Frequent changes of school disrupted Dawe’s education and increased his isolation. He was already a precocious writer but hated maths. He left school with an Intermediate Certificate to work in a succession of menial clerical and labouring jobs, but his desire to learn continued and in 1953 he matriculated with honours in English Literature, winning a Department of Education scholarship to Melbourne University. It proved to be a transforming experience: ‘Certainly the poets and other people I met there, the poetry I read, the sense of place created, made especially that first and only full-time year crucially significant in my life.’ He enjoyed the lectures of A.D. Hope, who would later promote Dawe’s career, and met young poets such as Philip Martin, who became a lifelong supporter, friend, and editor, and whose correspondence Evans Steggall draws on throughout the book. Dawe was also welcomed into some warmly affectionate families of a kind he had not experienced, and Evans Steggall suggests that these contributed to his conversion to Catholicism. At the end of the year, Dawe passed English and History, but failed Philosophy and French. Believing he was too immature to succeed as a teacher, he withdrew and paid back the bond. Ironically, we learn later that he was regarded as a ‘brilliant’ teacher.

In 1962 Vincent Buckley recommended Dawe’s No Fixed Address to F.W. Cheshire. It was published with Commonwealth Literary Fund support and attracted positive reviews. When his application for CLF support for a second book, A Need of Similar Name, was refused in 1965, Dawe reflected wryly on the experience of rejection in the unpublished ‘Glass Slipper for Sale’. Showing better judgement than the CLF, Cheshire published the book, despite anticipating ‘a certain loss’. History would prove it a wise decision.

The rejection strengthened Dawe’s sense of isolation: ‘I worked on my own – a loner – I do not have the literary connections’, elsewhere adding, ‘Randolph Stow once described me as one of those people who was lucky enough not to be trapped into factions, cabals, and groups … Whatever friends or enemies I’ve made, they’ve been of my own choosing … So I’m lucky in that sense’ – a typically positive reading of what many would regard as a disadvantage.

Evans Steggall documents the publishing history of the poet’s books fully, but she does not offer extended critical readings. There is some discussion of forms and techniques, and of Dawe’s uncanny ability to inhabit the voices of his characters, but the poetry is largely allowed to speak for itself, and its reception is treated summarily, the emphasis falling on the personal life, not on critiquing the work.

Dawe enlisted in the RAAF in 1959, seeking, Evans Steggall suggests, ‘a community where he could belong, a contracted position where he would have to stay the course, the possibility of a solid trade and the means to provide for a family of his own’, adding that, ‘at this stage of his life he was a very lonely man’. In 1963 he was posted to Toowoomba, where he met and married Gloria Bain. After postings in Malaysia and Melbourne, they settled in Toowoomba and raised their four children. Dawe now had the close and loving family that he had long sought, and his career also prospered. An Eye for a Tooth was published in 1968, the year he left the RAAF, and was followed by a book a year for the next few years.

He also performed his poems at schools, universities, and public venues, where they were received with a pleasurable shock of recognition. Audiences relished the self-deprecating humour and the effortless mastery of the Australian vernacular, its laconic rhythms and its range of tones. They shared his celebration of the gladness and grief of quotidian experience expressed in an accessible language that at once reflected and enhanced the everyday. They enjoyed his sometimes amusing, sometimes scathing satire.

When the first edition of Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems appeared in 1978, the critical reception was mixed, but its popularity with readers has remained undiminished: Sometimes Gladness has now sold more than 130,000 copies in six editions, and Condolences of the Season 70,000 copies.

The Toowoomba years, when Dawe’s career as a poet blossomed and he finally found congenial and rewarding employment, are described in detail. He was writing some of his best poetry and winning awards for his books, which were being set for schools and universities. Two fortuitous meetings led to teaching positions at Downlands College and then at Darling Downs Institute, later the University of Southern Queensland, where students remembered Dawe as a ‘very popular and entertaining lecturer, with a droll wit and a straightforward manner’. He also rounded out his education in these years, acquiring a B.Litt., an MA and finally a PhD.

Never a coterie poet, Dawe tried to reach as wide an audience as possible. A principled commentator on current political events, he championed civil liberties in the Bjelke-Petersen years. His protest poems appeared in newspapers, and he contributed regular columns and letters to editors, telling Dennis Haskell: ‘I think I’m a journalist manqué ... I’d rather have six poems over six years in a newspaper than six poems in an issue of Scripsi.’

Before she died from cancer in 1997, Gloria Dawe told her children, ‘Don’t worry about your father. He will get married again’, and in 1999 he married Elizabeth Qualtrough. He continues to write his poems at their dining table, telling Evans Steggall: ‘A study would be too oppressive, too demanding, as though the walls were saying, “OK, now you’re here, let’s have it!” and I would freeze up.’

Dawe enthusiasts will welcome this biography, which complements the work of earlier critical studies by Ken Goodwin, Peter Kuch and Dennis Haskell. Evans Steggall draws on Dawe’s unpublished work in the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library to fill out her portrait, which concentrates on the poet’s personal life, while, for his part, Dawe allows the reader access to his memories and reflections. Echoing his engagingly familiar and unpretentious manner, Evans Steggall’s straightforward narration is refreshingly free of psychological speculation and self-conscious interpositions.

A consistent theme of Dawe’s is that his life, like Bert Facey’s, has been fortunate. I doubt whether many readers would agree that its beginning was fortunate, though it is characteristic of him to see it positively. The story told here of his overcoming that initial disadvantage to attain ‘unofficial status as Australia’s Poet Laureate’ makes for compelling reading.