ADA - Key Persons
Chester Eagle was born in Bendigo in 1933. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar and the University of Melbourne. He worked as a teacher and administrator in Victorian colleges of Technical and Further Education until his retirement in 1988.
Chester is most-admired for his autobiographies Mapping the Paddocks (1984) which won the Age Book of the Year for non-fiction, and Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty (1986). The former recounts his rural boyhood and a search for meaning, ending with the bombing of Hiroshima. The latter describes his experiences at Melbourne Grammar from 1946 to 1951. These autobiographies add to his earlier memoir Hail and Farewell! (1971), an account of his twelve years in Gippsland.
Eagle also published several collections of short stories and a number of novels. In the 1970s he published Who Could Love the Nightingale (1973) and Four Faces, Wobbly Mirror (1976). In the 1990s he completed two novels, and a collection of stories. He also edited Didgeridoo: Some Histories (1999).
Christopher John Koch was born in Hobart in 1932. He was educated in Hobart at the University of Tasmania and worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a radio producer before devoting himself to writing in 1972.
His most famous and acclaimed novel, The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) was adapted into a Hollywood film in 1982, starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. Koch wrote the screenplay for the film which was directed by Australian director Peter Weir.
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Jan Owen, born in Adelaide in 1940, is a contemporary Australian poet. She studied arts at the University of Adelaide, where she earned her BA in 1963 and MA Qualifying in 1974. She worked intermittently as a librarian 1961-1984, and in 1970 attained her Registration Certificate and Associateship of the Library Association of Australia, tutoring in the South Australian Institute of Technology Library Studies Department from 1980-1983.
Les Murray was born in 1938 and was a leading Australian poet of his generation. He grew up in poverty on his grandparents' farm in Bunyah, New South Wales, a district he moved back to with his own family in 1985.
Les won numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including the Grace Levin Prize for Poetry, the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the UK Poetry Society Choice. Among his many works of note was his courageous account of his struggle with depression, titled Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression (2011). In 2012, the National Trust of Australia named him one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures.
Recurrent subjects in Murray's work are the history and landscape of Australia, white settlers, indigenous life, family, and the rural landscape. Murray's work has been translated into 10 languages, and he was awarded the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Rosemary Dobson Bolton was born in Sydney in 1920. She was educated at the Frensham School in Mittagong and the University of Sydney where she studied English literature as a non-degree student before commencing employment with publishers Angus and Robertson in her early twenties. Through her work there, Dobson established friendships and working relationships with many of Australia's most significant writers, including Douglas Stewart, Norman Lindsay, Francis Webb and Nan McDonald. She also worked with Beatrice Davis, one of Australian literature's most influential editors.
Dobson met Alec Bolton in 1950 when he joined Angus & Robertson as an editor, and they married the following year and had three children. They spent five years in London in the late 60s, before moving to Canberra in 1971, where Alec Bolton was the first Director of Publications at the National Library of Australia. Alec Bolton established the Brindabella Press in 1972, which deepened the couple's ties with Australian literary production. Dobson remained in Canberra after her husband's death in 1996, continuing an astonishingly long poetic career, until her peaceful passing in 2012, nine days after her 92nd birthday.
Regarded as one of Australia's most important poets, Dobson published 16 books of poetry, beginning with In a Convex Mirror (1944), and finishing with Collected (2012), which celebrates the work of her long and distinguished career, and was published just a month before her death. There can be few poets of any nation who have published over an almost 70-year period. Her work was recognised with multiple awards, including the Patrick White Award in 1984, an Order of Australia in 1987, and the Age Book of the Year Award in 2001.
Emeritus Professor Werner Senn (born 1942) studied English and German language, literature and civilisation at the Universities of Berne, Vienna and Liverpool. He qualified as a teacher in 1968 and received his doctorate in Berne in 1972. Werner earned his lectureship at the University of Berne in 1978 and was appointed to the position of Professor of Modern English Literature in 1984, a position he held until his retirement in 2007. Throughout his appointment, Professor Senn taught not only modern English but also postcolonial literatures, in particular Australian literature. Werner's special interest in Australian literature led him to travel to Australia in March-April 1983 on what was called a familiarisation tour, at the invitation of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. The aim of the trip was to allow Werner to familiarise himself with Australian literary studies as practised at the various universities Werner visited (more than a dozen of them), from Perth to Brisbane. The input from this trip proved decisive for Werner's subsequent engagement in furthering Australian studies in Switzerland and Europe. He was one of the founding members in 1989 of the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA), which in later years he served both as secretary and chairperson. Werner's professional works span numerous anthologies, articles and books on a wide range of topics and authors in English, American and Australian literature. He has edited and co-edited several collections of essays on Australian literature and culture, among them The Making of a Pluralist Australia, 1950-1990. This volume was co-edited by Giovanna Capone, the first chairperson of the EASA. It contains the papers given at the inaugural conference of the Association at the University of Berne in 1991.