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David Campbell Contents page

David (Watt Ian) Campbell (1915–79) was born on 16 July 1915 at Ellerslie Station, Adelong, in the Monaro district in the southern highlands of New South Wales. He attended The King’s School in Sydney and went on to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he represented England in Rugby Union and took his B.A. in 1937. He returned to Australia and joined the Royal Australian Air Force, and served as a flying boat pilot throughout the War, mainly in Australia’s North and in New Guinea against the Japanese. He was awarded the DFC. He later farmed near Canberra. His first book of verse was Speak with the Sun (1949). A Collected Poems was published in 1989, and he went on to publish over fifteen volumes of poetry and prose. He was poetry editor of The Australian newspaper in 1964 and 65, and won the 1968 Grace Leven Prize for his Selected Poems 1942–1968. From 1973 to 1976 he held a senior fellowship of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, and he was awarded the Henry Lawson Australian Arts Award, the Patrick White Literary Award, and (posthumously) the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Christopher Brennan Award, the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry, and the Grace Leven Prize, and was the posthumous subject of a special issue of Poetry Australia in December 1981.
    Campbell started out as poet of the local landscape writing in a style similar to that of Judith Wright and Douglas Stewart and others. His war poem ‘Men in Green’, about paratroopers in New Guinea in World War II, is well known. Responsive to changes in Australian society in the late 1960s, he unexpectedly changed to a looser form of versification and more contemporary themes with an occasional slightly surreal tone, and became friendly with a younger generation of poets including Michael Dransfield and Martin Johnston. His 1970 poem ‘My Lai’, about an infamous massacre of Vietnamese villagers by US forces, clearly expressed his attitude of opposition to Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam.

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