Poems, Plants and Post-modern Australian Men and Women: or ‘The Boy from the Bush’ in Sydney Town

Abstract

The following article is a short reflection on the already very full life and writing career of Edwin Wilson (b.1942), a former science teacher and botanist, and, until recently, long time worker in Community Programs at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. The life as recorded to date is deemed peculiarly representative of ‘first generation academics/teachers’ and working class country children in the later twentieth century. It was particularly occasioned by the issue of the considerable second volume of his autobiography, The Melancholy Dane: A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man (2006).