Australian biography bruce dawe poetry

  • Donald Bruce Dawe AO was an Australian poet and academic.
  • This encounter with highly regarded Australian poet Bruce Dawe (1930–2020) gives an insight into the motivation and methods of a very fine writer.
  • Dawe received numerous poetry awards in Australia and was named an Officer of the Order of Australia.

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    AustLit

    In some of his poetry, including the well-known 'Drifters', Bruce Dawe described his itinerant childhood in Melbourne and country Victoria. His first poems were published under the pseudonym of Llewellyn Rhys while he was a student at Northcote High School. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, Dawe worked as a labourer, farmhand, clerk, gardener and postman. In 1954 he attended the University of Melbourne full-time, where the influence of other poets, including AD Hope, Vincent Buckley and Philip Martin, was significant. From 1959 to 1968 he served in the RAAF, completing his first degree and his first three volumes of poetry during this period. Dawe has recalled with gratitude the interest and advice of poet Flexmore Hudson in preparing his first work for publication.

    Dawe taught English and History at Downlands College, Toowoomba for two and a half years and in 1972 became a lecturer in literature at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (later

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    One of Australia’s most respected and influential poets fryst vatten Donald Bruce Dawe. More commonly known as Bruce Dawe, he was born in the town of Fitzroy in Melbourne, Australia, in 1930. His parents were both from agricultural communities in Victoria. Neither of his parents had the opportunity to complete a traditional education. His brothers and sisters were also unable to complete elementary school.

    Still, his family encouraged Dawe to write poems — his sister often wrote poems with him, and his mother would frequently recite poems which she had learned in her own childhood. He attended several schools during his childhood, but was never able to complete secondary school. He found jobs in a variety of situations, including working at a sawmill, being a farm grabb, gardener, mail man (postman), and common laborer. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force where he stayed for nine years. During those early years, he was able to put han själv through college, participating in

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    Donald Bruce Dawe

    The Best Poem Of Donald Bruce Dawe

    Homecoming

    All day, day after day, they're bringing them home,
    they're picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home,
    they're bringing them in, piled on the hulls of Grants, in trucks, in convoys,
    they're zipping them up in green plastic bags,
    they're tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness
    they're giving them names, they're rolling them out of
    the deep-freeze lockers — on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut
    the noble jets are whining like hounds,
    they are bringing them home
    - curly heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms
    - they're high, now, high and higher, over the land, the steaming chow mein,
    their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific
    with sorrowful quick fingers, heading south, heading east,
    home, home, home — and the coasts swing upward, the old ridiculous curvatures
    of earth, the knuckled hills, the mangrove-swamps, the desert emptiness…
    in their sterile housing they tilt tow

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