Kenneth Slessor. Photo from cover of Kenneth Slessor: Critical Readings, ed. P. Mead, UQP, 1997, detail.

Kenneth Slessor Contents page

The life of Kenneth Slessor threads its way through almost three-quarters of this century, from his birth in the same year as the Australian federation until his death at the beginning of the Whitlam era. He was born Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser in 1901, the son of a free-thinking English father of German-Jewish ancestry who came to Australia to work as a mining engineer. His mother was Margaret McInnes, “The Belle of Orange,” a native-born daughter of a Scots storekeeper. The Slessor family, including Kenneth’s younger sister Maud and his younger brother Robin, is a small hybrid fragment of white Australian settlement. It begins in the last decade of colonial Australia in rural New South Wales, is transported around that colony, and Tasmania, by the demands of Robert Slessor’s pioneering job in the resource industries and eventually shifts to metropolitan Sydney where the younger generation — Kenneth, most successfully — grow up into very different social and cultural roles in the new nation of Australia.
     Self-assured and successful as a young man, Slessor seems to move straight into adulthood as if it was his rightful inheritance, oblivious to the psychological and interpersonal carnage that awaits him. Slessor left Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) to become a cadet journalist with the Sydney Sun and by the time he was twenty-one, standing in the doorway of the roaring twenties, he was a star of the Sydney newspaper world, a high-earner, married to the elegant, sixteen-year-old Noela Senior. He was also an intellectual, a slightly stand-offish satellite of the Norman Lindsay circle, the most visible and energetic artistic group in Australia at the time. He had published his first poem in the Bulletin when he was a schoolboy of sixteen. Slessor remained a working journalist all his life, writing for and editing a series of popular newspapers in the 1920s and 30s like Melbourne Punch and Smith’s Weekly and after World War II, the Sydney Sun and Daily Telegraph. During the war he was Australia’s official war correspondent in the Middle East and in New Guinea.
     His other life was as a poet, probably the most talented one to have written in Australia, and the first renovator of twentieth-century Australian poetry. Slessor’s career as a poet ran in tandem with his life as a hard-working journalist. He seems to have been able to turn off the raucous babble of everyday Sydney, like a radio, and to produce the piercing, rinsed-clean order of words that characterises his best poetry. From his early twenties, though, Slessor increasingly kept these two selves separate, and by the late 1940s one of them, the poet, had entirely atrophied. Slessor’s married lives, first with Noela, then with Pauline Bowe (with Kath McShine between) were tempestuous and harrowing. Noela died of cervical cancer in 1945, Kath McShine rejected him, Pauline and Slessor, despite their son Paul, led a bitterly estranged existence. It is a narrative of strange resonances with and against the history of modern Australia. It is a story of hybrid origins, great energy and optimism, the global reorientations of World War II and intertwined failures of public and private lives in the 1950s. In the long decline, all this is repressed and subsumed into a hollow kind of male camaraderie and national service in the conservative culture industries. There are some outstanding successes too, but ones, somehow, unable to redeem the wastage of life and work.

— Philip Mead
from Kenneth Slessor: Critical Readings
ed. P. Mead, UQP, 1997

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