Bruce Dawe

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Donald Bruce Dawe AO (born 15 February 1930) is an Australian poet, and is considered by many as one of the most influential Australian poets of all time.

Early life
Bruce Dawe was born in Fitzroy, Melbourne in 1930. Bruce Dawe's mother and father were from farming backgrounds in Victoria and, like his own sisters and brother, never had the opportunity to complete primary school. He always had encouragement from them (the younger of his two sisters also wrote poetry) and his mother, proud of her Lowlands Scots ancestry, would often recite poems she had learned in her 19th century childhood. Dawe's father's ancestors came from Wyke Regis in Dorset, England, in the mid-19th century. Dawes attended six schools before leaving Northcote High School at 16 without completing his Leaving Certificate. Of the four children in the family, he was the only one to attend secondary school. Until he went to University on a teaching scholarship in 1954, he worked in a wide range of jobs: as a clerk in various firms, as well as a sales assistant, an office-boy in an advertising agency, and a copy-boy at Melbourne newspapers Truth and the Sun. He also worked as a labourer in the Public Works Department, as a tailer-out in various Melbourne saw-mills, and as a farm-hand in the Cam River valley.

Dawe gained university entrance by completing his Adult Matriculation by part-time study in 1953 and enrolled at Melbourne University. He left university at the end of 1954 and moved to Sydney where he worked as a labourer in a glass factory and later in a factory manufacturing batteries. Returning to Melbourne in 1956, he worked as a postman for two years and as a self-employed gardener. Dawe joined the RAAF in 1959 as a trainee telegraphist, but re-mustered as an education assistant. He was posted to Malaysia and returned to Melbourne after six months.

Teaching
Leaving the RAAF in 1968, Dawe began teaching at Downlands College, a Catholic boys' college - Dawe had become a Catholic in 1954 - in Toowoomba, Queensland. After teaching English and History at secondary level for two and a half years, he became a tertiary lecturer in English Literature at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in Toowoomba. He taught there from 1971, retiring in 1993 as an Associate Professor at what had become the University of Southern Queensland.

Personal life
Dawe married Gloria Desley Blain on 27 January 1964. Between Dec 1964 and Jul 1969, Bruce and Gloria had four children: Brian, twins Jamie and Katrina, and Melissa. Gloria died on 30 Dec 1997 after a long battle with cancer.

Dawe has four degrees, all completed by part-time study: B.A. (Qld.), M.Litt. (U.N.E.), M.A. (Qld.), and Ph.D. (Qld.). He now teaches various literature courses in the U3A A (University of the Third Age, an organisation for senior citizens).

Recognition
Bruce Dawe was awarded the inaugural Award for Excellence in Teaching in his time at USQ, and received an Honorary Doctor of Letters by USQ for his services to literature in 1995. In 1996 he was awarded a Distinguished Alumni Award by the University of New England, and in 1997 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New South Wales. Other awards and honors won by Bruce Dawe include:


 * 1965 - winner of the Myer Poetry Prize
 * 1967 - winner of the Ampol Arts Award for Creative Literature
 * 1968 - winner of the Myer Poetry Prize
 * 1973 - winner of the Dame Mary Gilmore Medal
 * 1978 - winner of the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry
 * 1979 - winner of the Braille Book of the Year
 * 1980 - winner of the Patrick White Literary Award
 * 1984 - winner of the Christopher Brennan Award
 * 1990 - Paul Harris Fellowship of Rotary International
 * 1992 - made an Officer of the Order of Australia: "In recognition of service to Australian literature, particularly in the field of poetry"
 * 1997 - winner of the inaugural Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at the Mildura Writer's Festival
 * 2000 - Australian Council for the Arts Emeritus Writers Award for his long and outstanding contribution to Australian literature
 * 2001 - awarded the Centenary Medal for "distinguished service to the arts through poetry"

Publications

 * No Fixed Address (Cheshire, 1962)
 * A Need of Similar Name (Cheshire, 1965)
 * An Eye for a Tooth (Cheshire, 1968)
 * Beyond the subdivisions : poems (Cheshire, 1969)
 * Heat-Wave. Melbourne (Sweeney Reed, 1970)
 * Condolences of the season : selected poems (Cheshire, 1971)
 * Just a Dugong at Twilight: Mainly Light Verse (Cheshire, 1975)
 * Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954-1978. (Longman Cheshire, 1978)
 * Selected Poems. (London, Longman, 1984)
 * Towards sunrise: poems 1979-1986 (Longman Cheshire, 1986)
 * This side of silence : poems 1987-1990 (Longman Cheshire, 1990)
 * Mortal instruments : poems 1990-1995 (Longman, 1995)
 * A Poet's People. (South Melbourne, Addison Wesley Longman, 1998)
 * The Headlong Traffic : Poems and Prose Monologues 1997 to 2002 (Longman, 2003)
 * Sometimes Gladness: collected poems, 1954-2005, 6th Edition (Longman Cheshire, 2006)

Selected poems

 * The Wholly Innocent
 * Search and Destroy (1970)
 * Enter Without So Much as Knocking (1959)
 * Drifters (1968)
 * Homecoming (1968)
 * The Corn Flake (1975)
 * The Sadness of Madonnas (1985)
 * Somewhere Friendly poem
 * Weapons Training
 * Miss Mac
 * Life Cycle