Kenneth Slessor

Abstract

IT would have been in 1921 and in the Elizabeth Street 'Mockbell's', of course, that Ross Gollan indicated to me a dapper young man leaving the place with prosperous-looking friends and told me it was Kenneth Slessor. The name meant something to me even then—enough to twist in my chest a spasm of jealousy. So, that, there, was the so-and-so who had won a prize two or three years previously in a competition, open to all school-pupils, for a poem on the set subject 'Jerusalem Set Free!' Not much consolation was to be drawn from the fact that I had not been a competitor; for I had not had any poems printed in the Bulletin either; and that stuck-up-looking, impeccably dressed, frozen-faced dandy of a coot had!