DAVID ROWBOTHAM, WRITER, AUSTRALIA

TITLES BY DAVID ROWBOTHAM

Ploughman and Poet, poems, 1954

The White Cottage, a story, 1955

Town and City: Tales and Sketches, short stories, 1956

Inland, poems, 1958

All the Room, poems, 1964

The Man in the Jungle, novel, 1964

Brisbane, a monograph, 1964

Bungalow and Hurricane, poems, 1967

Focus on David Rowbotham, a life (with John Strugnell), 1969

The Makers of the Ark, poems, 1970

The Pen of Feathers, poems, 1971

Mighty Like a Harp, new poems in Selected Poems 1975

Selected Poems 1975

Maydays, poems, 1980

Honey Licked from a Thorn, in New and Selected Poems, 1945-1993

David Rowbotham 1945-1993: Penguin Book of New and Selected Poems, 1994

The Ebony Gates: New and Wayside Poems, 1996

The Pacific Star, poems, 2000 (with publisher)

A Garrison Of Gargoyles: The Brisbane Memoir, 2000

Death At Maiden Rock: The Mississippi Memoir, 2000

When The Town Was Motherland: The Toowoomba Memoir, 2000

DAVID ROWBOTHAM, AM, BA. Poet, journalist, theatre critic, literary editor, lecturer, novelist, short-story writer. Born Toowoomba, Queensland, August 27, 1924.

David Rowbotham is one of the most distinguished and active of the Australian writers who emerged in the immediate postwar years, when he was a significant contributor to the revival of Australian poetry. He has produced 21 books of verse and prose, and written more than 3000 theatre reviews and more than 1000 book reviews. After retirement from company journalism, he wrote two more books of verse and three volumes of memoirs. His books won major national prizes, including an SMH Literary Award (Poetry), a Xavier Society Award, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and second place in the NSW Captain Cook Bicentenary Celebrations Literary Prize for Poetry. His verse and stories appear in hundreds of anthologies, and his verse in particular has been translated into many languages. He was made an Emeritus Fellow of Literature by the Australia Council in 1989 for his “contribution to the national heritage”, and admitted to the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 1991 for his services to literature and journalism. He is community minded, with cosmopolitan interests. For six years he was a national book-reviewer for the ABC. He served on the Queensland Arts Council, the State Advisory Board of the ABC, the Brisbane Warana Literary Week Committee, and is a Custodian of the State Library Trust. He was president of the Queensland Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, a member of the 1982 Commonwealth Games Literature Committee, an assessor for the Australia Council’s Literature Board, and State representative for PEN International. He was an editorial assistant on the Australian Encyclopaedia edited by the late Alec H. Chisholm, and founding State vice-president and life-councillor of the Australian Society of Authors. He is a member of the NSW Writers’ Centre, a Reserve Member of the Australian Journalists’ Association (Qld), and a Member of the International Federation of Journalists. He was an Australian delegate to literary conferences in the United States, Japan, Malaysia, Italy, and the United Kingdom; and, for his lecture-visits to the USA, where he lived for a while, he was awarded honours by American academic institutions. His work has been highly acclaimed in America and widely studied in Australian schools. He was born in Toowoomba, and attended the Toowoomba East State School, Toowoomba Grammar School, Brisbane Teachers’ College, and, after the war, in which he served with the RAAF in the South-West Pacific, the Universities of Queensland and Sydney, winning the poetry prizes at both universities. He lectured for Adult Education, the Australia Council and former Commonwealth Literary Fund, took his BA degree at the University of Queensland, and was invited on to its English Department staff, where he taught for five years, resigning to return to journalism. He spent more than 50 years in part-time and fulltime journalism, starting in Sydney and London as correspondent for the Queensland Provincial Press and began his fulltime career as a columnist with The Toowoomba Chronicle when the late Bert Hinchliffe was editor. In 1955 he joined The Courier-Mail, then under the editorship of T.C.(later Sir Theodor) Bray, and became a senior feature-writer and reporter, and relieving theatre critic. Except for his university-teaching interim, he was to work for this newspaper for more than 30 years. In 1970 he was appointed the paper’s inaugural arts and literary editor under its new editor, the late John Atherton, and in 1980, when the arts and literary jobs were separated, became literary editor and chief theatre critic. His direct theatre reviews informed Brisbane readers for 30 years - in the last 17 years of which his 4000 theatre and book reviews were written. His articles on the arts and literature made these aspects of community life vitally important to the city, and to the government, with its first arts portfolio, held by the late Sir Alan Fletcher. He was an arts adviser to several Prime Ministers. His tireless reporting and promotion of the arts helped stimulate the growth of the arts, and greater arts-involvement among the community. He represented The Courier-Mail and the State at every major arts festival in Australia, from Brisbane to Perth, where he was also invited to give readings and lectures. He reviewed the work of every Australian writer of his day, often being their first reviewer and encourager. His book reviews were quoted overseas. Writers, painters and actors sought him out for publicity, and for personal help, which was always given. He helped, with references and his prize-money (which he gave away), a whole generation of artists who chose to go to Sydney, while he remained in Brisbane. He chose Brisbane for his family’s sake. He is survived by his wife Ethel, two daughters, Beverley and Jill, and five grandsons, to all of whom his most recent book of verse, “The Pacific Star”, is dedicated. His father Harold, who died in 1976, was the last bootmaker of a well-known Darling Downs pioneering trade family, and his mother Phyllis Hopper belonged to a pioneering farming family. A great-grand-uncle, Charles Rowbotham, who established the parkland of Picnic Point, was an early mayor of Toowoomba. – July 12, 1999

A NEW STATEMENT, by DAVID ROWBOTHAM

[For Tom Riggs, Editor, Contemporary Poets 2000, University of Montana]

I found, when I began, that I belonged with poets who contributed to the renaissance of Australian poetry in the immediate postwar years, an historical and prolific movement seldom acknowledged now. Of my postwar generation of fellows who returned from the war and started publishing verse, I am, at 75, and among a turbulent poetic scene, the only one still alive and practising. This claim and perspective, this Alpha and Omega, now seems to be the only way of precisely advocating that, while silly yet divisive “poetry wars” have been waged in Australia in the midst of life’s always greater issues, from people’s day-to-day battles in town and city to brutality and duplicity amongst the grandeur of the world, I have preferred to keep to my own compulsions. As a returned serviceman, I wrote, in lyric, narrative and portraiture, about what I might have lost. I did not express “experimentation”: the countryside and people were far more important to get down; which I did in “Ploughman And Poet” (1954) and “Inland” (1958), my first books of verse, poems from which appeared in new anthologies for decades. I was a poet instinctively drawn towards telling a story of his time, which might well become a story of himself: Lermontov said the story of a man’s soul could be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation. Over time, change and development came in preoccupations, imagination and technique simultaneously. They came in an emerging endeavour in the whole of my work to range: one can not have been born on a mountain without wishing to use such an operative verb. They came, too, with an endeavour to admit all variety as well as engage with the energy that the dimension called vision demanded. From the lifetime that went by, issued – I give as instances - poems not only about ploughmen and townsfolk, but about myself as one of them; and about men in space (“The Pen Of Feathers”, 1971), emigration, travel, wars, death (“Maydays”, 1980), love, loyalty, belief, and their opposites such as life, peace if ever possible (“Honey Licked From A Thorn”, 1993), and home, hates, betrayal and the wrestle for faith (“The Ebony Gates”, 1996) – concomitant with the wrestle to continue writing. And it is here that new assessments by Shapcott, Duwell, Jurgensen and Myers may be taken as an analysis of what, through poetry, my poetry and perhaps I have become. Here also, towards the end, my new book of verse, “The Pacific Star”, a volume largely examining war, sums up what, unknowingly, was to be the final reach of the young survivor who wrote so long ago of the homecountry he returned to and began to celebrate. I have always written as a survivor; and have tried to do so without humbug.-DR, August 27, 1999

	DAVID ROWBOTHAM, WRITER, AUSTRALIA

	TITLES BY DAVID ROWBOTHAM Ploughman and Poet, poems, 1954 The White Cottage, a story, 1955 Town and City: Tales and Sketches, short stories, 1956 Inland, poems, 1958 All the Room, poems, 1964 The Man in the Jungle, novel, 1964 Brisbane, a monograph, 1964 Bungalow and Hurricane, poems, 1967 Focus on David Rowbotham, a life (with John Strugnell), 1969 The Makers of the Ark, poems, 1970 The Pen of Feathers, poems, 1971 Mighty Like a Harp, new poems in Selected Poems 1975 Selected Poems 1975 Maydays, poems, 1980 Honey Licked from a Thorn, in New and Selected Poems, 1945-1993 David Rowbotham 1945-1993: Penguin Book of New and Selected Poems, 1994 The Ebony Gates: New and Wayside Poems, 1996 The Pacific Star, poems, 2000 (with publisher) A Garrison Of Gargoyles: The Brisbane Memoir, 2000 Death At Maiden Rock: The Mississippi Memoir, 2000 When The Town Was Motherland: The Toowoomba Memoir, 2000 DAVID ROWBOTHAM, AM, BA. Poet, journalist, theatre critic, literary editor, lecturer, novelist, short-story writer. Born Toowoomba, Queensland, August 27, 1924. David Rowbotham is one of the most distinguished and active of the Australian writers who emerged in the immediate postwar years, when he was a significant contributor to the revival of Australian poetry. He has produced 21 books of verse and prose, and written more than 3000 theatre reviews and more than 1000 book reviews. After retirement from company journalism, he wrote two more books of verse and three volumes of memoirs. His books won major national prizes, including an SMH Literary Award (Poetry), a Xavier Society Award, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and second place in the NSW Captain Cook Bicentenary Celebrations Literary Prize for Poetry. His verse and stories appear in hundreds of anthologies, and his verse in particular has been translated into many languages. He was made an Emeritus Fellow of Literature by the Australia Council in 1989 for his “contribution to the national heritage”, and admitted to the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 1991 for his services to literature and journalism. He is community minded, with cosmopolitan interests. For six years he was a national book-reviewer for the ABC. He served on the Queensland Arts Council, the State Advisory Board of the ABC, the Brisbane Warana Literary Week Committee, and is a Custodian of the State Library Trust. He was president of the Queensland Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, a member of the 1982 Commonwealth Games Literature Committee, an assessor for the Australia Council’s Literature Board, and State representative for PEN International. He was an editorial assistant on the Australian Encyclopaedia edited by the late Alec H. Chisholm, and founding State vice-president and life-councillor of the Australian Society of Authors. He is a member of the NSW Writers’ Centre, a Reserve Member of the Australian Journalists’ Association (Qld), and a Member of the International Federation of Journalists. He was an Australian delegate to literary conferences in the United States, Japan, Malaysia, Italy, and the United Kingdom; and, for his lecture-visits to the USA, where he lived for a while, he was awarded honours by American academic institutions. His work has been highly acclaimed in America and widely studied in Australian schools. He was born in Toowoomba, and attended the Toowoomba East State School, Toowoomba Grammar School, Brisbane Teachers’ College, and, after the war, in which he served with the RAAF in the South-West Pacific, the Universities of Queensland and Sydney, winning the poetry prizes at both universities. He lectured for Adult Education, the Australia Council and former Commonwealth Literary Fund, took his BA degree at the University of Queensland, and was invited on to its English Department staff, where he taught for five years, resigning to return to journalism. He spent more than 50 years in part-time and fulltime journalism, starting in Sydney and London as correspondent for the Queensland Provincial Press and began his fulltime career as a columnist with The Toowoomba Chronicle when the late Bert Hinchliffe was editor. In 1955 he joined The Courier-Mail, then under the editorship of T.C.(later Sir Theodor) Bray, and became a senior feature-writer and reporter, and relieving theatre critic. Except for his university-teaching interim, he was to work for this newspaper for more than 30 years. In 1970 he was appointed the paper’s inaugural arts and literary editor under its new editor, the late John Atherton, and in 1980, when the arts and literary jobs were separated, became literary editor and chief theatre critic. His direct theatre reviews informed Brisbane readers for 30 years - in the last 17 years of which his 4000 theatre and book reviews were written. His articles on the arts and literature made these aspects of community life vitally important to the city, and to the government, with its first arts portfolio, held by the late Sir Alan Fletcher. He was an arts adviser to several Prime Ministers. His tireless reporting and promotion of the arts helped stimulate the growth of the arts, and greater arts-involvement among the community. He represented The Courier-Mail and the State at every major arts festival in Australia, from Brisbane to Perth, where he was also invited to give readings and lectures. He reviewed the work of every Australian writer of his day, often being their first reviewer and encourager. His book reviews were quoted overseas. Writers, painters and actors sought him out for publicity, and for personal help, which was always given. He helped, with references and his prize-money (which he gave away), a whole generation of artists who chose to go to Sydney, while he remained in Brisbane. He chose Brisbane for his family’s sake. He is survived by his wife Ethel, two daughters, Beverley and Jill, and five grandsons, to all of whom his most recent book of verse, “The Pacific Star”, is dedicated. His father Harold, who died in 1976, was the last bootmaker of a well-known Darling Downs pioneering trade family, and his mother Phyllis Hopper belonged to a pioneering farming family. A great-grand-uncle, Charles Rowbotham, who established the parkland of Picnic Point, was an early mayor of Toowoomba. – July 12, 1999 A NEW STATEMENT, by DAVID ROWBOTHAM [For Tom Riggs, Editor, Contemporary Poets 2000, University of Montana] I found, when I began, that I belonged with poets who contributed to the renaissance of Australian poetry in the immediate postwar years, an historical and prolific movement seldom acknowledged now. Of my postwar generation of fellows who returned from the war and started publishing verse, I am, at 75, and among a turbulent poetic scene, the only one still alive and practising. This claim and perspective, this Alpha and Omega, now seems to be the only way of precisely advocating that, while silly yet divisive “poetry wars” have been waged in Australia in the midst of life’s always greater issues, from people’s day-to-day battles in town and city to brutality and duplicity amongst the grandeur of the world, I have preferred to keep to my own compulsions. As a returned serviceman, I wrote, in lyric, narrative and portraiture, about what I might have lost. I did not express “experimentation”: the countryside and people were far more important to get down; which I did in “Ploughman And Poet” (1954) and “Inland” (1958), my first books of verse, poems from which appeared in new anthologies for decades. I was a poet instinctively drawn towards telling a story of his time, which might well become a story of himself: Lermontov said the story of a man’s soul could be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation. Over time, change and development came in preoccupations, imagination and technique simultaneously. They came in an emerging endeavour in the whole of my work to range: one can not have been born on a mountain without wishing to use such an operative verb. They came, too, with an endeavour to admit all variety as well as engage with the energy that the dimension called vision demanded. From the lifetime that went by, issued – I give as instances - poems not only about ploughmen and townsfolk, but about myself as one of them; and about men in space (“The Pen Of Feathers”, 1971), emigration, travel, wars, death (“Maydays”, 1980), love, loyalty, belief, and their opposites such as life, peace if ever possible (“Honey Licked From A Thorn”, 1993), and home, hates, betrayal and the wrestle for faith (“The Ebony Gates”, 1996) – concomitant with the wrestle to continue writing. And it is here that new assessments by Shapcott, Duwell, Jurgensen and Myers may be taken as an analysis of what, through poetry, my poetry and perhaps I have become. Here also, towards the end, my new book of verse, “The Pacific Star”, a volume largely examining war, sums up what, unknowingly, was to be the final reach of the young survivor who wrote so long ago of the homecountry he returned to and began to celebrate. I have always written as a survivor; and have tried to do so without humbug.-DR, August 27, 1999