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OBITUARY
David Rowbotham
Poet, writer, journalist, theatre critic.
Born Toowoomba, Queensland, August 27, 1924. Died Brisbane, October 6, aged 86.
DAVID Rowbotham was one of a small group of Queensland poets who made a big impact on 20th and early 21st-century Australian poetry. Along with the likes of David Malouf, John Blight, Val Vallis, Judith Wright and Bruce Dawe, a Victorian who has spent most of his career in Queensland, Rowbotham was nationally respected, much anthologised and still writing up until his death.
In a recent interview in The Courier-Mail's QWeekend magazine, the bedridden, blind and ailing bard said of his muse: "You know, when I was a young boy, I didn't know what to call what was inside of me . . . now I know it was poetry."
Rowbotham, who spent some early years in Brisbane before the family moved back to Toowoomba, where he was born, published his first poem in a school magazine at 14. He had already been writing for years before that and described himself as "a rebellious boy in patched pants sitting in the apricot tree staring out at a world I could never enter in any other way than by scribbling poems and stories in my exercise book".
On leaving Toowoomba Grammar, Rowbotham worked as a clerk in a local foundry, studied at a teachers college in Brisbane and, at 18, joined the Royal Australian Air Force and served as a wireless operator. As with many writers of his generation, Rowbotham's wartime experiences never left him....