In this company Campbell’s distinctiveness was his lyric clarity, his adaptation of the rural tradition of Hesiod, and his repurposing of the popular ballad. Poems like ‘The High Plains’ revealed his encounter with the natural world of the Snowy, so intense it was surreal: ‘On the high plains by Dairyman / If you look up, you’ll see / Peter Quinn and his hollow mare / Caught in a spider-tree.’ Campbell’s delicacy of observation is also part of this: the paper daisies ‘lock the sunlight in their palm / as they go under snow’. The human figures in Campbell’s Monaro landscape, including the poet, are often half absorbed into their habitats. In ‘The Monaro’, for instance, Willy Gray sits and stares on One Tree Hill the whole day long: ‘And green grass-parrots fly in at his ear / And lay their eggs of rounded song.’ In ‘Hawk and Hill’, he writes: ‘all the coloured world I see / And walk upon, are made by me’. The freely admitted influence of W.B. Yeats allowed Campbell to inflect the Australian rural matter into a more contemporary idiom. In response to an offer by a predatory squatter to buy her lover’s grey shearing singlet, for example, the speaker of ‘A Grey Singlet’ replies, ‘A semi-trailer load of trade wethers would not buy it.’

David Campbell, c.1950 (photograph via the National Library of Australia)

One of the unpredictable collaborations within the A&R group was Campbell and Rosemary Dobson’s translations of Russian poetry. Campbell had already been interested in translating Russian poetry, but with Dobson’s return from the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and with assistance from Russian scholars at ANU, Natalie Staples and Robert Dessaix, they became absorbed in translating Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. Campbell and Dobson published two volumes of these translations, but perhaps one of the most remarkable results of this work was the Mandelstam translations that appeared in The Man in the Honeysuckle, Campbell’s last collection, published after his death in 1979. It’s hard to imagine anything more remote from Campbell’s outdoors Monaro than Mandelstam’s paranoid city of Leningrad, with its decrepit apartments and threatening telephones.

There is another Venn diagram of Australian cultural history that Campbell belongs to, the generation of twentieth-century writers, including Patrick White, Judith Wright, and John Manifold, who were all descendants of early pastoral settlers. Campbell’s ancestors went back to the Second Fleet. There is much of comparative interest in the careers and preoccupations of these writers and their works, not least their families’ different accommodations of the inheritance of Indigenous dispossession. Perhaps the best-known instance of this is Wright’s work for the Aboriginal Treaty Committee in the 1970s and 1980s and, coincident with that activist engagement, her rewriting of her 1959 family history The Generations of Men as The Cry For the Dead (1981). The portent of this great revision was Wright’s 1954 poem ‘At Cooloola’. The analogous gesture in Campbell’s poetry is apparent in his fascination with Aboriginal rock carvings and paintings spread across his last books. Campbell, less explicitly political in this sense than Wright, nevertheless intuited what the miraculously surviving Aboriginal art signified for the settler imaginary, like the sign of Wright’s driftwood spear. Campbell’s radar sensed what wouldn’t be far off in the minds of Aboriginal writers themselves: shut up about ‘the land’, and get your invasive poetics off of our country, if you don’t mind.

Campbell’s most striking disobedience, though, was his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was involved with the anti-war readings in Sydney from 1968 and with the moratorium week readings and rally organised by Michael Wilding in May 1970. But his most powerful intervention in this cause was the opening poem, ‘My Lai’, of his 1970 volume, The Branch of Dodona. This poem takes a Vietnamese peasant’s perspective on the US atrocity of March 1968, but also references some reporting about the massacre. Unusually, Campbell made a point of talking about this poem’s language and form. War is only a relatively minor theme in Campbell’s poetry, but a powerful one nevertheless. Many readers would have read ‘My Lai’, and the smouldering protest that underlies it, with the awareness that it was written by a man who had been decorated twice for his bravery as a reconnaissance pilot with the Australian Air Force in New Guinea.

But that’s not the whole story. Jonathan Persse’s useful biography chronicles the ways in which Campbell’s return to farming life after Cambridge University and the war was both a source of inspiration and eventually a constraint. At the source of this trajectory was Campbell’s idyllic boyhood on ‘Ellerslie’ station, near Adelong, which he wrote about in his short story collection Flame and Shadow (1976). After his return from the war, Campbell took over the management of ‘Wells’, the sheep station on the northern edge of Canberra that his father had bought after the sale of ‘Ellerslie’. But his father died suddenly in 1947. Their rows haunted him: ‘At seventy-three / Was it angina or did he die of me?’ Campbell, his wife Bonnie and their three children, John, Raina, and Andrew, lived on ‘Wells’ for fourteen years, a happy and productive time for Campbell. After the encroachment of Canberra, Campbell and family moved, in 1961, to ‘Palerang’, between Bungendore and Braidwood. Here the work of farming and grazing lost some of its attraction for Campbell, not helped by the breakdown of his marriage. And things got worse. During the seven years Campbell spent at ‘Palerang’, he also had spells in Alanbrook Psychiatric Hospital in Mosman, for alcohol dependency. There was other unhappiness: his sister Meg, to whom he was very close, was struck by schizophrenia and died young. No doubt these experiences were reflected in his strong friendship with Francis Webb and his dedication to helping him return to Australia from Norwich in 1960, even though this would mean a much less sympathetic care regime for Webb.

After ‘Palerang’, in the last decade of Campbell’s life he lived on a much smaller property, ‘The Run’, on a reach of the Molonglo River out towards Captains Flat, but had given up farming. He was also happily married a second time, to Judy Jones, a lecturer in History at the ANU. But there was unbearable grief here, too: his daughter Raina was killed in an accident early in the year of his own death.

Campbell was a man of stonking exuberant physicality: playing rugby union at an international test level, flying Avro Tutor biplanes as a student in Cambridge, piloting a Lockheed Hudson over the Owen Stanley Ranges, ferrying Australian soldiers to and from the Soputa track, droving sheep and farming crops on the Monaro high plains, jumping in and out of trout streams, making pottery, swimming naked in the Molonglo River. He was also a writer of glass-delicate, translucent lyrics, unmatched for their musicality. As Francis Webb wrote to Campbell about his lyrics, they are the ‘most spontaneous and faithful of poetic forms’.