Sometimes gladness ... - Rosie Hoban

For a man of verse, Bruce Dawe has a very down-to-earth view of the world. There's no waxing lyrical about life, no flowery words, no long-winded sentences. He says it how it is.

In fact, it's this 'ordinary' voice that has made Bruce one of Australia's most read and lauded poets. His work appears on the booklists of thousands of Australian students who study his poems each year. Mention the name Bruce Dawe and someone between the age of 15 and 45 will claim a poem: '"Provincial City"- yes, I studied that at school.'

Reading Bruce Dawe's poems is a bit like reading an autobiography, learning about his life, about its joys and sorrows and discovering how he feels about things of the heart, love, death and God. It's a window into the soul of a man whose early life was anything but poetic.

Bruce was born in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy eighty years ago and moved with his mother, Mary Anne, and brother, George, from house to house, with little money or knowledge of where the next week's rent would come from. Bruce's father, Alfred, moved in and out of their lives, often absent for long periods. It's his brother, George, who appears in his verse as the protector, the anchor in the young Bruce's life.

His father appears in poems as a bit of an itinerant character, not unlike Bruce's own life as a young man. Bruce, in the 1950s, drifted from job to job, but was lucky enough to gain an education at Northcote High School in Melbourne and later at Melbourne University. His high school English teacher, George Stirling, was a 'critical intervention' in his teenage years. He had faith in Bruce, affirmed his talent, encouraged the stories and spurred him forward.

'I would have been one of those permanently unemployed people if I didn't get an education', Bruce says. He reckons his own brother and sisters were just as talented as he, but had less opportunity and certainly little formal education. Now, as a lecturer at U3A in Queensland he meets people every day who, if born in a different time and place, might have been able to achieve great things. It causes him to ponder the issue of luck and unfulfilled dreams and potential. It's a theme that comes up in more than one of his poems. In 'Autobiography' he wrote,

I lived for a certain number of years on the earth's surface, like many of my kind, Remote from the tsunami of wars, plagues, 'quakes, great floods, etc., Was loved by my family, loved in due course that family which I had a small part in creating, Was loved by others as well, despite my limitations, as if there were something else there ...

Why has his life, despite the early troubles, been so blessed? It's a question he can't answer, but it has made him determined to use and celebrate the many blessings that have come his way.

'I have seen people interviewed on television after a terrible plane crash. They are alive because they decided not to take the flight. They are sometimes asked if they feel they were spared because they were chosen for something special. But I put it down to luck. And I believe that if luck comes your way you have to follow it as far as you can. The lucky person is a person who knows they are lucky', Bruce says. He admires people who use their good fortune to make a difference in the world.

Bruce was drawn to God during his time at university. He met and mixed with students at the Newman Society and families who modelled good Christ-like living to him, they were the role models that drew him to the Catholic Church and led to his conversion in 1959. As well, he has been influenced by some extraordinary Catholic figures such as St Francis of Assisi and Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

'I suppose I witnessed the faith through these people I met at university. I went to church with them and I experienced a sense of being at home in my faith.'

Bruce, like many Catholics, feels great sorrow at the recent sex abuse problems, and believes that the church like any significant power structure has in-built problems. But he has no plans to leave. 'It is not perfect, but it is mine', he says.

He has met people who have walked away from the church and have felt 'dogged for the rest of their life'.

Bruce believes there are many good people, 'renegades and authentic dissenters' in the church, who challenge things that are wrong with the institution. Though the church is not always 'big or wise enough' to listen to the voices and hear what they say, the voices will continue.

'Some of the best friends of the church are its critics, and I am not talking about religion bashers, but about authentic people.'

Bruce has himself been cast as a renegade and dissenter at various stages in his artistic life and makes no apology. While he writes with an ordinary voice, his strong views on issues are also printed for the world to read. He doesn't pick a topic that is provocative in a bid to be published, he simply writes things as they occur to him.

He has come under fire for some of his poems over the years, particularly 'Homecoming', which was published in 1968. The poem describes the efforts of the Americans to bring home dead soldiers killed during the war in Vietnam.

... they're zipping them up in green plastic bags, they're tagging them now in Saigon, in mortuary coolness they're giving them names, they're rolling them out of the deep freeze lockers - on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut ...

Many consider 'Homecoming' to be one of Bruce's greatest poems.

Bruce Dawe, at eighty, is still completely immersed in life and gives little thought to what may follow, though he pondered death and the meaning of life when his first wife of thirty-four years, Gloria, died in 1997.

'I find it hard to think about another world, other than this one I am living in,' he says. 'It's hard to get away from issues that this world places before us.'

Hopefully those issues of afterlife will elude Bruce for some time to come. His life, shared with second wife, Liz, is full and happy. His faith is strong, though he goes through periods of self-doubt, the nature of belief, he suspects.

An artistic challenge in recent years has been teaching his own poetry to students of U3A. For the first time in forty years of teaching he set a text of his own, the collected edition, Sometimes Gladness, for study

'The more I talk about myself, the less I understand. Lots of things are puzzling and unresolved.'

But some things are clear, even to an outsider. Bruce Dawe's life has been blessed with the love of two good women, four children and an 'ordinary' voice that has given joy to so many and taken them to places beyond their own imagination. In Autobiography, he best sums things up when he says he 'wouldn't have missed for anything' his life.