Summary |
MS 5575 comprises drafts of poems, notebooks, manuscripts of books, correspondence with writers and publishers, reviews, papers on seminars and other literary subjects, drawings and photographs. Correspondents include Alexander Craig, Thomas Shapcott, Rodney Hall, Kenneth Slessor, Michael Dransfield, Nancy Cato, Randolph Stow, John Wain, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, A.D. Hope and Douglas Stewart (19 boxes).
The Acc05.173 instalment comprises working notebooks containing drafts of poems, drawings and notes (7 v.); literary manuscripts and related papers; reviews for The Age, ca. 1970-2002; and, correspondence with other poets (many with copies of their poems), including Gary Catalano, Tim Bass, Evan Jones, Graeme Kinross-Smith, Peter Steele, Colin Shingleton, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Thomas Shapcott. The instalment also includes six cassette tapes of interviews by Simpson with Norman Hidden, Arthur Boyd, Alan Seymour, M. Bardos, Peter Porter, F. Gore, Peter Redgrove, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Bernard Hickey and Robin Rennie (6 boxes).
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Biography/History |
Art teacher, poet and literary critic. Ronald Albert Simpson was born in Melbourne in 1929. He studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and taught at schools in England and Australia. In 1968 he was appointed lecturer in art at the Chisholm Institute of Technology. He retired in 1987. Simpson was one of a group of Melbourne poets, including Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Vincent Buckley and Alexander Craig, who came to prominence in the 1950s. His first book of poetry Walk along the beach was published in 1960 and a further eight volumes appeared in the next 32 years. Simpson was poetry editor of the Bulletin from 1963-1965 and became poetry editor of The Age in 1969. He received the Christopher Brennan Award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1992. Simpson died in 2002.
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