While everyone else swanned around in floral shirts laughing their heads off I pounded away on my ads and poems, eyes glazed behind John Lennon spectacles.

The highlight of my life at that time was the stream of kind, constructive letters I received from Dawe; letters that encouraged me and spurred me on through what was a bleak time, despite the glitzy setting. But slowly my poems were finding their way into print, despite the plethora of rejection slips that were multiplying on my desk at home.

The first big breakthrough was an appearance in an anthology called 8 Poets 1978 published by the North Brisbane College of Advanced Education. It featured five of my poems, two inspired by the nonsense of Lewis Carroll. I re-read them recently: what was I on? Dawe had put me forward for that publication. I hadn’t cracked a national appearance yet but I was working on it, despite the constant knockbacks from all the best magazines and journals. I was a tad orthodox for the avant-garde set, in particular.

After another eighteen months at 4GG (that was as long as I could stick at anything back then), I tired of the Gold Coast and went to live in the small town of Monto in central Queensland, a bucolic retreat. I stayed with friends there, tried my hand as an assistant railway-sleeper cutter, failed miserably at that and managed to then find work as a reporter for the local newspaper, the Burnett Herald.

Meanwhile I was plugging away at the poems, which I still dutifully sent to Dawe, who always replied speedily and at length. One I was working on was entitled ‘Night Ride Revisited’, a tribute to Kenneth Slessor’s famous ‘Night Ride’. It was inspired by a train journey between Murwillumbah and Sydney and Dawe had suggested I submit it to Les Murray, who was editor of Poetry Australia at the time.

Murray very kindly worked through several drafts of that poem with me before publishing it in the February 1979 issue. It’s on page nine, and follows poems by Peter Porter and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, no less, just in case you have a tattered old copy lying around somewhere. Receiving my copy of the magazine and a paltry cheque was akin to a religious experience.

Since then I have worked as a journalist in Rockhampton, back on the Gold Coast and in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, where I live now. I have continued to write poetry throughout my career writing for newspapers and journals although, strangely, the muse left me several years ago, not long after the publication of my second book of poetry, An Accident in the Evening. She has absented herself in the past and returned eventually, unbidden and Dawe has always counselled me that fallow patches do occur, though this has been a long one. My correspondence with Dawe now consists of six-monthly phone calls and I saw him not too long ago at the launch of Stephany Evans Steggall’s book Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle.

Dawe was there with his second wife, Liz (Gloria passed away in 1997). His children were at the Brisbane book launch too and I was touched when they told me how well they remembered my stream of correspondence, mainly because I signed myself in those days with a smiling half-moon after my name, an affectation inspired by the poignant cartoons of Michael Leunig and the song ‘Half a Moon Is better than no Moon’, as sung by the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band.

Meanwhile I have moved on to prose. A shame, some suggest, but I’m happy enough. Poetry sustained me for nearly three decades and Dawe was there for me all the way through. I have found other writers to be equally generous at times: Nancy Keesing, Geoffrey Dutton and Les Murray. But Dawe was the guiding light with practical advice and always constructive criticism.

He has also pointed me in the direction of writers I cherish and may never have read otherwise: Edward Arlington Robinson and John O’Hara, that much neglected master of the short story, for example. My appreciation of Italo Calvino, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin and so many others is directly attributable to Dawe. Looking over his letters now I appreciate how valuable our friendship has been.

Such correspondence would no doubt happen by email now but I sense that wouldn’t be the same. There’s something about an eagerly anticipated, hand-written letter that can never be fully replicated by cyber-correspondence.

As a young poet I haunted the mail box and often came back into the house crushed after finding another self-addressed envelope, returned with yet another rejection slip. Then again, sometimes there was a letter in an unmistakeable hand with the address 30 Cumming Street, Toowoomba, Q. 4350 on the back. That would always make me smile and feel encouraged, before I’d even opened it.