Ronald McCuaig

Ronald McCuaig (2 April 1908 – 1 March 1993) was an Australian poet, journalist, literary critic, humorist and children's author.

He was described by Geoffrey Dutton as "Australia's first modern poet" and Kenneth Slessor included him in "the front rank of Australian poets".

In 1915, when McCuaig was seven BHP established an iron and steel works at the nearby suburb of Port Waratah.

His mother died the same year.

Ronald McCuaig began writing for radio in 1927, hired by 2BL as a writer, his principal task being to write a piece of light verse for the evening program.

He worked for Wireless Weekly throughout the following decade.

During World War II he worked for the ABC and for Smith's Weekly.

After the War he wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald.

The book finally appeared in 1938.

Most of his poems were first published in The Bulletin, which he joined as a member of staff in 1949, becoming short story editor from 1950 to 1960.

When he was eleven Ronald spent ten days on a relative's farm remembered in ten poems which make up Holiday Farm, a sequence he wrote in 1953 and first published in book form eight years later in The Ballad of Bloodthirsty Bessie and Other Poems.

On Fridays after school Ronald visited his father in his office.

At the end of the working day, when the warehouse closed, father and son went to a cafe for a meal then to a show, or to the School of Arts in Hunter Street, where they sat on the upstairs veranda and took in the scene:

A cake-shop glowed across the way

With a rainbow cake display;

I never saw its keeper there,

And never saw a customer,

And yet there was activity

High in the south-western sky:

A bottle flashing on a sign

Advertising someone's wine.

McCuaig got a job at Sargood Brothers Department Store working as a "glorified office boy".

One day a school friend who had gone into accountancy told him there was a place opening for somebody to write the 2BL "Topical Chorus" a nightly piece of verse on something in the news.

McCuaig got the job.

In Norway he is well known for his children's book Fresi Fantastika, translated into Norwegian in 1975, originally published as Gangles in English in 1972.

McCuaig's parents lived at Mayfield, on the rural fringe of Newcastle.

His work was the subject of one of Douglas Stewart's 1977 Boyer Lectures for the ABC.

Peter Kirkpatrick in "Thus Quod McCuaig" in Southerly 1991 recounts "McCuaig's earliest collection of verse, Vaudeville, was written in an astonishing two months at the end of 1933. The sexual candour of many of these poems of urban life meant they were unacceptable to the conservative literary journals and presses, so after four years of trying to find a publisher the author decided to publish them himself. Seven printers refused to touch the job, though, fearing prosecution."

BHP's iron and steel works are depicted in Berceuse de Newcastle, the poem which opens McCuaig's Selected Poems (1992):

It's always sunset in the east

With a roddle-toddle-toddle,

When the night furnace is in blast

With a roddle-toddle-toddle

And all night long the rolling-mill

Goes roddle-toddle-toddle

McCuaig recalled in an interview with Peter Kirkpatrick he had taken elocution lessons in Newcastle from a woman called Beatrice Welch.

At the time he would stand on the back fence and shout his poetry lessons in the direction of their neighbours.

Ronald's father worked in a warehouse as an ironmonger.

After the death of his wife he brought up Ronald on his own.

He was a quiet man with a love of Banjo Paterson, and passed his interests on to his son.