The flyer for the Brisbane launch of this new biography of Australia’s most popular living poet described Stephany Evans Steggall and Bruce Dawe as ‘joint authors’, and while the title page lists Evans Steggall alone as its author, there is a sense in which the poet is indeed co-author of this collaborative account of his life. The title comes from one of his best-known poems, and the chapters take their titles from the poems with which they begin. Evans Steggall has also reordered poems written over many decades into a chronological sequence that enables the poet himself to tell much of his life story. She has added to this her own complementary account of that life, in which she has been assisted by the poet who, instead of writing his autobiography, has chosen to collaborate with his biographer. Such a venture has its constraints, which are increased when the subject is involved in the writing, but it also offers opportunities that the objectifying passage of time removes. In this case, the collaboration has produced an intimately personal account of a notable life viewed sympathetically and through the poet’s own eyes.
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