Bruce Dawe, Melbourne

Bruce Dawe AO (b. 1930), poet and teacher, was born in Fitzroy and worked as a labourer, clerk, sawmill hand, farmhand and postman before joining the RAAF in 1959. Ten years later he began teaching literature in Toowoomba, where he remained, completing four degrees part-time, eventually becoming an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Queensland and publishing more than a dozen books of poetry. Along with Les Murray, Dawe is arguably Australia’s most popular poet. After the publication of A Need of Similar Name in 1965, he won major literary awards including the Myer Poetry Prize (1965, 1968), the Grace Leven Poetry Prize (1978), the Patrick White Literary Award (1980) and the Christopher Brennan Award (1984). In 1999 he himself endowed the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize. Bruce Dawe’s elegiac poem, ‘the shadow broken free’, was read at David Moore’s funeral in Sydney in 2003.